The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich Paperback – November 9, 2010

Is there any prospect as frightening as a political show trial in the court of public opinion?Reading about the 17-year government witch hunt for Marc Rich - the global commodities trader credited with inventing the spot oil market - I was reminded of an old quote attributed to Cicero:"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?"In the early 1980s Rich became a prototype for the celebrity show trial, having been accused of 1) the largest tax fraud in history and 2) "trading with the enemy" through the duration of the Iran hostage crisis.Rich was essentially a star-making vehicle for a fame-hungry prosecutor you may have heard of, Rudy Giuliani, launching the career in politics that followed.For the reader with strong liberterian instincts, the thrust of government overreach in the Rich story is nauseating. The U.S. government tried to pursue Rich by means fair and foul for 17 years, including a kidnapping scheme in blatant violation of Swiss laws. (In refusing to succumb to U.S. bullying, the Swiss government is an unsung hero in this tale.)The bungled extradition attempts came after Giuliani had used RICO, a controversial legal statue designed for mafia cases, to essentially shut down Rich's commodity trading business and extract hundreds of millions of dollars at gunpoint. (Imagine the government freezing your assets and mortally threatening your livelihood before there is any trial - forcing your enterprise to settle or die - and you get the idea.)Rich ultimately left the United States for Switzerland, never to come back, because he feared the sensationalized media treatment (gleefully encouraged by Giuliani and others) would increase his odds of a possible lifetime prison sentence, with prosecutors crowing about 100+ years of jail time and refusing to discuss finer points of evidence.The mind boggles at the mindset necessary for one man to pursue another in such blatant fashion. Another government operative, Ken Hill, spent 14 years "solely and exclusively" committed to the Rich case, obsessing over the bitter, vindictive image he and other crusaders had created in their own minds. What kind of life could that possibly be?The story as told by the book's author, Daniel Ammann, is unquestionably sympathetic to Rich. But that seems reasonable, based on the evidence presented, and also based on the merciless beating Rich's reputation took in the hands of his detractors. There are many who see him as "the biggest devil" to this day.There is nothing wrong with diligent pursuit of justice, obviously, or upholding the rule of law. What is so off-putting (again from a libertarian perspective) is how selectively the rule of law is applied.In other words, an individual with a show trial profile may be pursued to the ends of the earth because it conveniently fits the image-burnishing goals of the prosecutors - yet at the same time, activities of proven and far greater corruption, covered over through deep complications or access to the Washington power structure, are routinely ignored.There was perhaps nothing so galling, for example, as the trillions of dollars lifted out of taxpayers' pockets in recent years via the global financial crisis - an insider con job orchestrated at such high levels that the public (and the SEC) had zero chance of understanding. The true criminality is embedded in the system itself, and the Giulianis and Weinbergs of the world could care less.The "trading with the enemy" charges leveled against Rich also seemed gallingly hypocritical. After all, is anyone as actively involved in "trading with the enemy" as the United States government itself? One would not be surprised to find that more than half the regimes who give the U.S. trouble were, at one time or another, propped up by U.S operatives in the first place. (On top of that, one hardly needs to bring up Iraq, Afghanistan, CIA connections to the "war on drugs", and so on.)At the same time, the tax questions that originally entangled Rich - for which there is still a credible case that nothing illegal was done, as interpreted through the lens of a Swiss company operating under Swiss laws - were born of Nixon's ridiculously byzantine system of oil price controls. (Which, by the way, worsened the energy crisis rather than improving it.)The fact of the matter is that Rich was an easy man to hate, and to prosecute in the public eye, because of his willingness to do fully legal business (from the perspective of a neutral Swiss corporation) with unsavory characters like Iran, Angola, and South Africa at a time others preferred to grandstand on moral issues.This willingness to operate in the "gray areas" of capitalism (as Amman dubs them) allowed Rich to provide significant value to large-scale buyers and sellers of vital commodities, especially regarding transactions between those countries who, on an official public level, professed to have nothing to do with each other (the most eye-opening example being mutually beneficial trade between Iran and Israel).Questions of morality and government hypocrisy aside, "The King of Oil" is a fascinating tale of how one of the most successful traders of the twentieth century built his business at the heart of the global commodities trade.It should be noted that Rich is not a trader in the modern-day popular sense of the term, i.e. one who moves quickly in and out of positions and uses stop losses. He began with Phillipp Brothers, a commodities trading house later acquired and spun off as Phibro, in 1954, nearly three decades before crude oil futures hit the NYMEX.The business then, and the business of Marc Rich + Co. as it grew, was facilitating long-term arrangements between commodity buyers and sellers on a very large scale. The typical profit margins of "commodities trading" as Rich practiced it were generally small, perhaps only two or three percentage points on a deal, but the scale of activity - hundreds of millions to billions - made it an incredibly lucrative practice.In addition to matching buyers and sellers, handling transport and distribution, and making discreet use of well-placed contacts in dozens of countries, Rich's firm acted as something of a de facto investment bank for many of its developing world partners, facilitating access to international loans and letters of credit (or even investing the necessary capital itself). Some of the biggest scores also came via aggressive directional exposure to rising commodity prices. (Marc Rich + Co. eventually became Glencore International, with mentions of the founder purged from its history.)All in all "The King of Oil" is a fast and light read, interweaving a compelling story of political intrigue with the twentieth century development of global commodity markets. It is easy for an idealistic public to take a sensationalized view of Marc Rich, but not so easy to see how the wheels of trade would turn without men like him behind the scenes.

Insightful, an eye-opener. This is the life of a very unusual man with an unusual destiny and Daniel Ammann brings the point home: Marc Rich is brilliant, he is really like nobody else, the true "king of oil" - and a tragic figure, almost a Greek tragedy complete with family disruption.Why not give this book 5 stars? Only because after a magnificent start, the book slows down and at the end meanders too much in details that most readers probably wouldn't care about. If the book could be cut back a little, it would be a masterpiece - but even as it is, it's a must read, highly recommended. You will learn a lot about the world of high finance and oil that you never suspected and you won't regret the time you spent on this book. As I said, an eye-opener

Great books, amazing life story.

Rich began his commodity career working for Philipp Brothers, (now Phibro) - a part of Occidental Petroleum - before launching his own firm in 1974 with Pinkus Green and Alec Hackel. The new firm was to be called Marc Rich + Co AG. Rich is a Randian and was known for making large commodity deals on handshakes.Most international companies, including the Seven Sisters, had legitimate offshore entities to better manage their tax liability, among other reasons. So that Marc Rich + Co AG had several such entities should not have come as a surprise to any international commodity dealer.If not for an overzealous US Attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, Rich undoubtedly would be in the United States. He was indicted for dealing with Iran during the hostage crisis. Yet, according to Ammann, each of the American Seven Sisters - through subsidiaries - were doing business with Iran all the while...obviously a double-standard.Giuliani, no stranger to the perp walk, saw an easy target and literally made his case. Giuliani got his political win in that he very publicly seized tens of millions of dollars in frozen assets in the US.However, he didn't drop the case as he often did after all the fanfare and press that he got BUT he didn't bring the case to trial either. Had he taken Rich through the court system and lost, he would have lost much political capital.This is a great book. You can hear a podcast I did with the author Daniel Ammann at my blog [....].