The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

honeymoon. It was raining all the time, and I stepped on a sea urchin. I’ve never been there again.”
    In the face of their obvious failure to capture Rich and Green, prosecutors desperately followed every lead that came their way. The hunt for Marc Rich at times seemed almost pitiful, as classified police documents show. On May 5, 1992, a U.S. citizen thought he saw a sign welcoming “Mr. Rich” at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo II International Airport. He dutifully reported what he had seen to the police. A welcome sign for a Mr. Rich? Reason enough for Mary Jo Grotenrath, associate director of the Office of International Affairs, to phone Boris Senchukov at the Russian bureau of Interpol the following day. According to police logs marked CRITICAL URGENT and FOR POLICE/COURT USE ONLY , Grotenrath requested Senchukov’s assistance in determining whether Rich was actually in Moscow, saying, “Your assistance in this most urgent matter is greatly appreciated.” Nothing came of this.
    A fax dated February 21, 1992, and marked URGENT also casts a rather poor light on the U.S. investigation. Donald S. Donovan, assistant director at the U.S. National Central Bureau of Interpol, sent the fax to Don Ward, the deputy director of the U.S. Marshals. “Our criminal police have found out the above subject [Marc Rich] set up a branch of the ‘Marc Rich’ Company at address as follows: Stepanska 34, Prague 1, Czechoslovakia,” it said. This explosive piece of information, apparently of the utmost urgency, had already been officially published in Prague’s commercial register six months previously.
    In their desperation, federal agents even sought out the assistance of Josef Lang. Lang, a former Trotskyist and ultra-left member of the Swiss parliament, was a well-known local critic of Rich. Lang once described the United States as a “warmonger” and its presidents as “death-penaltybarbarians.” True to the Arabic proverb “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the FBI approached Lang in 1992. Lang was invited to the fourteenth floor of 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, the headquarters of the FBI’s New York field office. There two agents tried to persuade him to recruit informants working among the mechanics at Zurich’s airport. They hoped he could tip them off when Rich was due to leave the country. “I had to say, ‘Sorry, I am a politician, not a private eye.’ Besides, it was against Swiss law,” recounts Lang. 12 The fact that the FBI agents repeatedly referred to the750,000 reward on Rich’s head did nothing to sway the Swiss politician.
    Although the exact amount of the reward was never officially mentioned, the fact that it existed was known the world over. The U.S. government broadcast an International Crime Alert over the entire globe on the Voice of America. The alert promised, “The U.S. will pay a reward for information that leads to the arrest of Marc David Rich. The U.S. guarantees that all reports will be investigated and all information will be kept confidential. If appropriate, the U.S. is prepared to protect in formants by relocating them.” This made Rich a target for bounty hunters, kidnappers, and envious competitors. There were even rumors that European terrorists had offered to catch Rich for money and deliver him to U.S. authorities. 13
    The U.S. government expended 19.2 man-years at a level of “GS/GM 13 or higher” (more than 1.5 years of experience) between the years of 1984 and 1990 in order to apprehend Rich. In other words, the equivalent of three people worked full-time on the hunt for the fugitive trader. In this same period,55,000 was spent on travel expenses alone. 14
    Yet it was all for nothing. Rich was always just a step or two ahead of his pursuers. Rich did nothing to hide his business successes, his riches, or even his ridicule of the authorities. He celebrated his fiftieth birthday at the Grand Hotel National in Lucerne, where two of Switzerland’s most famous clowns appeared onstage for a rather special boxing match. The clown wearing a Marc Rich logo on his back went after theother clown, dressed as a member of the NYPD, with an oversized rubber hammer. The three hundred guests, who had traveled from every corner of the globe to attend the party, loved this bit of slapstick.
Secret Protection?
     
    It must have infuriated Rich’s pursuers. Rich was listed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list between Victor Gerena, wanted for armed robbery, and Eric Rudolph, the