The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

transactions.”
    On the flight back to New York, Weinberg began putting his prosecution team together in his mind—the FBI had to be a part of it, the Treasury Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the Customs Service,the State Department. Weinberg was thrilled. “I felt passionately about the case,” he says. This was no run-of-the-mill case. This case would set a precedent.
“With Our Shotguns Blazing”
     
    Edward Bennett Williams had seen it all. Nothing could shake the legendary Washington trial lawyer, who had defended high-profile clients such as the singer Frank Sinatra, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy,
Playboy
owner Hugh Hefner, financier Robert Vesco, Soviet spy Igor Melekh, and reputed Mafioso Frank Costello. He was a “superlawyer,” considered “the ultimate insider,” the man to see if you had really big legal trouble. He had a stellar reputation as a “miracle worker who could make the guilty go free.” 4
    Marc Rich knew Williams. The lawyer sat on the board of the film studio 20th Century Fox, half of which Rich secretly owned. When it soon became apparent that the Southern District of New York meant business, Rich hired Williams to represent him. Williams had comforting words for Rich. The matter at hand appeared to be an ordinary energy case parading as a tax case—the type of proceedings the government routinely settled without pressing criminal charges. He assured Rich that he could settle the case without an indictment if Rich agreed to pay a fine and a portion of the taxes he allegedly owed. He gave the same advice to Rich that he gave to all of his clients: Keep quiet and stonewall. “The worst you can do is talk to the prosecutors. I can get rid of it for thirty million,” he told Rich and then offered him the following words of encouragement: “We shall go to the U.S. Attorney with our shotguns blazing.” 5
    Williams adopted this attitude when he visited Assistant U.S. Attorney Sandy Weinberg in his office in New York in May 1983. He threw himself onto a chair, leaned back, put his feet on the table, and asked Weinberg how much money the government wanted to settle the case. “You don’t have to worry,” Williams added patronizingly, “my clientsdon’t flee.” 6 He proposed to dispose of the case by having Rich pay the taxes owed plus a substantial fine.
    Was Williams putting too much stock in his reputation? Did he think he could easily put one over on the young assistant U.S. attorney? Whatever the case, this tactic did not work on Sandy Weinberg.
    Weinberg looked the celebrity superlawyer straight in the eye, shook his head, and said with no more respect than necessary that he was not interested in a plea deal. Puzzled, Williams asked Weinberg what he had in mind. Weinberg spelled it out for him: “J-A-I-L.” 7 The government, he continued, would not accept a plea agreement unless it included both “a huge fine and substantial jail time.” Weinberg would not change his mind, even after Williams raised his offer to100 million (see chapter 13 ). According to Rich’s Swiss lawyer André A. Wicki, Weinberg was seeking a twenty-five-year prison sentence. He threatened to indict Rich, his partner Pinky Green, and the Rich companies on racketeering charges if no such settlement could be reached.
    Weinberg clearly looks back on his former brazenness with delight. “I took Ed Williams’s breath away a bit,” he says. The attorney, who—ironically—now defends white-collar criminals, believes his refusal to deal with Williams was a matter of principle. “If we allowed people to buy their way out of it, if you don’t go to jail for [what in his mind was] the biggest tax fraud, we could never bring another tax case.”
Rich’s Flight to Switzerland
     
    The Rich family was then staying at their weekend house on Long Island’s Lido Beach, as was usually the case at that time of year. “We were at the beach for the weekend, and Marc said we may have to leave the country,” Denise Rich remembers with a shudder. We are sitting in her penthouse at 785 Fifth Avenue. Above the photographs of her daughters’ weddings hangs a still life of flowers by Marc Chagall.
    Denise Rich knows how to give a convincing performance. She shakes her head in wide-eyed disbelief as if Rich himself had just given her thedevastating news. “I had no clue, believe me. I didn’t know anything about what was going on. ‘Why?’ I asked Marc. ‘There may be a few problems,’ he answered.