Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [58]
Kroll turned his team loose on the project, and he agreed not to charge Congress for his services. The case was significant: owing to Kroll’s reputation and personal friendship with the congressman, his firm was now getting a call that otherwise could have gone to any number of federal investigative agencies. Kroll was sticking his nose into the government’s tent.
Kroll focused on four buildings in New York City owned secretly by Marcos through American cutouts: 200 Madison Avenue, the Herald Center at Herald Square, the Crown Building at 730 Fifth Avenue, and 40 Wall Street. All told, the properties were worth as much as $300 million. At first, the American property managers would not acknowledge having anything to do with the Marcos family. But Solarz was armed with Kroll’s evidence, and he hauled them before his congressional subcommittee in May 1986. They confessed to the connection in a dramatic hearing, detailing meetings with Marcos at resorts to discuss business deals, and even to a dinner in 1981 at Sign of the Dove restaurant in New York—a dinner during which Imelda Marcos, who would become infamous for the astounding number of shoes she collected, showed them her Swiss bank account statement to verify her personal fortune of $120 million.
“Solarz was the hero of the day,” Kroll says. But Kroll benefited from the spectacle, too. Kroll was now a global force, perceived as able to stand up to dictators and win. Soon Kroll would be drawn into other high-profile global asset searches. The firm worked for the Russian Republic, trying to track assets that were pilfered and taken out of the country after the breakup of the Soviet Union; made efforts to find the fortune of the brutal Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier; and, most famously, undertook a globe-spanning search for Saddam Hussein’s billions after the first Gulf War.
Just two months after the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the Kuwaiti government decided it needed help as it mounted an intelligence effort against him. How much money did Hussein have? Where was it hidden? To find out, the Kuwaitis hired Kroll.
The investigators unraveled much of a convoluted international shell game used by Hussein and his family to hide assets: some stolen from the Iraqi people and others filched through an elaborate system of kickbacks for government contracts. Kroll told 60 Minutes that Saddam and his family had pocketed 5 percent of Iraq’s $200 billion in oil sales over the previous ten years. The investigation, reporters noted, relied on interviews with Iraqi expatriates and searches of global media accounts. It turned up embarrassing Iraqi connections with several western companies. One of the most revealing money trails Kroll followed was that of Barzan al-Takriti, who was a half brother of Hussein and at one point had headed Iraq’s feared security police force. In 1979, Barzan set up a company, Montana Management, Inc., which he registered in Panama. Two years later, the company began buying stock in Hachette, a French publishing company that owned several American magazines, including Car and Driver. By the eve of the first Gulf War, the Iraqi ownership stake had grown to include nearly 9 percent of the company. Whenever they were asked, lawyers for Montana declined to reveal the owners of the company, arguing that such details weren’t required public information under French law. But once the true ownership was revealed, Newsweek magazine