by Alex Perry
With so few malariologists left in the world, these were golden years for malaria too. Though malaria deaths would never again return to their previous heights of an annual two million at the start of the twentieth century, the burden of the disease was rising steadily. Partly that was because inside malariology, eradication was now viewed as a foolish dream. “We were dominated by the failure of the old campaign,” says Marcel Tanner, director of the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel. “It became obscene to use such words. People said: ‘You’re stupid; it won’t work.’”28
Greenwood and his group could still try to alleviate suffering, however. They conducted trials of new artemisinin-based treatments. They also went back to basics, reviving a malaria prevention method that required little skill to distribute or administer: the bed net. “The thing about malaria,” says Bob Snow, “is that we know what to do about it, and it’s not that sophisticated. We know that you make your children sleep under a bed net. This is not anti-retrovirals for the rest of your life, like HIV. This is easy.”29
This was also, as the team discovered, surprisingly effective. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Gambian group conducted a series of tests on bed nets they treated with a new insecticide—not the by-now-notorious DDT but permethrin, which also killed mosquitoes on contact. In September 1991, they published their findings: insecticide-treated nets cut malaria deaths among children by 70 percent and overall child deaths by 63 percent.30 “It was a stunning result,” says Christian Lengeler, head of the Health Intervention Unit at the Swiss Tropical Institute. “But they knew that in order to convince people, they had to repeat the trials on a huge scale in other settings.”31
Over the next five years, Lengeler coordinated four mass trials of bed nets involving tens of thousands of people in Gambia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Kenya. The results were not as impressive as Greenwood’s initial data. But their meaning was clear, and profound. “They showed you could bring down child deaths by a fifth,” says Lengeler. “After the measles vaccine, there is nothing else in public health that’s ever had that kind of impact. And since those trials, we’ve seen that the true impact is actually much higher, maybe as much as 40 percent.”
What really fascinated the malariologists was how deaths kept on falling the more nets were used. The greater the number of nets, the greater the number of dead mosquitoes, the better the transmission of malaria was interrupted. “It’s like a downward spiral,” says Lengeler. So impressive were the results of blanket net coverage that they suggested a new possibility: covering every bed in one area might kill so many mosquitoes that malaria itself would be eliminated forever. It stood to reason. If all the mosquitoes were dead, and the area was so big that other mosquitoes could not penetrate it, then malaria was dead too. Though no one yet dared propose it, everyone understood the logical extension. Global net coverage. The end of malaria.
CHAPTER 3
The Selfish Philanthropist
It is three days before I visit Apac. We are high above the crater of Ngorongoro in the Serengeti en route from Tanzania to Uganda when Ray Chambers unclips his safety belt and beckons me to follow him to the back of the plane. The UN special envoy for malaria is graying, and his movements are a little stiff, but for sixty-six, he is still trim and square-jawed, his looks complemented by a low Clint Eastwood whisper. Chambers travels like a star too: the plane, the size of a small commercial jet, is his own. At the front, just behind the cockpit, are eight wide leather seats where we have been sitting for takeoff. At the rear are a double bedroom and walk-in closet with neatly pressed shirts, ties, and suits. Over the wings is a lounge—a TV, a drinks cabinet, and two sofas facing each other. Chambers sits on one and indicates I should take the other.
As an assistant serves Coke and pretzels, Chambers starts to talk. His conversation is peppered with casually startling statements like: “So in March of 1987, I decided to kind of adopt 1,000 of the children of Newark.” Or: “So after September 11, we kind of began looking at what we could do for world peace.”1 He mentions friends like P. Diddy, Ashton Kutcher, Bono, and Jeffrey Sachs, and meetings with the Dalai Lama and receptions at the White House. From anyone else this might be irritating. But Chambers, I realize, is not showing off. People with private planes just fly a little higher than the rest of us.
Chambers’s origins were humble. He was born and raised in the poor, depressed East Coast immigrant port city of Newark, New Jersey, the son of a warehouse manager. He put himself through an accounting degree at Rutgers University by singing and playing piano for a rock ’n’ roll cover band, the Raytones—a past that explains the enduring rockabilly hint to his hair. His first job was as a tax accountant at the Newark branch of Price Waterhouse.
By 1968, at just twenty-five, Chambers felt he was ready to branch out on his own. He bought into a nursing home company called Metrocare Enterprises and installed himself as chair and president. He made his first million dollars when he took Metrocare public in 1969 and stayed for another seven years, steadily expanding and acquiring other businesses. In 1975, he quit.
In later decades, those seven years in one job would seem uncharacteristic of a man who, perhaps more than anyone, came to personify the get-rich-quick spirit of the 1980s. But the 1970s were a time of recession and fear, when banking and accountancy were staid, clubby professions for men who liked golf and a long lunch. Chambers had some radical ideas about how to change banks and finance. But they were fraught with risk, experimentation was discouraged in a downturn, and he was young, with no track record in the industry. In later years, bankers would come to see that profile not as a disqualification but as an attribute. But with times as they were, Chambers had to be patient.
