The Billionaire Who Wasn't

by Conor O'Clery

  To enable Atlantic Philanthropies to help projects in Cuba, an organization called Atlantic Charitable Trust was registered in London with the Charity Commission of England and Wales, to which funds were allocated from Bermuda for transfer on to Havana. No U.S. board member or American employee of Atlantic Philanthropies was associated with it. Irish national Colin McCrea, head of the international branch in Dublin and senior vice president of Atlantic Philanthropies, was made its executive director. “We were very careful that the laws of the U.S. be protected, in spirit as well as in practice,” said McCrea. Its other members included director Tom Mitchell, also based in Ireland, and two English appointees. Mitchell had no qualms about his role. “I think what the United States is doing in Cuba is unconscionable,” he said. He could see the reason for it before the end of the Cold War, but since then, Cuba represented no credible threat to the United States. “The main thing is that the foundation plays it straight. If Atlantic Philanthropies is going to give a significant gift to Cuba, it gets a license to do so. It is not trying to do anything through a back door.”

  Chris Oechsli made several initial trips to Cuba to identify projects that could legally be supported and to ensure that Havana knew enough to take the philanthropist seriously. Cuban officials often got inquiries from sympathetic Americans that never came to anything, mainly because of the American embargo. Oechsli detected an element of “not-unfounded paranoia” in the Cuban administration about the secretive Feeney operation. One of the directors of Atlantic Philanthropies was Fritz Schwarz, who had served as chief counsel on the Senate intelligence subcommittee investigating CIA excesses that former Senator Frank Church chaired in 1975: Half the publication was devoted to CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro.

  In November 2004, Feeney went to Cuba, flying directly from Paris to Havana, accompanied by a group that included board member Tom Mitchell, and Roger Downer, president of the University of Limerick. It actually wasn’t Feeney’s first time in the country. While still single and selling cars around the world, he had flown into Havana in January 1959, a week after the revolution. “Fidel and his camp followers had taken over the Hilton,” he recalled. Feeney was able to travel uninterrupted to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, where he sold two cars and appointed a salesman for Cars International.

  On the last evening of his weeklong trip in 2004, a Cuban official advised Feeney and his group to be at the Havana Conference Center in late afternoon. At 5:30 PM, two black Mercedes limousines approached along the driveway through the surrounding lawns. The first one slowed down and then zoomed off. The second one did the same. Having completed their security maneuver, the limos circled and came back.

  Fidel Castro strode through the door, bearded and gaunt, dressed in military green fatigues. He greeted Feeney and led the way into a conference room. He seemed as if he had recently been asleep. The Cuban president had with him his physician, Dr. Eugenio Selman-Housein—famous for his prediction that Castro would live to be 140 years old—and his first vice minister for foreign affairs, Fernando Remírez de Estenoz Barciela, who had been the head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., at the time of the repatriation from Florida of the Cuban schoolboy Elian Gonzales.

  Once he started to talk, however, Castro came to life and monopolized the conversation. His monologue went on almost unbroken for over six hours, ending just before midnight. He displayed a phenomenal memory and attention to detail. “He starts very inaudible and quiet and draws you in, and hours later you realize you are at another level of discourse and energy, and you have been engaged, you have been hooked,” said Oechsli. “For me there was not one minute of dullness. It was quite engaging.” At one point, Castro engaged Tom Mitchell on a discourse about Greek philosophy, and Feeney interjected to say, “If you guys go on like this, all we will be able to discuss is baseball.” Castro replied, “No, we have much more important things to discuss,” and launched into a debate on global warming and world health. During that time the guests were served fruit and fruit drinks. Feeney drank little, aware from the start that they were in for a long night. At last Castro said, “I really apologize, I can’t help myself, I go on, and I don’t stop, and I’ve been very rude.” Chuck was relieved in every sense—no one had dared interrupt the monologue to go to the bathroom. He agreed it was time to wrap up, saying it was so late “that my wife will think I am with another woman!” The Cuban leader made a show of being mortified. “Oh! I didn’t realize your wife is here with you. I will have to give her flowers.” “If you send her flowers she will know I am with another woman,” replied Feeney, at which Castro laughed uproariously.

  The next day, just before Chuck and Helga were to leave, Castro appeared again, this time accompanied only by his interpreter. He presented Helga with a bouquet of flowers and proffered a box of cigars to Feeney. “Do you smoke?” he asked. Feeney said, “No.” “Well, do your friends smoke?” “No.” “Better yet, give them to your enemies,” said Castro, who himself gave up smoking in 1985. This time the meeting went on for two hours in a smaller room. Castro was very solicitous of Helga. Oechsli, who was also present, found that in the more intimate setting, Castro had a real grace and was very personable. The Cuban leader also sought out Roger Downer separately for a discussion on education, saying, “Last night I lectured you, now you inform me.”

