The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

of Perrier. We are sitting at a huge oval table in soft office chairs of artificial leather. On this cool spring morning the visitor can see all the way to St. Petersburg from Weinberg’s office on the twelfth floor of the Bank of America Building in downtown Tampa. A pelican flies past the window. 1
    We break the ice by chatting a bit about Roger Federer, the Swiss tennis player who is undisputedly the world’s number one player at the time. Weinberg, a fervid wrestler in his youth who once won the Mid-SouthChampionships, considers Federer to be the best tennis player the world has ever seen.
    Weinberg speaks with the singing drawl of a Tennessean born in Chattanooga. He is a classic southern liberal who was heavily influenced by the civil rights movement. His mother was a Southern Baptist, his father a Jew from Brooklyn who knew about discrimination from personal experience. Speaking of himself, Weinberg claims he had a “very progressive upbringing.” Like both his brothers, he studied at Princeton, where he graduated magna cum laude. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School. Weinberg became a federal prosecutor at the age of twenty-nine. At the age of thirty he got the phone call from the Justice Department and was assigned to the Marc Rich case.
Marc Who?
     
    In the late fall of 1981, Rich was almost completely unknown to the public at large, although he was already the world’s largest independent oil trader and one of the richest men in America. Outside the close-knit community of commodity traders, almost no one knew his name. Up until 1981 not a single article on either Rich or his company had ever been published outside of the trade journals. He had never given an interview, and Rich was quite happy with the fact that the press did not have a single photograph of him. “We are happiest when nothing is written about us,” a Jewish trader in Zurich once told me. “If I was Catholic I would say commodity traders fear publicity like the devil fears holy water.”
    After the call from the Justice Department, it would not be long until the whole world knew the name Marc Rich. The FBI had already begun looking into deals made by Marc Rich International, a subsidiary of Marc Rich + Co. AG that had a New York office. 2 The Feds had received tips from two Texas oil traders who accused Rich of hiding profits from the Internal Revenue Service by funneling the money to offshorecompanies and foreign bank accounts. In December 1981, just a few weeks after the call from the Justice Department, Weinberg and an FBI agent flew to Texas to meet with these oil traders.
    The tip came from David Ratliff and John Troland, who together had directed West Texas Marketing (WTM) in Abilene. They were serving fourteen months in a federal penitentiary in Big Spring, Texas, at the time, having been convicted in an unrelated case concerning illegal oil transactions, and were hoping to cut a deal with the government in order to avoid serving their entire sentence. 3 Weinberg immediately got them out of prison on furlough, whereupon the two took Weinberg to their office in Abilene. “So there I was in Abilene on a weekend in a godforsaken place,” Weinberg told me, “and they pulled out what they called the ‘pot file’ and explained the scheme. They showed me that over seventy million dollars were in this ‘pot.’ Marc Rich had in 1980 and 1981 earned more than seventy million in illegal reseller profits and funneled those funds offshore to his Swiss company in order to evade federal income tax and federal energy oil control regulations.”
    Weinberg realized immediately that he was dealing with a very big case. “It was a big deal. I was very fortunate. It defined me as a young lawyer.” What is more, it was the case that put Weinberg’s name in the headlines and lent him the national stardom that ultimately launched him on his lucrative career as a lawyer in Tampa. Upon reviewing Troland and Ratliff’s dealings with Marc Rich, Weinberg came to the personal conclusion that he had uncovered “the biggest tax fraud of all times,” as he proudly tells me. “The case was simple,” he says while sizing me up with his glacial blue eyes. “The man made a whole bunch of money that was illegal. He couldn’t recognize it. He didn’t want to give it up, so he had to get it out of the country some way. He devised a scheme to launder the money outside of the United States by creating these phony oil