In 1975, his frustration boiled over. He left Metrocare and used his savings to buy a series of small, soundly managed companies with low debt. Chambers’s first insight was to understand that these firms, many of them undervalued by the stock downturn of the 1970s, could support far higher debt. His second was to realize that debt was the best way to get rich without already being so. If he borrowed against the value of the company he was about to buy—putting up the company as collateral, in the same way as a house is used to support a mortgage—he could buy into companies far beyond the reach of his own resources. If he borrowed heavily enough, he could buy a controlling position. When the company’s value rose, as it should with an undervalued company under Chambers’s aggressive management, he would sell off his shares, pay back the debt, and keep the difference. If prices rose high enough, he could make a killing. For a stake of a few thousand dollars and a few months’ interest payments, he’d be taking all the profit, potentially in the millions.
Though the term had yet to be coined, Chambers had imagined the leveraged buyout—a concept that, once his competitors figured out what he was doing, would dominate business and finance in the 1980s. Leverage would spark a wave of mergers and takeovers and, with the instant fortunes it created, define the mood and culture of the times. Investment changed its meaning, from something you put a little into to get a little out of to something you put very little into to get a whole lot out of. Investment banking became less about careful research than out-and-out gambling. Ivy League types in the venerable investment houses on Wall Street were replaced by young Turks from city colleges. Across the Atlantic, the City of London changed from a square mile of establishment banks staffed by men in bowler hats to a mecca for Porsche-driving chancers from the East End.
Chambers was among the first of this new breed. In 1981, already a leverage veteran at age thirty-nine, he formed an investment house with William Simon, fifteen years his senior, who had briefly served as Richard Nixon’s treasury secretary. With Chambers’s acumen and Simon’s contacts, the pair “kind of kicked off the whole leveraged buy-out movement,” says Chambers. Their first acquisition, in 1980, was an oyster farm. In September 1981, they formalized their partnership in an investment firm they christened Wesray after Simon’s initials and Chambers’s first name. In J
anuary 1982, in a deal still studied in business schools today, Wesray bought Gibson Greetings, the third-largest maker of greeting cards in the US. The deal was breathtaking in its audacity. Chambers, Simon, and a third partner put up $333,000 each. They paid the balance of $80.5 million by selling some of Gibson’s assets and mortgaging others. Gibson flourished, and its shares rose. Wesray began selling off its stock in mid-1983. Eventually, the three partners made a $70 million profit each—a return of more than two hundred times their original stakes. In 1985, Chambers topped even that. Using just $10 million of Wesray’s capital, by then $408 million, and borrowing the balance, Chambers bought the giant car rental company Avis for $1 billion—then sold it fourteen months later for $1.75 billion to an employee stock ownership plan, a profit of $740 million. In 1988, Forbes magazine estimated Chambers’s personal wealth at more than $200 million. It has multiplied many times since. “We had a great deal of luck,” says Chambers.2
Today Chambers is reluctant to talk about the old days. That may stem from a surprising realization that dawned on him even as the millions rolled in: money didn’t make him happy. “In 1985, Bill Simon came into my office and said: ‘Isn’t this great?’” says Chambers. “‘But you don’t look happy. What would it take to make you happy?’ And I said: ‘If we lost it all, we could do it all over again.’ But more and more, I began to realize that increasing your wealth was not going to make you feel more contented, and that that was not making great use of your life on earth.”
Chambers began hanging out in a destitute area of Newark at a project for poor inner-city teenagers, mostly blacks, mostly living with single mothers. He became, as he says, “engaged in the lives of these kids” in a way that he had rarely felt in his life. Which is how in March 1987, Chambers came to promise one thousand of them that he would pay their tuition through college “if they stayed the path.” Chambers’s involvement only deepened after that. “I found myself not wanting to go back to the office. Eventually I said: ‘Fellas, let’s take a year to figure out what to do with Wesray. And if we don’t come up with anything, let’s close it.’ And in June 1989, we closed Wesray, and I put all my assets in trust.”
Over the next four years, Chambers would give away around $50 million, according to an estimate at the time by the New York Times. The year he closed Wesray, he set up the Amelior Foundation to channel his money. At first, Chambers’s cash went only to Newark. He made grants to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Newark. He helped fund a new $190 million New Jersey Performing Arts Center. He also helped buy, for $150 million, a basketball team, the New Jersey Nets, and install it in a new arena in a deprived area of the city. He put money toward Newark’s first movie theater. “He was the first Newark boy who really put his money on the line and made it happen,” says Barton Myers, architect of the new art center. “No one would have thought you could raise $190 million in Newark and build an arts center.”3 Chambers’s prominence in the wider charity world also rose. In 1991, with the backing and funding of then president George Bush, he formed the Points of Light Foundation, a program for successful professionals to mentor underprivileged children that would eventually grow to include five million mentors.
For all his beneficence, the world didn’t hear much about Ray Chambers, and for one good reason: he wanted it that way. “Ray is the only example I know of someone keeping a PR firm on retainer to make sure he stayed out of the press,” says Suprotik Basu, later to become a key aide to Chambers in the UN special envoy’s office.4 In 1992 Chambers did agree to an interview with the Wall Street Journal but only if the reporter first performed five months of community service, and even then Chambers only communicated by fax.
