by Ben Mezrich
“So go over and talk to him,” Serena said.
David rolled his eyes at her, exasperated. Seeing the man in the flesh was one thing. You didn’t just go up and talk to Anthony Giovanni. The guy had more money than God. He was one of the richest Italian Americans in the country. He had made a fortune on Wall Street, then gone on to create a real estate empire. He owned restaurants, golf courses, movie theaters, whole fucking neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Staten Island. Currently, he was chairman of something called the New York Mercantile Exchange, some sort of stock market for energy futures that David had read about in business school. David wasn’t exactly sure what the Mercantile Exchange was all about, but if Anthony Giovanni was involved, it had to be something important.
“Yeah, right.” David glanced across the table at the other four couples relegated to the Siberia-like seating as far away from the stage as was geographically possible. Rented tuxes, a fair amount of hair spray, economical shoes and purses that reminded David of his aunts and cousins in Staten Island. It seemed like the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom had boroughs just like the city outside.
“Seriously, David. I’m sure he’d be happy to offer you some advice. Just start off by asking him what he thought of your speech.”
David shook his head grimly. He had given a short speech to a small crowd gathered in one of the tearooms of the hotel during the cocktail hour, well before the real dinner had begun, and he
certainly would have noticed if Anthony Giovanni had been in the audience. As far as he could tell, Giovanni had only just arrived, considering the swarm of well-wishers that had swamped him over the past few minutes. The truth was, David was actually kind of glad Giovanni hadn’t been there at the cocktail party to hear David’s take on what it was like being a kid from his background at Oxford and HBS. David had read Giovanni’s bio many times before; Giovanni had gone to the Citadel, spent time in the Navy, then returned to New York to build an empire with his bare hands. David had rowed crew, agonized through a couple of Boston winters, and in a few days was about to begin a crappy first-year analyst job at Merrill Lynch. David doubted the man would have seen much potential in him—at least not the sort of potential that turned on guys like Giovanni.
“Why don’t I just go up on stage, grab the mike, and do a little karaoke to get his attention? Maybe a little Sinatra to get this started right.”
Serena did what she usually did when he started acting like a jackass. She ignored him, instead turning toward one of the other women seated at the table to compliment her on her earrings.
The conversation was over it seemed, and David was happy, for the moment, to just watch his idol from afar while finishing his cannoli and, for that matter, going to work on his oversize goblet of red wine.
At least the food was nothing to complain about. A mishmash of Italian delicacies served in no particular order—salads were still on the table, and David was already threatening the buttons of his tux jacket. He’d gone through a selection of focaccias, bruschettas, and prosciutto-wrapped asparagus; two different types of lasagna served as an appetizer; a carbonara that his mother would have flipped for; even a risotto with a fancy name he couldn’t pronounce. And they hadn’t even gotten to the main course yet. There was something about Italian food that seemed to make you hungrier the more of it you ate; it was no wonder most of David’s uncles were clinically obese, and he was thankful that Serena’s family staple of beans and rice had kept him from ballooning up in the three months since they’d been back in New York.
Still, he was already searching for the cannoli guy when his attempt at continued gluttony was interrupted by a thick hand on his shoulder. David looked up from his chair, only to see the light from the chandelier nearly blocked out by a massive, thicknecked man in an ill-fitting gray suit. The guy had a crew cut and a nose like a pug, and when he leaned close to David’s ear, David had the sudden urge to hide under the table. Then to David’s utter shock, the thick-necked guy uttered eight incredible words:
“Mr. Giovanni would like to speak with you.”
David’s jaw went slack as he stared at the behemoth. He didn’t respond until Serena kicked him under the table. She’d obviously overheard.
“Are you sure?” David asked, feeling stupid the minute the question left his lips.
The man added a little pressure to the grip he had on David’s shoulder.
