The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

media,” Azulay told Rich’s lawyers. He advised, “We have to bypass the bureaucratic channel.” Rich had a bad reputation, and many even considered him “the biggest devil,” as Rich himself says. If it were to become widely known that he was seeking a presidential pardon, his people could no longer control what would happen next.
    Rich’s lawyers decided that it was legally possible to go around the Department of Justice and take their petition directly to the president. “The pardon attorney doesn’t like it, the attorney general doesn’t like it, but it is legal,” they said. In late October 2000, only three months before Clinton’s final day in the White House, Rich’s lawyers made the definite decision to take this avenue of last resort. “I tell you we didn’t have a sophisticated plan. It was rather a cowboy mission,” Azulay assured me. Rich’s legal team, including the experienced New York attorney Bob Fink, began to put together a petition. Discretion was of the utmost importance. “We tried to keep a low profile,” Fink told me. “I was concerned that the petition would become public. If it did the press would start to attack.”
    Rich’s team was able to keep its efforts out of the media spotlight. In late November the two-inch-thick petition was finally ready. Jack Quinn sent it to “the Honorable William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States” on December 11. It contained a legal argument combined with a personal and emotional appeal. The legal argument maintained that Rich and Green had been “wrongfully indicted” and “unfairly singled out.” 7 “This case was grossly overprosecuted,” Quinn emphasized during our telephone interview. All comparable cases in the past, he said, had been tried in civil instead of criminal courts. It was the same argument that Rich’s various lawyers had unsuccessfully made over the last sixteen years in order to come to some sort of arrangement with the Southern District of New York (see chapters 10 and 13).
    Avner Azulay was responsible for the personal and emotional aspectof the petition, and his efforts to this effect were quite impressive. According to the first lines of the petition, “Mr. Rich and Mr. Green are extraordinary businessmen and philanthropists who have lived exemplary lives since the alleged offenses.” Rich’s charitable foundations had donated “over 100 million dollars to charitable, cultural and civic organizations.” 8 Attached to the petition were letters from dozens of prominent figures offering testimony of Rich’s generosity. The petition was supported by several prominent Israelis, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Nobel Prize winner Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, former director general of the Mossad Shabtai Shavit, mayor of Jerusalem (and later prime minister) Ehud Olmert, and several other Israeli and Jewish dignitaries such as Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman and U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council chairman Rabbi Irving Greenberg. From Switzerland came letters from the well-known art collector Ernst Beyeler, Zurich mayor Josef Estermann, and top UBS banker Pierre de Weck. King Juan Carlos of Spain also put in a good word for his countryman Rich and in the process offered a form of official recognition for the important services that Rich had provided for Spain in the 1960s and 1970s (see chapter 6 ).
Ehud Barak’s Support
     
    Azulay’s greatest tactical masterstroke was that he had been able to convince Ehud Barak to personally lobby President Clinton on Rich’s behalf. The timing could not have been better. On December 11—the same day that Clinton received Rich’s petition—Barak made a telephone call to the White House. According to the White House transcript, the call was made at 6:16 P.M . and lasted exactly nineteen minutes. 9
    “One last remark,” Barak said to President Clinton. “There is an American Jewish businessman living in Switzerland and making a lot of philanthropic contributions to Israeli institutions and activities like education, and he is a man called Marc Rich. He violated certain rules of the game in the United States and is living abroad. I just wanted tolet you know that here he is highly appreciated for his support of so many philanthropic institutions and funds, and that if I can, I would like to make my recommendation to consider his case.”
    Clinton responded, “I know about that case because I know his