  Under U.S. rules, Atlantic Philanthropies was allowed to support an important health study, known as the Isle of Youth Study, identifying risk markers for chronic kidney disease, which affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. It was also permitted to provide medical backpacks for the Latin American School of Medicine, established by Castro in Havana in 1998 to train doctors from other countries without charge. Castro explained to Feeney that this was an opportunity to build human resources in health in the region.

  By 2007, Atlantic had contributed some $11 million to Cuba, mainly to medical education cooperation. However, the U.S. embargo frustrated Feeney from doing what he did best, identifying the capital needs of colleges and universities, and providing funds for new buildings and facilities to raise the national level of educational achievement.

  Feeney was enthusiastic, however, about helping the Cuban health program, which was based on prevention rather than cure and which succeeded in giving Cuba a greater average life expectancy than the United States. On one visit he asked Gail Reed, an American journalist based in Cuba, why so few people knew about the achievement of Cuban physicians. When she replied that a book was being written, he retorted, “Nobody reads anymore, make a movie.” Atlantic Charitable Trust subsequently provided $1 million for a ninety-minute documentary called Salud, produced by Gail Reed and Academy Award-nominee Connie Field in 2006, and pledged resources for worldwide distribution.

  Feeney remained determined to do all he could within U.S. law. On another visit to Cuba in January 2007, he told Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly, over dinner in the elegant Café del Oriente in Old Havana, “You haven’t seen the back of me.”

  In the meantime, Feeney had “discovered” the Republic of South Africa. He went there in the autumn of 2005. But it wasn’t a case of geographical creep. The Atlantic Foundation had been active in South Africa since 1994, largely on the initiative of Harvey Dale, who asked John Healy to find opportunities after the end of apartheid in 1991. In the following decade, it had committed some $100 million to education, reconciliation, human rights, and health, with significant funding for the fight against AIDS, and was ranked one of the country’s top five foreign donors. Healy had become, as he put it, “an absolutely unabashed enthusiast for South Africa,” but he could never get Chuck really interested. At a meeting of the Atlantic Philanthropies board in Brisbane in 2004 when Healy announced that the next board meeting would be held in South Africa, Feeney retorted, “Well, I won’t be there.”

  “Every time I spoke to Chuck about South Africa to try and interest him in it, he just closed his mind,” said Healy. “He did
n’t want to go there. He thought the problems were too great. And in recent years, perfectly understandably, his confidence waned even further because of the AIDS denialism of the president and because of the huge outflow of trained health professionals, and because of the less than smart way the South Africans are dealing with the Zimbabwe crisis. So all those things turned him off completely.”

  Feeney had a different explanation. “I am never daunted by the depth of a problem because if you are signing up to help you have to assume there are problems,” he said. “I didn’t go before because I only go to places on the track where I am going.” South Africa was a major physical as well as psychological diversion. His travels took him around the world, but it was a fixed elliptical route that he traversed over and over, from New York to San Francisco, Hawaii, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and back to New York, or else the other way around, the itinerary always recorded in ballpoint pen in a school exercise book that Feeney, who disdains computers, likes to call his “Jesuit’s lap-top” and takes with him everywhere.

  Feeney changed his mind, however, and went to South Africa some days in advance of the board meeting, giving Healy an opportunity to set up meetings with people who might influence his opinions. One of these was ex-African National Congress general secretary Cyril Ramaphosa, the powerful union leader who helped negotiate a peaceful end to apartheid. They met for lunch in Johannesburg’s Sandton district in the private room of a restaurant that was once a famous brothel. They found a common interest in the Northern Ireland peace process. Ramaphosa and former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari had been invited by the IRA to verify the decommissioning of its secret stores of weapons. He regaled Feeney with cloak-and-dagger stories of how the IRA made contact with him. “I was told to go to a pub in Paris and read the Financial Times and to be inconspicuous,” he said. “Me? A black man?” An IRA man in dark glasses sidled up, and he was spirited to Ireland, where he ended up standing in Irish bogs, still trying to look inconspicuous, as caches of weapons were opened up and counted. Feeney had his own stories of adventures on the back streets of Belfast when making contact with Gerry Adams.

  “The point of meeting Cyril Ramaphosa was to try and demonstrate to Chuck Feeney that this is not a ‘basket-case’ country, that there are terrific people here who are going to secure its future, and that it is a place where philanthropy can invest its money and be reasonably sure of getting a return,” said Healy. It succeeded. As they parted, Feeney grasped Ramaphosa by both hands and told him, “Our work in South Africa has only just begun.”

  Feeney also sat riveted while Alistair Sparks, South Africa’s best-known journalist, gave the Atlantic directors an overview of the country’s history in the eleven years since it moved from pariah status to a fast-growing stable democracy, and again when retired chief justice of South Africa, Arthur Chaskalson, one of the heroes of modern South Africa, spoke about the shift into constitutionalism in South Africa at a dinner for grantees held at the Howard Hotel. The evening ended with a group of students from the Music School of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, singing arias by Puccini and Verdi.

