The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

already on the runway and ready for takeoff; the police were able to stop the plane only minutes before its departure. Thanks to the tip-off from Rich’s own law firm, agents recovered two steamer trunks full of business documents. Shortly afterward, the media-savvy Giuliani had the trunks brought to Judge Sand’s courtroom as physical evidence of Rich’s brazen behavior and immediately held a press conference to publicize the seizure. The episode was soon referred to as the “steamer trunk affair.” “By this time Marc Rich had lost all credibility; he was down the toilet. After that affair he was viewed as a scoundrel,” says Weinberg, who felt that Rich’s actions strengthened the prosecution’s hand. “It prejudiced him in court and in the public opinion. When people obstruct justice and try to interfere with your investigation, that indicates that you’re right.” Rich’s lawyers maintained they were only shipping the papers to Switzerland to let them be viewed by an attorney in order to make sure they contained no confidential information. As a result of the incident, a furious Judge Sand ordered that all of Rich’s companies produce the subpoenaed documents by the following Friday. “By Friday?” Rich’s flabbergasted attorney asked. “We have forty-eight offices worldwide.” “By Friday!” Judge Sand ordered.
Caught in the Crossfire
     
    August of 1983 was one of the hottest that Switzerland had ever seen. It seemed even hotter in Rich’s headquarters in Zug. A dozen people sorted through the documents they needed to send to the United States in a jet that Rich had chartered especially for the purpose. “We workedday and night,” one of them told me, “fourteen, fifteen hours per day.” Four of the five founding partners were present—Marc Rich, Pinky Green, Alec Hackel, and John Trafford—as well as two lawyers and a handful of young employees. Within three days the group handed over two hundred thousand documents to officials in the United States, and that was just the beginning.
    Then, on August 13, officers from the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland knocked on the door of Marc Rich + Co. AG in Zug. They had come to seize any remaining documents that had been subpoenaed by the U.S. government. They cited article 273 of the Swiss Penal Code, which deals with the disclosure of information to foreign countries and economic espionage. The Swiss government wrote a letter to the State Department and the district court stating that it was “legally and physically impossible for Marc Rich + Co AG to provide the U.S. Attorney with any single document located in Switzerland.” 17 Now Rich not only had the government of the United States to worry about; the Swiss government was after him as well. “He was caught in the crossfire,” remembers one of the participants, who is still in the commodities business.
    The Swiss government’s actions did nothing to dampen Judge Sand’s resolve. He continued to demand all of the subpoenaed documents and ruled that the contempt fine of50,000 per day should continue. For the next year one of Marc Rich’s messengers would deliver a check for200,000 to the federal courthouse each Friday and a check for150,000 each Monday—all in all, more than21 million. The Swiss repeated their protest in an official note describing the “violation of generally recognized principles of international law. The imposition by a foreign authority of acts aimed at having effects on Swiss territory violates the sovereignty of Switzerland and is therefore unacceptable.” 18
    Rich, who one year earlier had been one of the great unknowns of the international oil trade, was now recognized by over half of the entire world—a fact that certainly seemed to boost the reputations of Rudy Giuliani and Sandy Weinberg. The American and internationalmedia reported regularly on the Rich affair and its international implications, and thus made the two prosecutors national celebrities.
     
    Giuliani, who pushed his attorneys to produce indictments, had a few more aces up his sleeve. In mid-September 1983 he invited journalists to a press conference the likes of which they had never before seen. In Giuliani’s view, this press conference was a historic event.
“The Largest Tax Evasion Indictment Ever”
     
    Journalists called to the law library on the eighth floor of the U.S. attorney’s office, where Rudolph W. Giuliani was waiting on Monday, September 19, 1983,