The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

by Daniel Ammann

  As a final question I ask him if he had served as an informal mediator between Iran and Israel. “To some extent I guess I was, but it wasn’t a position I was officially looking for. I just wanted to be helpful on a case-by-case basis.” One case was about the secret pipeline, the joint venture between Israel and Iran (see chapter 6). After the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran cut off all contact with Israel and stopped supplying it with Iranian oil. Six years later, the National Iranian Oil Company filed lawsuits against Israel.11 Iran claimed about 500 million for unpaid oil deliveries. Negotiations through lawyers reached a dead end. Iran objected to direct contact with Israel. So Marc Rich met in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 and proposed a possible solution—that his company would buy Israel’s shares and negotiate a solution with Iran in a businesslike way. “Rabin agreed,” Avner Azulay, who was present at this meeting, told me, “but the affair was torpedoed by the bureaucrats who made the conditions so complicated that Marc Rich eventually lost interest. I’m sure, today they are sorry.”

  Marc Rich was not a Mossad agent, as some have occasionally claimed. He was not a spy in the true sense of the word. He regularly offered his services as a volunteer, and he was of great use to the Mossad. He organized contacts in places where the Mossad had none. He offered money in situations where Israel officially could not. That is why Rich has been personally acquainted with all Israeli prime ministers from Menachem Begin to Ehud Barak. The Mossad refers to people like Rich as sayan—the Hebrew word for “helper.” It is a fitting name for the commodities trader, who above all considers himself a provider of services.

  The PRIVATE LIFE of the RICHES

  O

  n September 8, 1996, a Sunday, Gabrielle Rich was lying in a hospital bed at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. She had been diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, an extremely aggressive form of cancer that prevents the body from producing normal blood cells and renders it powerless to fight off infection. There was no longer any hope. Gabrielle, Marc and Denise Rich’s second daughter, was dying. She was twenty-seven years old.

  “It was horrific,” Denise Rich says, “all this pain.” The emotion in her voice makes it seem as if she is talking about events that had happened yesterday. She reaches out with her arm for her daughter Danielle’s hand while fighting back the tears. The three of us are sitting in her nineteenth-floor penthouse—once estimated to be worth 40 million—on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The floor-to-ceiling windows offer a breathtaking view of Central Park. Denise Rich sits underneath Andy Warhol’s interpretation of The Birth of Venus, the Renaissance masterpiece of Sandro Botticelli. The name of the Italian artist means—how fitting for the ex-wife of a billionaire oil trader—“little barrels.” Denise is dressed casually in a light blue V-neck sweater and leggings. It was at a fund-raising dinner in this very same penthouse that President Bill Clinton referred to Denise as one of his “closest friends.”1 It was another era—the era before Marc Rich’s pardon.

  Before I met Denise I had no idea to how I should broach the subject of her daughter’s death. I only asked her after we had spoken about a variety of issues and only when I was sure that she would not misinterpret my asking as mere voyeurism. There is nothing worse for a mother—or father—than a child’s death. Such an experience can change a person forever—and it had definitely affected Marc Rich, who was already divorced from Denise when his daughter died. I thought it was important to ask how he and the family had dealt with the loss.

  Gabrielle was not alone during her final hours. Her family—including Philip Aouad, whom Gabrielle had secretly married—was sitting with her in the hospital room. Her mother, Denise, who had already lost her own mother and sister to cancer; Ilona, Gabrielle’s older sister; and her younger sister, Danielle, were all there. Her father, however, was not—at least not physically. After the doctors had diagnosed Gabrielle’s leukemia, the family scoured the globe for the best doctors available. “They found them in the United States,” Danielle says. “My father supported this choice even though it was very painful for him not to be able to be with Gabrielle.” Rich could only sit in his house on Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne and speak to his dying daughter in Seattle by telephone. “He was on the phone up until she took her last breath,” Denise explains. “He was with her just as we were, and he couldn’t be there. The fact that he could not be there with his daughter was horrific. He was just sobbing on the phone. I finally hung up the phone because he was sobbing so much and I couldn’t take it. I wanted to hold her.” Shortly past ten o’clock on that very same evening, Gabrielle passed away.

