The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

‘Why?’ ‘The lawyer will talk to you.’ The lawyer, Bob Thomajan, walked me around the block three times in New York and I still didn’t know why. If we were going to have to leave, what was I going to do? As a wife, you know, I love my husband. I love my children. I consulted my father, who was a very smart man; he was my rock. What should I do? Papa said, ‘You go with your husband, of course.’ ”
    Denise did just as her father, Emil Eisenberg, advised. In the first week of June 1983, the Rich family hastily relocated to Switzerland, where Rich had based his company nine years earlier. Rich was rattled by the fact that Williams had lost control of the case—and with that lost the opportunity to settle the case out of court. Rich, who stresses his innocence to this day, was alarmed by the prosecutor’s aggressive posture. The threat of racketeering charges was a dramatic escalation. A RICO indictment, Williams explained, would mean all of Rich’s assets could be frozen before the case even came to trial. The statute, about which I will write more later in the chapter, also provided for draconian jail sentences.
    Rich was deeply shocked. The man who was used to settling so much with money had simply not expected events to turn against him. He took it as a sign that he should flee the country, but the few weeks of absence that Denise Rich had initially expected soon became an eternity. In Rich’s mind, his flight to Switzerland represented a second escape (the first being from Antwerp) and a journey of no return. Rich had renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a naturalized Spaniard in September 1982. “I was naturalized under the laws of Spain, swore an oath of allegiance to the King of Spain, and formally stated that I thereby renounced U.S. nationality,” he claims. 8 However, the State Department takes the view that it never approved Rich’s Certificate of Loss of Nationality and thus he had failed to renounce his U.S. citizenship. 9 Rich also took on Israeli citizenship in July 1983.
    Ed Williams’s biographer describes how the lawyer was standing inMarvin Davis’s office in Los Angeles when he heard the news that his client was on the lam. Williams screamed into the telephone, “You know something, Marc? You spit on the American flag. You spit on the jury system. Whatever you get, you deserve. We could have gotten the minimum. Now you’re going to sink.” 10 Rich claims there is not a shred of truth in this version of events. On the contrary, Rich maintains that neither Williams nor any of his other lawyers had ever asked him to return to the United States.
    Regardless, Williams’s overconfident performance caused quite a bit of damage. His misinterpretation of the situation led his client down a dead-end street—and into the headlines. “It was a scorched earth policy,” said Michael Green, who joined Rich’s legal team in 1985. “Ed was known as a tough litigator. Sometimes it works. In Rich’s case it did not.”
Rudolph W. Giuliani Takes Over
     
    The case was exactly the type the media loves. It was a case of “historic” significance, as the prosecuting attorneys never tired of stating: a virtually unknown millionaire with a beautiful wife who lived in a Park Avenue penthouse. Journalists soon discovered that Rich owned half of 20th Century Fox, as a silent partner. His name had not surfaced publicly when Denver oilman Marvin Davis negotiated the722 million purchase in June 1981. 11 The film studio was riding on a wave of success at the time. George Lucas’s
Return of the Jedi
, the third part of the Star Wars saga, had just opened; at the time it was the greatest box-office success in cinematic history. Several prominent Americans sat on 20th Century Fox’s board of directors, including former president Gerald R. Ford and former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger.
    When Rudolph W. Giuliani was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in the spring of 1983, the case, which had been slowly simmering over a relatively small flame for a year, suddenly became a raging wildfire. Giuliani pressed his subordinates to prosecute cases more quickly; happy to see himself in the role of ananti-Mafia crusader willing to take on Wall Street and white-collar criminals, he did not doubt in the least that he was born for a greater purpose. “Aggressive” was the label that was most often used to describe Giuliani. His tactics, as the former mayor of New York