The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

Union after the United States had enacted an embargo against the country following its invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. They rage over the fact that he traded copper, sugar, and oil with Cuba despite the Kennedy embargo. “Mr. Rich was publicly reported to have traded with just about every enemy of the United States they have had over the last twenty years, and many of those countries were embargoed,” says Dan Burton, the influential chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform when its report on Rich was written. 19
Anti-Semitic Stereotypes
     
    The capitalist without a country who makes deals with the enemy. The speculator who creates nothing of his own but only acts as an intermediary while profiting from others. The “bloodsucker of the Third World,” as Rich was once referred to in the Swiss parliament. The perfidious profiteer, who would rather leave his own country and give up his citizenship than pay taxes. Many critics may not be aware of the anti-Semitic stereotypes that resonate throughout these accusations. More than a few of my interviewees see this as at least one of the reasons why Rich was so persecuted while other oil companies that acted in a similar fashion were treated much more leniently.
    “I don’t really like to use the word ‘anti-Semitic,’ because you can say for any type of criticism that this or that is anti-Semitic. Usually it isjust not true, but in Marc’s case this was a really big problem,” Avner Azulay said to me. The former officer of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service is one of Rich’s closest friends and was influential in gaining his pardon. “He was a parvenu. Not from the U.S. establishment—and Jewish. I have no doubt about it: A part of the American establishment, the WASP elite, is anti-Semitic,” says another one of Rich’s longtime companions, who closely witnessed his case from the very beginning.
    An anti-Semitic angle to the whole affair? “Could be,” Rich himself says. “I was an easy target: one individual, making a lot of money, Jewish.” Sandy Weinberg, the assistant U.S. attorney who initiated and heavily influenced the criminal proceedings against Rich, took a sip of Perrier from a bottle and raised his voice for the first time. He strongly rejected the charge of anti-Semitism. “My father was a Jew from Brooklyn. He was discriminated against as a Jew,” he angrily told me while we were sitting in his office on the thirteenth floor of the Bank of America Building, which provides a fantastic view of Tampa that reaches toward St. Petersburg.
    “Survival is Rich’s chief commodity,” a journalist for
Fortune
once aptly wrote. 20 This could be Rich’s motto. The experience of having to flee his home in Belgium had a great effect on Rich. He does not like talking about it, but he confirms my suspicion. “The forced emigration instilled in me a strong desire for independence.” “Independence” is a word that Rich often uses, and he uses it again when I ask him what his unimaginable wealth means to him. “Wealth always means independence.”
    He has the typical mentality of the immigrant who has to do everything himself and who wants to show everyone that he can make it. He was hungry for success and ambitious enough to work his way up from a small apartment at 4404 Holly Street in Kansas City, Missouri, to a ten-room apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan. “He is motivated by an athlete’s drive to think faster, work harder, and achieve more than others,” says the private banker Karl Reichmuth, who has known Rich well for many years.
    Top performance was Rich’s instrument in gaining recognition, esteem, and—if not love—respect, as a young refugee who spoke not a word of English, as a Jew in the Diaspora all on his own, and as an only child who wanted to please the father he so admired. His close friend Michael Steinhardt, the legendary hedge fund pioneer, expressed it best, when he received me in his Madison Avenue office in Manhattan. Steinhardt is a man like a panda bear with a silver mustache and a very low and calm voice. His office on the seventeenth floor offers a view of the ice rink in Central Park and contains marvelous artworks. There are ancient Judaica like silver menorahs and Torah boxes. There are photomontages by the famous German artist John Heartfield, né Helmut Herzfeld, who was satirizing Adolf Hitler and the Nazis with his gripping work. Steinhardt shows the seminal picture of the white dove