His approach to Daniel O’Hare, head of the fledgling Dublin City University, was typically indirect. O’Hare was invited to the annual dinner in Dublin of the peace organization Cooperation North and found himself seated beside “this small American man.” Padraig Berry was there, shooing away a photographer. With glass of white wine in hand, Chuck asked O’Hare about university projects for which he needed funding. O’Hare mentioned that he needed IR£1 million for a research building. “If I had only known who I was talking to!” he recalled years later with a laugh. “Would you mind writing up a little piece, and giving it to Padraig Berry,” said Feeney, who explained that he might know some people who could help. Berry came to see the Dublin City University president at his office shortly afterward to get the proposal and emphasized the need for secrecy. O’Hare started to think, “Is this funny money? Is it honest money? Oh God, this might be money laundered.” He called a friend in an Irish bank with U.S. branches and asked him, “Who is this Chuck Feeney?” The friend called back: “Blue chip!”
Harvey Dale, described only as a friend of Chuck’s, then invited O’Hare to visit his New York home when on a trip to the United States. There Dale casually remarked, “We are pleased to help you with your project.” From this O’Hare surmised that Dale had a big role in Feeney’s operation. O’Hare found the lawyer to be “a frighteningly bright guy who seemed to know everything about everything, very aggressive, very tough-minded, very strong on anonymity.” Later, when he asked Harvey Dale whether he would lose $10 million pledged by Atlantic if he didn’t get government matching funds, “he looked me in the eye and said, ‘You will definitely lose the money,’ and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.”
Feeney was taken with O’Hare and became a regular visitor to Dublin City University. The money started to flow in, just as in Limerick, for new buildings and facilities. “Chuck had a particular affection for the underdog, and we were the new kids on the block,” said O’Hare, who was extremely conscientious about concealing the source of funding as demanded by the Atlantic Foundation. He once asked his architect, Barry Kehoe, to show a “visiting American” his plans for a sports complex that Atlantic was funding. Feeney examined the blueprint and said, “You could move that from here to here. . . .” Kehoe interrupted, “Oh no, you couldn’t.” O’Hare kicked him under the table, and the architect took the hint. Afterward, O’Hare told Kehoe in confidence who Chuck Feeney was. “Barry was a former priest, so he was used to the confessional and kept the secret,” he recalled gleefully.
Feeney was also impressed with Tom Mitchell, the provost (president) of Trinity College, the oldest university in Ireland, set in the heart of Dublin. John Healy brought Feeney to lunch with Mitchell in September 1991. “All I knew was that he was wealthy, but he was very, very different from any of the really rich American businesspeople I had met,” recalled Mitchell. “He was quite reserved and initially shy, and in appearance and the way he talked he bore little resemblance to the stereotype of an Irish American businessman.” Although Feeney had been funding Limerick University for four years at this time, the secret of his foundation hadn’t leaked out, and Mitchell had no idea how important Feeney could be.
“The thing that stands out from that lunch,” recalled Mitchell, “was that he kept saying, ‘You have to think big! Don’t be afraid to think big.’ That never left my mind because the task facing Trinity and Irish universities was very big and the resources to do it were small. You know how dark an era the 1980s was. There was no investment in anything that wasn’t desperately needed. Trinity was bursting at the seams. The labs were inadequate and overcrowded. The library was outdated. Classrooms were overcrowded. As an institution we could not aspire to international caliber.”
Feeney became personally involved in modernizing the university. “All the things I wanted to do got a major start from Atlantic funding,” said Mitchell, but not of course before Harvey Dale appeared on the scene with his dire warnings about confidentiality. Trinity College Dublin got scores of millions of dollars in funding for a student village, a revamped library, and other capital projects and research programs.
Eventually all seven universities in the Republic of Ireland and the two in Northern Ireland received substantial funding from Atlantic, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. Feeney did not get what he called “good vibes” from all Irish university leaders, but he reached a point where it would have been invidious to discriminate. Universities in Ireland were elevated, in extraordinary secrecy, without even the top education department officials knowing who was behind it, from Second World to First World level over a period of a few years, primarily through Chuck Feeney’s intervention. The Irish higher-education system was subsequently better placed to provide graduates and researchers for the emerging Celtic Tiger economy of the late 1990s.