“Listen, kid, I don’t have all day. Are you coming or not?” It was like something right out of a Godfather movie, but David didn’t care, he was out of his chair so fast he nearly overturned the table in the process. Serena squeezed his hand as he left the safety of the Staten Island table, following the big man on a winding path through the center of the great hall. Well, the giant didn’t wind exactly, he waded right through the crowd,
people scrambling to get out of his way. But David had to do his best serpentine just to keep up; by the time they reached the special table by the stage, David was nearly out of breath. Christ, he thought to himself as the giant waved him through the group of mostly men who were still surrounding Giovanni’s perch, these are the most powerful gavones in the country. Before David could dwell on the thought, he found himself face to face with Giovanni himself. Or more accurately, chest to face, as Giovanni was peering up at him from the comfort of his chair, a half-grin on his lips. David glanced around at the bank presidents, politicos, and CEOs who were watching with a mixture of amusement and irritation in their eyes, and then shrugged. Fuck it, I’m here, I’m making the most of it.
David tried to calm his racing heart as he held out his hand.
Giovanni looked at the proffered appendage trembling in the air between them, then finally gave it a cursory shake, his grin deepening.
“I caught the tail end of your little speech earlier tonight from out in the hallway. You’ve got an interesting story, kid.” “Thank you, Mr. Giovanni,” David blurted, his face flushed.
He couldn’t believe he was standing there, talking to one of the most powerful men in the country. He didn’t want to fuck up the opportunity with too many words, but at the same time he could feel a million responses rising in his chest. He had never been that good at controlling what came out of his mouth in times of high pressure. But for the moment, he managed to keep it simple. “It’s
an honor to meet you.”
Giovanni cocked his head to the side.
“Oxford. Harvard. Couldn’t have gotten any farther away from Brooklyn if you’d hopped a boat to China.”
David wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to laugh, or whether Giovanni was being serious. David could see that most of the other guests at Giovanni’s table were now listening to their conversation. David swallowed back a sudden burst of fear, doing his best not to topple over.
“Boston’s not that far,” he blurted. “There’s a bus from the Port Authority every two hours.”
“Hah,” Giovanni grunted. The smile didn’t change, so David had no read on what Giovanni thought of his answer. “So what are you doing now?”
David was almost embarrassed to answer truthfully. “I start with Merrill Lynch on Monday.”
“Merrill Lynch? Why the fuck do you want to work there?” The truth was, Merrill hadn’t exactly been David’s first choice.
Unfortunately, he had graduated from business school in one of the worst years in MBA history. Where two years ago, kids were getting ten or eleven offers months before graduation, David’s classmates were lucky to find one or two by the end of the school year. Although 9/11 was already a year old, the tragedy had killed the financial job market; there were signs that things were on the mend, but in the meantime, David had been forced to take the best job he was offered. Now he was looking forward to pushing paper around, compiling statistics, and cold-calling clients for a year or two as he tried to get his foot in the door somewhere else. But at least Merrill paid well. It wasn’t the optimal situation, but it was a start.
“I like photocopy machines,” David responded.
“And making coffee. I’m really good at making coffee.”
David knew that he was taking a chance, letting the thoughts come out as words without much interference. But he wanted to make some sort of impression at least, and he seemed to be succeeding. Giovanni was really looking at him now, that smile still firmly fixed on his handsome face.
“What are you afraid of, kid? What really scares you?” It was an odd question, and David didn’t know how he was supposed to answer. He could feel the rest of the table’s attention on him, all those super-rich and super-powerful Italians watching him stew. Well, fuck it, he thought to himself. I’ve been honest so far. No reason to change tack midsail.
“Bears.”
David regretted the answer the minute it left his lips. Bears?
What the fuck did that mean? But it was too late to take it back.
Giovanni’s eyes widened a fraction of an inch. Then he crossed his arms against his chest.
“You’re a real smart-ass, aren’t you?”
David felt the heat rising in his cheeks. The conversation was not going well. Had he already screwed up his chance of getting in good with his idol, just minutes after meeting him? He wished
Serena had been nearby to deck him before he’d let it go in this direction. But he was on his own.
