The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

flawed, why didn’t he come back and face the charges?” On hearing the question, Rich looks at me as if he has trouble believing that I still do not understand. He continues in a low voice, “I saw no hope of getting a fair trial because of the unstable and inflamed environment. My case was very bad—unjustifiably so.” He once more points out his belief that this was a case in which the prosecution had overstepped the limits of acceptable conduct. “The situation was so negative, I didn’t trust the situation, it wasn’t a normal situation.”
    In this, Rich receives support from unexpected quarters. The former Swiss minister of justice Elisabeth Kopp-Iklé is of a similar opinion. She is a highly intelligent, reserved, and serious woman who harbors great sympathy for the United States, stemming from the years she spent in there in her youth. “Marc Rich was prejudged by the media. The publicwas agitated and Rudolph Giuliani was pursuing his own goals,” Kopp-Iklé said. “I realized that Rich had no chance of receiving justice in the United States. He could not be sure of a fair trial,” she told me.
    “Everybody was inflamed,” Rich’s longtime lawyer Robert Fink confirmed. He made a gesture with the flat of his hand as if he were running it over a wooden slat. “It was a train on a track that could not be stopped. The atmosphere was very polluted. There was so much anger, pressure, and threats. Marc was thoroughly demonized.”
    “Marc was characterized as a villain,” Wall Street financier Michael Steinhardt told me. “We all got the impression that if he came back, they would lock him up and throw away the key.”
     
    “Nonsense,” Sandy Weinberg said when I confronted him with this criticism. “Rich would have gotten a fair trial. He created the publicity, not us. It was self-inflicted.” However, the prosecution’s threat of 325 years in prison was “shocking to the entire defense team,” Laurence Urgenson told me. Urgenson has served as Rich’s lawyer since 1994 and also represented him during the postpardon hearings. He offered a piece of wisdom in parting, gained from his thirty years’ experience as a lawyer, prosecutor, and deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. “When cases become symbols, the defendant is in trouble,” Urgenson said at the end of our discussion. “For the Southern District of New York, Marc Rich had become a symbol. For them he was a wealthy guy—the rogue billionaire who thinks he’s above the law. They thought, ‘We don’t let this rich guy get away with it.’ ”
    This was certainly the case with the U.S. Marshals Service, which is responsible for conveying international fugitives to U.S. courts. Many of their cases involve fugitives on the lam, their whereabouts unknown, but the U.S. marshals knew exactly where Rich was to be found. They even had his address: Himmelrichstrasse 28. He lived in a large house at the edge of the woods in Baar, a rural village with a wonderful view of Lake Zug. The very fact that Rich was living so openly infuriated the agents, and they swore they would get him. Howard Safir, the associatedirector of operations for the U.S. Marshals Service, knew that special problems required special solutions. He was prepared to do everything possible to bring Rich before an American court, “as long as it doesn’t involve a violation of the fugitive’s human rights.” 1 In October 1985, Safir packed his bags and headed to Switzerland. He did not intend to return empty-handed. “This time,” he told his colleagues, “this time we’ll get him.”

 

     

The
HUNT
for
MARC RICH
     

    A
s befitted a man regarded by the United States as a traitor and fugitive, American officials made strenuous and sometimes almost comical efforts over the years to apprehend Marc Rich, ranging from psychological pressure to tricks to lure him away from Switzerland to spying to outright kidnapping. Many of these efforts have never before been revealed.
     
    A shroud of fog covered Lake Zug against the backdrop of beautiful central Switzerland on an October morning in 1985. As is often the case in the fall, the fog would dissolve in the course of the afternoon. Howard Safir traveled to Zug that morning disguised as a tourist. He was accompanied by Chief Inspector Don Ferrarone, a legendary former DEA agent with vast international experience who was involved in the famous “French Connection”