Metal Men; Marc Rich and the 10-Billion-Dollar Scam

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1985. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. 224 pages. DJ has slight wear and soiling. A. Craig Copetas is a Greek author and international correspondent currently based in Paris. Copetas joined the London bureau of Rolling Stone magazine in 1973 before moving to Esquire magazine. He was a staff reporter of The Wall Street Journal and a senior writer for Bloomberg News until early 2012. He is correspondent-at-large for Quartz/The Atlantic Group.

Copetas has published several books, including Bear Hunting with the Politburo, Updated: American Adventures in Russian Capitalism (2001), Metal Men and Mona Lisa's Pajamas. Marc Rich -- the most wanted white-collar criminal in America -- was one of the most successful metal traders in the world. Before there was Michael Milken or Ivan Boesky, Rich rose through the ranks to amass a multibillion dollar fortune in the halcyon days of high-flying commodities trading. But he did it by cutting corners and pulling the wool over the eyes of his competitors. Eventually his companies pleaded guilty to 38 counts of tax evasion, paying $90 million in fines. Rich fled to Switzerland, where he faced a potential jail term of over 300 years if he ever returned to the United States. This is a story of greed, corruption, and money gone wild, in truly astronomical proportions. Posing as a commodities trader, A. Craig Copetas goes behind the scenes to give us a riveting, true-to-life portrait of Rich's corrupt world and his incredible escape from the law.

Marc Rich (born Marcell David Reich; December 18, 1934 - June 26, 2013) was an international commodities trader, hedge fund manager, financier and businessman. He was best known for founding the commodities company Glencore and for being indicted in the United States on federal charges of tax evasion and making controversial oil deals with Iran during the Iran hostage crisis. He was in Switzerland at the time of the indictment and never returned to the United States. He received a controversial presidential pardon from U.S. President Bill Clinton on January 20, 2001, Clinton's last day in office.

He worked with Philipp Brothers, a dealer in metals, learning about the international raw materials markets and commercial trading with poor, third-world nations. He helped run the company's operations in Cuba, Bolivia, and Spain. In 1974 he and co-worker Pincus Green set up their own company in Switzerland, Marc Rich & Co. AG, which would later become Glencore Xstrata Plc. Nicknamed "the King of Oil" by his business partners, Rich has been said to have expanded the spot market for crude oil in the early 1970s, drawing business away from the larger established oil companies that had relied on traditional long-term contracts for future purchases. As Andrew Hill of the Financial Times put it, "Rich's key insight was that oil - and other raw materials - could be traded with less capital, and fewer assets, than the big oil producers thought, if backed by bank finance. It was this highly leveraged business model that became the template for modern traders, including Trafigura, Vitol, and Glencore...." His tutelage under Philipp Brothers afforded Rich the opportunity to develop relationships with various dictatorial régimes and embargoed nations. Rich would later tell biographer Daniel Ammann that he had made his "most important and most profitable" business deals by violating international trade embargoes and doing business with the apartheid regime of South Africa. He also counted Fidel Castro's Cuba, Marxist Angola, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, Nicolae Ceau escu's Romania, and Augusto Pinochet's Chile among the clients he serviced. According to Ammann, 'He used to say 'I deliver a service. People want to sell oil to me and other people wanted to buy oil from me. I am a businessman, not a politician."

One of his biggest market coups came during the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo, when he used his Middle Eastern contacts to circumvent the embargo and buy crude oil from Iran and Iraq. After purchasing the crude for roughly US$12 per barrel, Rich doubled the price and sold it to supply-starved U.S. oil companies. Later, following the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Rich used his special relationship with Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, to buy oil from Iran despite the American embargo. Iran would become Rich's most important supplier of crude oil for more than 15 years. Due to his good relationship with Iran, Rich helped give Mossad's agents contacts in Iran.