“I try to be more smart than ass,” he said, in the way of a quick apology, “but sometimes they seem to blend together.” Giovanni was smiling fully now, and David felt some of the
pressure release. Maybe honesty had been the right choice all along. Giovanni was a god, to be sure, but he was also an Italian from Brooklyn.
“You got a sharp mouth, kid. When was the last time you got into a real fight?”
It was another strange question, and it kind of reminded David of the more bizarre interviews he’d had after business school, the kind where the guys in suits would try to throw you off by asking about the number of piano tuners in New York or the type of tree you’d like to be. But Giovanni wasn’t interviewing him—was he? Maybe Giovanni was kidding—or maybe again he was seeking the truth.
The last real fight he had been in? David immediately flashed back to his first year at Oxford. Even though he had been through the preppy training camp that was Williams, he’d still had much of the street in him. He’d been tapped for the crew team based on his moderately athletic size and sports résumé—he’d lettered in both football and baseball in high school—but he hadn’t quite
gotten the knack of the Gentile endeavor. Then one sunny afternoon, during a multischool race on the Thames, the Cambridge crew “accidentally” bumped David’s Oxford boat. After the two boats reached the finish line, the other members of David’s crew had gotten out and were shaking the Cambridge team’s hands.
Without pause, David had walked right past them, picked out the biggest guy on the Cambridge crew, and decked the guy with a right hook to the jaw. Even though David had nearly gotten kicked out of Oxford for the incident, he had also gained the immediate respect of his crew team. They had felt he was just stupid and bullheaded enough to be their new captain—and nobody had ever “accidentally” bumped the Oxford boat again. A good story, but David wasn’t sure whether it was something you talked about in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom with guys like Giuliani and a police commissioner listening in. So instead, David once again went with the first thing that popped into his head. “About two hours ago,” he said. “My girlfriend didn’t like my tie. She feels that it’s enough to have graduated from Harvard; you don’t have to wear your résumé on your shirt.” Giovanni raised an eyebrow.
“And you wore it anyway?”
David shrugged. “I like my girlfriend. But I worked my ass off to get this tie. It’s not often I get invited to events where I get a chance to wear it.”
Giovanni looked at David for a second. Then he grinned and reached into his jacket pocket. He handed David an embossed, robin’s-egg-blue card: anthony giovanni, chairman, new york mercantile exchange.
“I like you, kid. I could use a smart-ass like you. See if you can get on my schedule.”
David stared at the card, sparks flying through his veins. Was Giovanni offering him a job? Well, not exactly—“see if you can get on my schedule” wasn’t quite the way Merrill Lynch had gone about it—but still, it was something, if not an open door maybe a window that wasn’t entirely locked. David jammed the card into his pocket, shook the man’s hand again, and started back toward his table. Before he’d gotten very far, Giovanni called out to him again.
“Hey, kid, next time listen to your girlfriend. If you showed up on the trading floor of the Merc wearing a tie like that, they’d be fishing you out of the Hudson the next morning.”
This time David was pretty sure Giovanni was kidding.
Chapter 3
September 4, 2002
There was something uniquely soothing about the whir of helicopter blades. The rhythmic, circular disruption of air, each and every turn applying calculable lift, allowing a thing that should not fly instead to float, like a magic carpet in a child’s coloring book—a carpet made of steel and Plexiglas and in this case solid gold. Even as the rhythm slowed and the floating, five-ton, bug-eyed carpet came to a gentle rest on the jutting ivory-white helipad, the whirring blades continued their soulful cadence, the long steel appendages cutting slower and slower arcs until all that was left was the beat of the thing itself, the soothing rhythm of a thing that should not be—but, indeed was.
Khaled Abdul-Aziz let the rhythm of the great mechanical carpet wash over him as he half-crouched, half-walked out from under the slowing rotors of Sheik Oman’s luxury C-14 helicopter and onto the marble deck of the magnificently opulent yacht. When he was clear of the blades, he rose to his full six-foot-two and quickly surveyed his beautiful surroundings.