  “Don’t Come Home, Daddy, Please”

  Whoever among his family or acquaintances is asked the single most difficult aspect of the prosecution against Marc Rich gives the same answer: the fact that he was not allowed to travel to the United States in order to see his daughter and hold her in his arms when she needed him most. “The death of a daughter is tragic enough, but on top of that, if you are not able to be there—even though you are so rich and powerful—then what does all that power and money mean?” Isaac Querub asked me. He is one of Rich’s trusted associates and a friend who has three daughters of his own. Another friend, the businessman Michael Steinhardt, was Rich’s houseguest in the town of Meggen during those sad days. “It was such a tragedy for him not being with Gabrielle. He had very strong feelings for her. She was—and still is—an important part of his life,” Steinhardt told me. “You just mention her name and he starts crying,” Danielle says.

  There is nothing Marc Rich would rather have done than visit his daughter in the hospital. Robert Fink, Rich’s longtime lawyer in Manhattan, discussed the issue with Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. “I told him Rich’s daughter was dying,” Fink remembers. “I asked him if there was a way Marc could be allowed to visit his daughter without jeopardy.” The answer was no.

  Thirteen years had passed since Rich had fled the United States, and for thirteen years he had managed to avoid falling into the traps that U.S. agents had set for him. Rich knew that if he wanted to see his daughter one last time, he would be arrested the moment he stepped off the airplane in the United States. “Then so be it,” Rich said to himself. It was worth it. He called Gabrielle. “He said to Gabrielle, ‘I’ll come,’ ” Danielle tells me in her mother’s apartment. “Gabrielle told him, ‘Please, I beg you, don’t come. I beg you, don’t come home.’ He said, ‘I will, I will.’ She said, ‘Please, Daddy, I love you so much. Please don’t come. If you do this I will be so angry with you.’ ” Denise had to promise her terminally ill daughter that she would make sure her father stayed in Switzerland. “He was prepared to take any consequences,” Danielle says.

  With the heaviest of hearts, Rich decided against traveling to the United States. He stayed in Switzerland and missed his daughter’s funeral. Rich’s friends still tell each other how agents attended the funeral in the event Rich did decide to come. The U.S. marshals who were tasked with apprehending Rich were convinced that he might try to secretly travel to the United States via Canada.

  “Sure. It’s very sad,” said Sandy Weinberg, the assistant U.S. attorney who had initiated the investigation into Rich. He seemed irritated that I had asked him if it would have been a humanitarian gesture to grant Rich safe conduct. “It’s kind of hard to feel sorry for him. He created the situation. Safe conduct? It doesn’t work like that. He chose not to play by the rules,” Weinberg explained. He is probably right—those were the rules. Any prosecutor or any politician who had granted Rich safe conduct would have faced the toughest of criticism. It is probably naive for a fugitive to hope for such mercy. However, I remember the words of Avner Azulay: “No humane person would have denied such a request. Marc didn’t kill anybody. He is not a terrorist.”

  I spoke about the case with the Swiss minister of justice who was involved in Rich’s case in the mid-1980s. I wanted to know how she would have reacted to just such a request. Elisabeth Kopp-Ik
lé answered without a moment’s hesitation, “As minister of justice I would have granted safe conduct in a similar case. Otherwise I would not have been able to face myself in the mirror anymore.” I replied by saying that a decision of that nature would have put her under immense political pressure. She looked at me for quite some time, considering, then said, “There are situations in which humanitarian issues must take precedence over political issues. If this is no longer possible, then you have to ask yourself why you are even involved in politics.” Her answer echoed in my head long after our discussion had ended. I was happy that I was not a politician.

