The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

admits that the Swiss had received a quiet tip-off concerning Safir’s activities. Whether this tip came from the U.S. Department of Justice or the U.S. State Department remains a subject of debate. A classified report from the Swiss embassy in Washington dated from thetime of the case provides a telling hint: “Top [U.S.] officials are slowly becoming aware of the fact that agencies and courts have gone too far in recent years. They are beginning to realize that the most wonderful prece dents blessed by the highest courts are of absolutely no use in cases where the foreign country opposes the decision. In fact, as in the Marc Rich case, they appear almost ludicrous to their foreign partners.” It is an open secret that the State Department and the Department of Justice often opposed one another in the Rich case. The State Department had actually wanted to seek out Swiss cooperation, whereas the Department of Justice had wanted to go it alone.
    Safir’s failed mission was a small part of a huge, top-secret project known as the Otford Project, the goal of which was to apprehend Marc Rich and Pinky Green at almost any price. A multiagency team was put together consisting of personnel from the FBI, the IRS, the Office of International Affairs at the Department of Justice, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Interpol, and the U.S. Marshals Service. The Otford Project was directed by the U.S. Marshals Service, which as of 1979 was responsible for apprehending federal fugitives (previously the responsibility of the FBI).
    The U.S. marshal who was assigned by Safir to hunt down Rich was Ken Hill. Ever since Rich had fled to Switzerland in 1983, Hill had been devoted “solely and exclusively” to the case—and remained so in the role of case agent for fourteen years. 3 The former New York policeman probably knew more about the wanted commodities trader than Rich’s own family did. From his Manhattan office in a faded brick building near the Brooklyn Bridge, Hill kept on the trail of Rich and Green. The task would soon become his entire life.
    I spoke to Ken Hill in Florida. 4 He retired in 1997 and became a diving instructor after thirty years of service to the United States. Secrecy is still of the utmost importance to the sixty-two-year-old former marshal. Only a single photograph of Hill is officially known to exist, in which he appears—unrecognizable—in a wet suit and diving mask. Hill called me shortly before 9:00 A.M . in my Tampa hotel room.
Code Name: The Riddler
     
    “It’s all about money,” Hill told me right after the initial greetings. “If Marc Rich calls you he asks himself a) can I make money with you today, b) can I make money with you tomorrow? If not, good-bye.” Hill’s code name was “the Riddler.” He was on Rich’s heels for fourteen years. During this time Hill spoke with countless people who had had some form of contact with Marc Rich, whether as frustrated employees or tough competitors. Hill had a fixed picture of Rich in his mind. “Do you have children?” he suddenly asked me on the telephone. “He was like a child, you know, who thinks, ‘The rules don’t apply to me. I can get away with it.’ The man is a genius, no doubt, but he thought his entire life, ‘The rules don’t apply to me.’ He had no respect for no country, no people, no law. He screwed a lot of people.”
    I could sense that the Rich case had been no routine job for Hill. The hunt soon became an obsession. “He worked an incredible amount of time on the case,” a former official at the U.S. Department of Justice said. Hill was so frustrated toward the end that his colleagues feared he might be suffering from burnout. This would come as no surprise. The average tax evasion suspect, the U.S. government once calculated, remains at large for three years and eight months. Rich and Green, however, were at large for more than seventeen years before they were pardoned by Bill President Clinton in January 2001.
    One can feel the deep resentment in Hill’s account of the events. During the 1991 Gulf War, for example, as Hill explains, “I phoned Pinky in his hotel in Jerusalem when the Iraqis were firing the Scuds on the city and asked him if he still didn’t want to come back.” Another time he sent Rich a bottle of scotch while the trader was on a ski holiday in St. Moritz. Hill wanted to prove to him that he always knew exactly where he was. He wanted to remind Rich of his