The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

health. He was insufferable, his employees said. He was “overbearing, unbalanced, and out of control,” as one of Rich’s friends summed up his mood in those days. There were several reasons for Rich’s bad patch. It was obvious that his private problems involving Denise were taking their toll, both on Rich personally and on the business. The U.S. prosecutors were pressing him harder than he was prepared to admit, and federal agents were making his life as difficult aspossible. As U.S. Marshal Ken Hill put it, “We stuck to the motto of the SAVAK [Iran’s infamous intelligence service under the shah]: If you can’t catch the fish, take away the water. We had tremendous success taking away the water.” It was the continuation of legal prosecution by other means. “Because the prosecutors were unable to catch Rich, they did their utmost to destroy him,” a former business partner, a manager at British Petroleum, told me. Rich’s public image suffered greatly as a result.
    Competitors and rivals soon realized that they only had to mention Marc Rich’s name in order to provoke a public debate that could damage his business—and aid theirs. They knew that Rich cherished discretion above all else and that any publicity would have a negative effect on his business. In the early 1990s, two important events led to Rich’s name being dragged through the headlines. First, October 1990 marked the start of a two-year labor dispute at the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation in Ravenswood, West Virginia, a company partly owned by Rich. Seventeen hundred employees went on strike for higher wages. The workers were locked out by management and their jobs taken over by nonunion replacements. The United Steelworkers of America organized an international campaign that successfully directed the media focus onto Rich’s participation in the company. Demonstrations were organized in front of Rich’s headquarters in Zug and at the annual meeting of the London Metal Exchange, where the unionists distributed a wanted poster for Rich. They were able to pin the label of “corporate villain” on Marc Rich. As a vilified Jewish capitalist on the run from U.S. justice, Rich was the perfect bogeyman. Indeed, Rich was the only reason that all of the most important international and American news outlets were keen to report on what was fundamentally a regional U.S. strike of little significance.
“A Little Bit of Rich in My Pocket”
     
    One revelation by the United Steelworkers led to the second case of negative publicity, which made Rich the subject of discussion in theU.S. Congress. The union had discovered that for years Rich’s company Clarendon had been supplying the U.S. Mint with copper and nickel for the production of coins. These government contracts were worth45.5 million to Clarendon. Politicians and media had a field day over the fact that an indicted tax evader on the run from U.S. prosecutors was doing business with the federal government. A congressional subcommittee began investigating the contracts. From a legal standpoint, however, everything was aboveboard. Clarendon had won the contracts in a public bidding process. However, politicians were quick to denounce the federal government’s involvement with a suspected tax fraudster. “Every time I reach into my pocket for some change, I have to wonder if there’s a little bit of Marc Rich in there,” said Robert Wise, the media-savvy congressman from West Virginia who was in charge of the investigation. 3
    Negative headlines were Rich’s Achilles’ heel, a fact that his detractors were more than happy to use to their own advantage. Even today critics wag their fingers and cite his name whenever one of his former employees’ names turns up in a commodities scandal in some part of the globe—toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, for instance, or the oil spill from the tanker
Prestige
that sank in the Atlantic in 2002 and contaminated the coastlines of Spain and France. Various journalists attempted to associate Rich and his companies with these occurrences, but in reality such events had absolutely nothing to do with him.
    Every time an embargo was broken, Rich’s name was mentioned almost as if by reflex. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon involved the embargo against Iraq under Saddam Hussein. According to the
Wall Street Journal
, Rich attempted to circumvent the UN embargo against Iraq in 1991. 4 In fact, Rich’s company had sought official