  Daughter’s Grave Moved to Israel

  “Doesn’t help me,” Rich says with a bitter tone when I tell him how the former minister of justice reacted. Rich had also missed the death and burial of his father in New York in September 1986. David Rich was always his son’s greatest role model both as a father and a businessman. Marc, an only child, wanted nothing more than to prove to his father that he was successful in business. He wanted his father’s recognition. Yet Rich was unable to attend his father’s funeral and say the Kaddish, the traditional prayer of mourning that only a son can recite. “It is an extremely important prayer,” a religious friend of the Rich family explained. “It is the last service that the son can perform for the dead father. For Marc it was a tragedy that he was not able to be there.” Rich had no other option than to recite the Kaddish over the telephone.

  As I quickly discovered, Rich does not like talking about the deaths of his father and daughter. There was, however, one question that I had to ask. Can one ever be happy again after losing a child? “The pain still lingers after all these years. I’m happy again, but less than I used to be when she was around,” Rich says. Not many people are aware that the Rich family had their daughter’s grave moved after Rich was pardoned by President Clinton. Gabrielle’s grave is now located in Israel near Tel Aviv, where Rich, an Israeli citizen, can visit as often as he likes—and with no one to disturb him. “I regularly visit,” he says. The possibility of traveling to the United States to see his family was one of the most important points in the petition for his pardon. The petition states that the pardon “will allow Mr. Rich and Mr. Green to be with their families.”2 Even so, Rich has not set foot in the United States since the pardon (see chapter 18).

  Blind Date with Denise Eisenberg

  Marc and Denise Rich first met on a blind date, which is not uncommon in Jewish circles. It was December 1965, and Rich had flown back to New York from Madrid to celebrate Hanukkah with his parents. Paula Rich was beginning to worry about the fact that her son had not yet married, so she organized a meeting with Denise’s father. Rich was thirty-one years old and running Philipp Brothers’ Madrid office. Denise Joy Eisenberg, a dark-haired, almond-eyed beauty with a cheerful temperament, was a good ten years younger. She was studying French at Boston University.

  Denise came from a solid Jewish family that had found prosperity in America. Her father, Emil Eisenberg, was an entrepreneur who owned one of the country’s largest shoe manufacturers, the Desco Shoe Corporation. Eisenberg had founded the company in 1942 shortly after the family had immigrated to the United States. The Riches and Eisenbergs had strikingly similar family histories, for the Eisenbergs were also German-speaking Jews from the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. Emil Eisenberg was born in Tarnow, an important trading town that is now a part of Poland, in 1912. The town was only one hundred miles from Przemyl, the birthplace of Marc Rich’s father. Just like David Reich, Emil Eisenberg was able to escape the Holocaust and make his way to the United States.

  Eisenberg moved to Paris in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. There he met Gery Diamant, and the two were later married (their marriage would last for fifty-three years). At the young age of twenty, Eisenberg, together with three of his brothers, founded a fur-trading company with offices in Paris, London, and New York. In the spring of 1940 the Nazis invaded Western Europe, and the Eisenbergs decided to flee Paris. It was in that same spring that David Reich and his family fled Antwerp for the south of France in a used black Citroën. The Eisenbergs were somewhat more well-to-do than the Reichs, and the family was able to board a ship for New York. In 1942 they settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, approximately forty miles west of Boston.

  Half a year after their blind date in New York, in the late summer of 1966, Denise Eisenberg traveled to Spain to visit Rich. Their parents had done well—the match was a success. “Marc proposed to me after two weeks of touring in the north of Spain. We had dinner in the parador of Santiago de Compostela. It was very romantic,” Denise remembers. Built in the fifteenth century, the parador is a former royal hospital with four cloistered courtyards and an impressive dining room. “I had like two seconds, and I said OK. I called my parents and told them I was engaged. My mother wanted to have a nice wedding in Massachusetts. Marc said no. He wanted to get married in two or three weeks. My mother said she couldn’t organize a wedding in two weeks, so they negotiated back and forth. Guess who won?” Just a few weeks later, on October 30, 1966, the couple married in Worcester’s Temple Emanuel.