Chambers had his reasons for staying in the shadows. He discovered that, personally, he didn’t need the approval of others to make him feel good. For him, giving was its own reward. Chambers had reached that conclusion after lengthy research. Curious about his own transformation from accumulator to philanthropist, he responded as he always had when confronted by a puzzle: he crunched data. Chambers began gathering material on giving and philanthropy wherever he could find it, moving from scientific journals and religious teachings to pieces of consumer research. “Saatchi & Saatchi did a psychological probe to understand why people gave,” he says. “And they discovered that right after we are born, when our mothers first leave us, we experience what’s known as a narcissistic injury. All our lives we try to cope with [this]. And nothing fills the hole better than engaging in the life of somebody less fortunate.”
Chambers also explored more ethereal arenas. He visited the Californian spiritualist Deepak Chopra, “who teaches from the Vedas ways to get to a new self, soul and God, and that one of the most efficient ways to do that is to help somebody less fortunate—and that whether the person thanks you or not, it doesn’t matter.” He took in some Tibetan Buddhism too. “Five years ago, I saw the Dalai Lama in New York. They were doing these CAT scans of Tibetan monks who had meditated on kindness and compassion. And they compared them, the colors on them, which parts were most active, to other brains. A Tibetan monk has a completely different brain from the brain of a CEO.” One monk, Matthieu Ricard, a Frenchman who gave up a career in science to study Buddhism in the Himalayas, made a particular impression. “He came over to my apartment, and as he walked in, the apartment just lit up,” says Chambers. “Within five minutes, you knew you were in the presence of the happiest man that ever lived.”
Ricard taught Chambers two things. First, “happiness comes from oneself only.” Second, “the shortest route toward happiness is in the service of others.” Taken together, that added up to a paradox. To be happy, Chambers didn’t need anyone’s help. But he did need others to help. Just as contradictory, while Chambers’s new path was to be in the service of others, it was underwritten by self-interest. Even if he was helping others, he was still pursuing his own happiness—only that no longer depended on “gathering acorns and treasures for oneself. It’s about putting others before you.” Chambers, leverage king, Wall Street wizard, had discovered enlightened self-interest. It was in his best interest, it turned out, to be good to others.
Why make money only to give it away? Philanthropy can be about selfless duty, and Chambers had a well-developed conscience. “I had never seen people as down-and-out as the people of [1980s] Newark,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 1992. “It had gotten so bad I didn’t think I had any alternative.”5 But philanthropy can also be about feeling good—something that not only sustained Chambers on the new path he had created for himself but helped him sell it to others. In meetings in the boardrooms and homes of America’s wealthy and famous, Chambers told his audiences this was still about getting ahead, still about being number one, still about serving yourself. Only now it was about accumulating staggering great sacks of spiritual satisfaction.
Chambers had solved the paradox of millionaire philanthropy. Making a pile and then giving it all away was not a contradiction. By Chambers’s reasoning, it was almost logical: you had to make money to give it all away, and doing that was actually the most selfishly fulfilling thing in the world. By this view, self-interest and altruism actually ran side by side. It was the element of altruism that made philanthropy admirable, but it was the element of self-interest that ensured it was enduring and efficient. Conscience was dropping a bill in the poor box once a year; self-interest was setting up your own foundation and monitoring how your money was spent.
And if Chambers was bringing the mind-set of an entrepreneur to philanthropy, he was also borrowing the techniques. He ran Amelior like a business. He established a nonprofit commoditiestrading fund to raise cash. He networked to find investors in his social projects just as he would for his commercial ones. He made himself a kind of charity-world CEO, accountable to his funders for a project’s success. He calculated his and others’ performance by business measurements such as return on capital and ability to meet deadlines. “Ray approaches social issues like a CEO approaches a company,” sa
ys Basu. “He breaks it down into supply chains, investment decisions, sales and marketing, accountancy.”
Crucially, Chambers also deployed his secret weapon for getting more from less—leverage. His approach had three pillars: political leadership, business leadership, and the media. Playing them off against each other to multiply their effect was Chambers’s peculiar skill. Steven Phillips of ExxonMobil, also an advisor in years to come, calls it “the Ray Chambers model for development and saving the world.” “Everything Ray went on to do in malaria was built on what he did in Newark,” says Phillips. “He was a skillful leader with an intense understanding of the levers of power. He knew how to change institutions for the benefit of mankind. He knew how to change the world.”6
The system worked, says Phillips, as “a triangle of leverage and accountability.” “Ray would go to business and say, ‘With my money, I will help elect an effective mayor, the kind of mayor that you deserve. But in return, you need to invest in X, Y, and Z—and I will coinvest with you.’ Then after fixing the politics and attracting local business interest, he would invite the media in to do these snapshot profiles about the new breed of Newark politician and business leader who were revitalizing the city. It appealed to their vanity. But it was also an accountability tool: now they’d committed to rebuilding Newark in public. It was brilliant, really brilliant. And it really worked.”