The view from the heavily tinted helicopter windows had not done the sheik’s yacht justice. The ship was, in a word, fantastic. Over three hundred feet long from bow to stern, four stories high, with a deck of solid white marble. The helipad behind Khaled was actually only one of two matching pads; the other was barely visible now, a hundred yards away at the other end of the massive ship. In between, Khaled could make out all three topside swimming pools, each almost as pristine and azure as the Mediterranean that surrounded them. Though it was barely ten in the morning, both Jacuzzis were in full use, as was the regulation-size beachvolleyball court, complete with bone-white sand imported directly from a beach in Carmel, California. In fact, the yacht seemed fairly crowded, especially considering that this was not exactly a leisure cruise. But then, the sheik never traveled with less than a small army. The yacht alone kept a full-time staff of forty, and that did not include the sheik’s bodyguards, chefs, and attendants. Nor did the number include the beautiful women who always seemed to surround him—his wife, his seven daughters, and the miscellaneous hangers-on. Khaled doubted even the sheik could keep track of them all—or, for that matter, tell them all apart.
Khaled smiled as he saw Ali Agha, the sheik’s favorite bodyguard, approach down a red carpet that had been laid out across the middle of the marble deck. Khaled had always liked Agha, probably because he had known the man since his early childhood. Agha had worked for the sheik for more than twenty years now; when Khaled had first met the former Lebanese soldier turned body builder, he had thought he was some sort of giant, like something from a fairy tale. Of course, Khaled had been six at the time, visiting his uncle in his summer palace in the kingdom for the very first time. It was shortly after Khaled’s father’s death, and he had been in need of fairy tales.
But Agha was no mythical creature—he was flesh and blood. All three hundred pounds of him, at the moment jammed into a dark three-button suit that seemed about to burst at every seam. He was grinning like a madman by the time he reached Khaled at the edge of the helipad, and he held out both hands, pulling Khaled in for a monstrous bear hug.
“Salaam Alekhem,” Agha said, choosing the formal greeting, as the two
had not seen each other for more than a year now. “Geneva has been good to you, Khaled. You look more like your father every time we meet.”
Khaled smiled back. It was a wonderful compliment. His father had been one of the most popular actors in the Arab world, before the cancer had cut him short. His success in film was so great that Khaled had been forced to choose a career path as far from the arts as he could so as not to compete with an image he could only tarnish.
“Alekhem Salaam,” Khaled responded. “And you look more like a mountain every day. Is the sheik well?”
“As well as can be considering all of his daughters are on board. I told him to leave half of them behind when we left Monte Carlo, but he never listens.”
“To any of us,” Khaled agreed.
As they spoke, he let Agha lead him across the polished deck. The breeze was warm and peaceful, even though they were a good mile from shore. But the breeze was always peaceful here, Khaled reminded himself. He had spent so much time in the more landlocked parts of Europe, he had almost forgotten how beautiful the South of France was this time of year. Now that he was finished with his schooling, he was hoping to spend more time in warmer climes. However, he knew that would not be his decision to make. The business school in Geneva had been expensive, and now Khaled had debts to pay. Debts he would gladly pay, considering who his generous benefactor had been.
“He’s in the parlor,” Agha said, pointing past a pair of bikiniclad blond women sunning themselves on deck chairs. “In case you’ve forgotten, down the hatch, first door on your left.”
Khaled nodded, trying not to stare at the women as he followed Agha’s directions. They looked young, barely as old as Khaled himself, and at least twenty-five years younger than the sheik, but that was really par for the course. The sheik had built himself quite a reputation over the years, and it was not unwarranted. There were great benefits to being a secular innovator who also happened to be a high-ranking member of a royal bloodline. Especially a royal bloodline that happened to come from the most oil-rich region in the world.