  The pair flew to Jamaica for their honeymoon, where it rained the entire length of their stay. As he would tell me ruefully so many years later, Rich stepped on a sea urchin on the very first day and had to keep his infected foot raised for the rest of the honeymoon. Exactly nine months later, on August 1, 1967, Ilona was born. The young family settled in Madrid, and Denise devoted her energies to taking care of her young daughter. Gabrielle was born in January 1969.

  Family Values

  Rich was living in the fast lane. He was working harder and longer than any of his colleagues in the office. He arrived at the office shortly past 7:00 A.M. and he was seldom home before 10:00 P.M. “He was constantly working. It was difficult sometimes,” Denise remembers. “His work was his hobby, and his family suffered as a consequence,” Ursula Santo Domingo told me. The marquesa became a close friend of the Rich family and came to know them better than almost anybody else. She told me that Denise once complained to her that Rich made too little time for his family. “ ‘I don’t have any time for you during the week,’ he told her. ‘I can give you a half hour on Saturdays and forty-five minutes on Sundays.’ ”

  The situation did not improve when Rich decided to go into business for himself in 1974. Before moving back to New York, the couple moved to London, where Danielle was born in March 1975. At that point Denise still provided her husband with a great deal of support. “He was building a business, and that’s what he had to do. I was there to support him in any way I could. He did what he had to do. I understood. That’s what my father did. My father would always say that you have to work for money to really understand what the price of anything is, what the value is.” Marc Rich once said of himself, “I guess I’m a business machine.”

  It was the typical division of labor in those days. Despite her public image as an eccentric jet-setter and flamboyant socialite, Denise was a rather conservative mother and wife with a strong sense of family. Marc and Denise Rich wished to instill traditional values in their children. Marc Rich believed in the classic virtues. “Honesty, hard work, responsibility, and some knowledge of the Jewish religion,” he said when I asked him about what he had wished to pass on to his children. (He stopped observing the Jewish rituals at the age of fourteen, he told me. He doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t pray.) His daughters had to be well behaved, come home on time, and finish their homework right away. Because he was so wealthy, he wished to teach his children the value of money. “I never spoiled them,” he says. “I wanted to teach them that you have to work to make money.” Danielle still remembers this. “He did not just give me money or let me buy whatever I wanted as my mother would have done,” she says. “Instead I was given an allowance and had to work hard for it. If I wanted a raise, I had to prove that I both deserved and needed one.”

  Demanding Father, Dominant Mother

  Rich ad
mits that he was a strict father. He can also be a strict grandfather, as I myself witnessed during our skiing in St. Moritz. Rich’s daughters had come to visit along with their families, and on that day we all sat down to lunch together in Rich’s chalet. One of his grandsons kept acting up; he refused to sit still at the table, and no one could get him to calm down. After this had gone on for some time, Rich began to scold the boy. “Listen to your mother! If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll send you to the kitchen.” “Then I’ll have to eat in the kitchen?” the boy asked. “Who said anything about eating?” Rich dryly replied.

  If you ask friends of the family about Marc Rich’s values, they refer to the special relationship that he had to his parents as an only child. “Denise always said, ‘His mother comes first, and then it’s a while before he gets to me,’ ” Ursula Santo Domingo commented. Another friend said his mother was too dominant. “He dressed the way she wanted.” Denise herself says only, “She was very, very, very controlling. She wasn’t too crazy about me.” According to Rich’s cousin René Traut, an eye specialist in Antwerp who kept in close contact with Paula Rich, Marc telephoned his mother almost daily, and it was the highlight of her day. David Rich, on the other hand, was very strict with his son as a child and expected a lot of him, Ursula Santo Domingo says. She believes that Rich’s relationship to his parents was one of his driving forces. “He wanted his parents to be proud of him. He always wanted to prove to his father that he could be as successful—or even more successful—than he was.”