As time passed, the individual university heads began to realize they were all benefiting from one big “anonymous donor” and that the man behind the philanthropy funding rival universities was most likely their own secret benefactor, Chuck Feeney. Danny O’Hare, however, never joined in chitchat in academic circles when talk turned to the “anonymous donor.” “I would look on, thinking—you are very naughty children, weren’t you all told to keep quiet about these things,” he recalled. But it irked him to stay quiet. He read in the Chronicle of Higher Education that it was important for the person who received money to be able to talk about it, otherwise it does the person psychological damage. He sent the article to John Healy and Harvey Dale and said, “Look, you are doing psychological damage to me!” “That’s OK,” they said, “we won’t give you any more money!”
Ed Walsh also found the restrictions frustrating and once had a bit of fun at the expense of Atlantic Foundation staff. Chuck and Helga invited Ed Walsh and his wife, Stephanie, to spend a holiday with them in Thailand. They were picked up by a courtesy Rolls Royce sent by InterPacific’s Laguna Beach Resort, and Walsh took a snapshot. On returning home he made a mock-up of the front page of the weekly Limerick Leader newspaper on his computer, inserting the photograph and a fictitious article by reporter “Margaret Ryan.” Headlined “Feeney’s Other Life,” it reported that Feeney was spotted in Thailand getting into a Rolls with two blondes and that in contrast to his frugal ways elsewhere, he led an extravagant lifestyle in Thailand in a 145-bedroom residence with 376 staff and a pet elephant. (The blondes were their wives and the “residence” was the hotel.) Walsh sent the mock-up page to the Atlantic Foundation office, where, he happily recalled, “They went totally bananas; they thought it was for real.”
Mark Patrick Hederman, a Benedictine monk at Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick, also had a bit of fun getting around the “no publicity” rules imposed by the Atlantic Foundation to acknowledge a $2-million donation for the monastery library. He prefaced his biography3 with a poem entitled, “To the Unknown Donor.”
Clematis grows through creepers round these walls
Hundreds of leaves hide endless blocks of grey
Autumn descends in rainbowlike decay
Rescuing evening from the dread footfalls
Littering planetaria with sound
Edited rows of books envelop us
Shelves full of memories tell us what we found
Fascinating on the transit bus.
Futures are formed by those who read such signs
Ears finely tuned to register beyond
Eyes of a hawk. Magnificence aligns:
Nothing on earth can fail to correspond.
Every minute vibration always links
Yours to the so-called riddle of the sphinx.
Only a very astute reader would notice that the first letter of each line spelled out the name Charles F. Feeney. “There was no way to thank Chuck for his donation to our library,” said Hederman, “so I put in a coded dedication to him. It was my secret Da Vinci Code!”
Feeney had already experienced the monk’s penchant for poetry. When inquiring about a delay in th
e funding, Hederman had sent him a long fax in doggerel verse that began:
Dear Chuck
we’re stuck
without a buck
and several bills to pay
unless you bless
our neediness
this merry month of May . . .
When he started directing funds to Limerick University in Ireland, Feeney was surprised to find that there was no place for visitors to stay in the locality, except in the city of Limerick some miles away. He had seen the importance of the Statler Hotel on the campus at Cornell. He spotted a chance to do something similar for Limerick University when he had lunch there one day with Ed Walsh and Brendan O’Regan. Over the meal, Walsh complained that a seven-acre field right at the university entrance had been put up for sale and would likely become the site for “a glorified pub and some grotty development.”
Feeney suggested they go and take a look. The three tramped through high grass and peered through blackberry brambles at the piece of land. Feeney later showed the site to Padraig Berry. “That’s an important field,” he said. “That was my cue to acquire the field, which I duly did,” recalled Berry. “That was how it worked. I would negotiate the price, ring Bermuda, say I needed a million or ten million, and in came the money, directly, in cash, no systems, no control, no nothing.” Once the sale was completed, Feeney donated the seven acres to the university.
