The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

fact that he was pardoned by Bill Clinton in January 2001 has changed nothing. In fact, it had the opposite effect. The pardon, considered one of the “most notorious” in United States history, is seen by many of Rich’s opponents as proof that he can buy anything, even immunity from the president of a superpower. 2
    I want to find out who this man really is beyond all the clichés and simplifications. How did Marcell Reich, a poor Jewish refugee boy from Belgium, become Marc Rich, “one of the wealthiest and most powerful commodities traders ever to have lived,” as the
Financial Times
put it? 3 How did he and a handful of business partners seem to appear out of nowhere and go on to dominate global trade in oil and other commodities? What were the crucial decisions, the milestones in his unlikely career? How far did he have to go in order to reach them? What were his limits? What were his greatest successes and his worst defeats? What drives him on? What can be learned from his entrepreneurial skills?
    I am lucky. My black Opel starts with a turn of the key. Only the speakers seem to have a tough time with the extreme temperatures. Mick Jagger’s voice sounds strangely dull:
Please allow me to introduce myself / I’m a man of wealth and taste.
It is just before 8:00 A.M ., and the streets are full of snow. There is not a person in sight. I drive carefully past the frozen Lake St. Moritz toward the luxurious Suvretta House, the best hotel in town. Within a span of a few days, the hotel will be taken over by the international jet set and European gentry as a fitting location for their Christmas and New Year’s celebrations. Nestled among the snow-covered fir trees, the hotel seems tranquil and serene on this particular morning. A group of snowmen with red carrots for noses stands quietly by the hotel entrance.
    Mick Jagger’s voice echoes from the speakers. Forty years later, the Rolling Stones song “Sympathy for the Devil,” written in the very symbolic year of 1968, can be heard again on nearly every radio station. I turn right and head toward the lower terminus of the Suvretta ski lift,where I am to meet the “biggest devil”—the exact term that Marc Rich used to describe himself. “I was painted as the biggest devil,” he said to me without the least bit of self-pity during our last conversation in his office in the town of Zug. Those who are familiar with Rich’s matter-of-fact style know that he is not prone to exaggeration.
    A. Craig Copetas, who wrote the first and hitherto only biography of Rich nearly twenty-five years ago, called him “the veritable Prince of Darkness.” 4 Rich was stylized as the personification of evil, the ruthless villain, and the capitalist monster whose fingers are “sticky with the blood, sweat, and tears of the Third World.” 5 Over the years, the name Marc Rich became a symbol for greed and unscrupulousness, a chilling code that stands for everything that is wrong with “real-world capitalism.”
    There is a precise date for the day on which Marc Rich lost control over his own name. On September 19, 1983, a Monday, a young and ambitious United States attorney for the Southern District of New York appeared before the media. Trying hard to hide his glee, Rudolph W. “Rudy” Giuliani feverishly announced “the biggest tax fraud indictment in history.” He read aloud from the indictment to the bewildered journalists and camera teams. The
New York Times
saw the need to describe the situation as an “unusual public display.” 6
    Giuliani accused Rich, then forty-eight, of a total of fifty-one crimes. 7 In addition to tax evasion to the tune of at least48 million, Rich was accused of racketeering, conspiracy, and trading with the enemy—the gravest crimes of which an upstanding citizen can be accused. It was alleged that Rich had been trading in Iranian crude oil and had ignored the U.S. embargo against Iran at a time when Americans were held hostage in Tehran. In the law library of the U.S. attorney’s office, Giuliani announced that Rich and his business partner Pincus Green could spend the rest of their lives in prison for their crimes. The two businessmen had already absconded with their families to Switzerland, where the headquarters of Marc Rich + Co. AG, founded ten years prior, was located.
    Since then, investigators have frequently referred to the affair as “the biggest tax fraud in American history,” politicians have often describedRich as a