About six weeks later, Feeney invited Walsh to breakfast at Ashford Castle. He moved aside the coffee cups and spread out an architectural drawing of a hotel and conference center for the field. It would be called Castletroy Park Hotel. He said his business would buy back two acres of the land on which to build the hotel.
“He gave us money to buy seven acres,” said the university’s finance officer, John O’Connor, “and then bought back two acres to build the hotel himself.” In other words, said O’Connor, he paid twice for the land to build the hotel. “And he would often accuse me, tongue-in-cheek, of profiteering!”
Feeney set up a management company under Padraig Berry to build the hotel and make it a showpiece for the hospitality industry in Ireland. The Sunday Business Post in Dublin tried to find out more about the hotel’s financial backer but admitted in print that after three weeks of an “international search,” it had failed to find a photograph of the mysterious Mr. Feeney.
For all its reputation as a country of “a hundred thousand welcomes,” Ireland had a weak hospitality structure. Its biggest hotel chain, the state-owned Great Southern, had nine grand hotels in the south and west of Ireland but they were badly run and inefficient. Feeney had toured the Great Southern Hotels on his earlier visits to Ireland with a view to buying them and concluded everyone had a “fat job” and the management was incompetent. He met the then-minister for labor, Bertie Ahern, in Dublin’s Mespil Hotel and told him he wanted to buy the chain and modernize the hotels. Ahern agreed with Feeney’s assessment. The company suffered from low morale, the board was in tatters, and staff were leaving, he told the American. But there would be no sale because of SIPTU, the Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union, the biggest and most powerful Irish trade union, to which all the hotel workers belonged. SIPTU would never agree to private ownership, said Ahern. (The Great Southern Hotels continued to languish and were eventually sold off in 2006.)
Castletroy Park Hotel, the first modern hotel of its size to be built in Ireland since World War II, was opened to widespread acclaim by Irish president Mary Robinson on May 5, 1991. It had 108 rooms and a combined health and fitness center with a twenty-five-meter pool, a first in Ireland. Soon afterward, it won the Egon Ronay award for the best business hotel in the country and was given four stars. It soon acquired a reputation for paying decent wages compared to other Irish hotels.
“Castletroy was his baby,” said Aine McCarthy, junior manager at the time. Feeney would sit in the lobby and watch how people were greeted and checked in, and how luggage was carried. He fussed over the display of cereals, the supply of fresh juice, the softness of the butter, and the type of rashers in the buffet breakfast. Once when he saw a patron carrying a pint of Guinness into the conservatory, he asked McCarthy to go and tell him it was not the place for drinking.
The first two months were plagued with teething problems. Early one morning, Padraig Berry came across Feeney running a vacuum cleaner over the lobby carpet where workmen had been doing repairs. Berry made the mistake of saying, “You can’t do this kind of stuff!” He still remembers the sharp rebuke in Feeney’s expression. “He would be very fussy, to see that everything was absolutely right,” said Berry. “He had incredible attention to detail. It was almost an obsession. The one time he and I had a row, over somebody who should be fired, he said, ‘If you are unwilling to do it, why do I need you?’ He looked me in the eye, with cold blue eyes like steel.”
When he stayed in the hotel Feeney always insisted on a different standard room and never took a suite. No one was allowed to say he was there. Roger Downer, who succeeded Ed Walsh as Limerick University president, remembered a clerk saying, “We have no record of a Mr. Feeney staying here,” while he knew Feeney was upstairs.
In Ireland, and especially in his hotel, Feeney was more tempted to let his hair down. After the grand opening of the $25-million foundation building and concert hall at Limerick University, officiated by U.S. ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith in September 1993, which he observed discreetly from a spot where he wouldn’t be noticed, Feeney joined a celebration dinner for local dignitaries at Castletroy Park Hotel. His philanthropy and his lifestyle were by then an open secret among the invited guests. Ed Walsh joked in an after-dinner speech that the donor was so secretive that he had been relegated to the laundry room. To turn the tables on Walsh, Feeney slipped out and arranged for the hotel’s closed circuit television to show him hanging his shirt on a clothesline. Everyone enjoyed the joke. Feeney did in fact often do his own laundry in hotel rooms. His frugality was a talking point on the campus. John O’Connor remembered a conversation at the Castletroy Park Hotel with Feeney and John Healy about multi-million-pound investments, during which Feeney made six calls to Bonnie Suchet, his secretary in London, to get a cheaper air ticket. The message O’Connor got was, “Don’t squander money.”
As time went by, Ed Walsh became more ambitious. He got Chuck Feeney and his foundation board chairman, Lew Glucksman, together and said: “Look, we need to raise £25 million for the library and I am going out of the room for fifteen minutes and when I come back, I want the two of you to tell me how we are going to build the library.” He left the two men in the room. When he came back, they said, “Well, OK, here’s how we are going to do it.” Both Feeney and Glucksman pledged significant funds, and Glucksman’s name went on the building.
The university then came up with a plan to construct a sports arena to house an Olympic-size swimming pool. John Healy was skeptical about the ability of finance officer John O’Connor to procure sufficient government funds, though he considered him “the smartest guy in the field.” In an unguarded moment, he promised O’Connor he would come and swim two laps, naked, if the fifty-meter facility was ever constructed. The magnificent pool was completed and was opened in 2002 by Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. Every time he went to the university afterward, Healy was cheerfully reminded of his promise to swim two laps naked. “I did it quietly one night when nobody was there,” he protested with a straight face, adding, “I didn’t say I would do it in front of an audience.”
CHAPTER 21
Four Guys in a Coffee Shop
In January 1993 Chuck Feeney got a call from a publisher friend, Niall O’Dowd, in New York asking him to meet for dinner. They went to P. J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. With its low ceiling and dimly lit rooms, it was a perfect place for a conspiratorial meeting, which was what O’Dowd had in mind. Part of his friendship with Feeney was that he never, ever, asked him for anything. This would be the first time. Leaning across the little wooden dining table,
the publisher came straight to the point. “OK, Chuck,” he said. “Here’s what I’m doing. I’m putting together a group of Americans to go to Ireland. I think the IRA [Irish Republican Army] will call a cease-fire. I think that they are ready to reach out to America. I think that this is something that is very important you get involved in.”
Feeney’s reply came without hesitation. “Yeah, definitely,” he said. “I feel very strongly about my roots, and I will be very much committed to whatever you want to do.”
The two had been friends for about six years. A former schoolteacher from County Tipperary in Ireland, O’Dowd had emigrated to the United States in 1979 and cofounded Irish America, a journal that focused on prominent Irish Americans and was unapologetically pro-business and pro-nationalist. After coming across the magazine in 1987, Feeney had called O’Dowd to tell him how much he liked it and invited him to breakfast at Kaplan’s on East Fifty-ninth Street, a run-down diner that has since closed. O’Dowd said, “I found this guy sitting there in the corner, very unobtrusive, wearing a Mac, with nobody else around. He told me absolutely nothing about himself. I just assumed he was a businessman. He said he was very happy that somebody was finally chronicling the Irish American community because he felt that Americans had moved on too far from their roots.” They talked for most of the morning. After that, Feeney regularly called O’Dowd when he was in town. They would have coffee at Kaplan’s or lunch at P. J. Clarke’s, and the Irishman would go for weekends to Feeney’s house in Connecticut.
“We hit it off because basically he looks at the world as a fairly absurd place and so do I, to a large extent,” said O’Dowd. “He has a kind of put-down humor, self-deprecating. He very consciously disdains everything that other people would make a fuss about. And he had this long-running dialogue with the waitress at Kaplan’s. They were always having a go at each other about his ‘meanness.’ She would say, ‘I suppose you only want boring tea?’ and he would say, ‘Just give me a glass of water.’ One time when someone at a nearby table started talking on a mobile phone, Chuck pulled out a large toy phone made of plastic and pretended to have a loud conversation.”
The Billionaire Who Wasn't Page 23