  Atlantic Philanthropies directed the bulk of its funding in South Africa toward higher education, donating substantial sums to major universities such as Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal in Natal province. Operating with a staff of five in Johannesburg under the direction of Gerald Kraak, a writer whose novel Ice in the Lungs won the European Union Literary Award in 2006, it has also given funding to organizations ranging from the Pietermaritzburg Gay and Lesbian Network to the museum at Robbens Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, and it has paid for activists in Northern Ireland to come to South Africa to discuss conflict resolution.

  Always on the lookout for university heads with vision and energy, Feeney told Brian O’Connell, the rector (president) of the University of the Western Cape, “We have come to the right place,” after O’Connell explained over lunch, with considerable passion, what the mission of the university was. At a dinner at the Vineyard Hotel in Cape Town the next night, Mamphela Ramphele, who along with the murdered student leader Steve Biko was one of the founders of South Africa’s Black Consciousness movement in 1969, spoke about why people should invest in South Africa. Urged on by John Healy’s wife, Yvonne, Feeney made a short speech, the bottom line of which was that there was more work for Atlantic Philanthropies to do in South Africa.

  “As the board visit proper progressed, you could see almost on a daily basis his mind changing because he kept encountering the most wonderful people, who are heroic in what they have done or are doing and have enormous obstacles to overcome, and he realized that this is a special country not just because of what it had shown to the world in the last few years in terms of moving from tyranny to democracy but because of the potential to lead Africa out of its present mess into a better future,” said Healy.

  Feeney duly recruited South African academics into his worldwide network of university leaders. At his suggestion, Brian O’Connell brought a delegation from the University of the Western Cape to Australia to start building links with universities there. John Hay, president of the University of Queensland, began a collaboration with O’Connell on public health, AIDS research, and language acquisition. Students from South Africa were given the means to study in Brisbane and upgrade their qualifications.

  In late 2006, asked if he would consider another geography, Feeney, then seventy-five, replied, “I wish I was younger.”

  CHAPTER 32

  The Old Turks

  The four founding shareholders of DFS, who started with nothing and became fabulously wealthy, were by the turn of the century leading very different lives. Today they have little or no contact with each other, though Bob Miller, Alan Parker, and Tony Pilaro own chalets on the same wooded hill-side at the tony ski resort of Gstaad in Switzerland. Feeney and Miller have not spoken since their last meeting before the sale. Nor have Miller and Pilaro. Feeney and Pilaro have met just once. Only Alan Parker continues to have cordial relations with the other three, though he himself did not see Miller or Pilaro for five years after the split.

  On one thing Feeney’s partners agree. They were extremely fortunate that the Irish American entrepreneur came into their lives, and they are happy to acknowledge his role in making them rich. Chuck Feeney “is a very special human being, there is no question about it,” said Bob Miller. “There is absolutely no doubt Chuck was the visionary and the driving force in DFS,” stated Alan Parker. “Feeney is a peripatetic, brilliant, goal-driven, visionary ... he had success written all over him,” reflected Tony Pilaro.

  Bob Miller treats his wealth in conventional ways. He and his wife, Chantal, have become members of global high society. The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s English-language daily, once described his and Feeney’s opposite lives as “the story of the billionaire prince and the billionaire pauper.” Miller resides most of the year in a magnificent house on the Peak in Hong Kong, where he is the richest Western resident. From early August to the end of January—the grouse-shooting season—he can be found in England at Gunnerside, a shooting lodge on his private estate in Upper Swaledale, Yorkshire, which includes the largest grouse moor in England.

  The elegant stone-walled lodge is set in an amphitheater of meadows, blanket bog, and heathlands. An adjacent enclosure contains free-range pheasants. Fit and tanned, and with a full head of silver hair, the seventy-two-year-old billionaire was wearing a zip-up jacket bearing the logo of his yacht, Mari-Cha IV when he reminisced one November evening in 2005 about his relationship with Feeney and his own attitude toward great wealth. Over dinner, in a room hung with large oil paintings of dogs and hunting scenes, Miller talked with some regret about the breakdown in his relationship with the partner who helped propel him to billionaire status. They were never really close, he said, but in the early days they were the “Young Turks,” and those were the best days.

  As his butler, Andrew, form
erly first footman to the Queen Mother and dressed in regulation black waistcoat and striped trousers, poured Chateau Gruaud Larose 1998, Miller reflected on how his attitudes to wealth were shaped by his childhood experiences, which were not dissimilar to those of Chuck Feeney but had very different effect. “I was born in 1933 and grew up in the Depression,” he said. “I can remember my father wouldn’t get paid until Saturday morning, and the Friday night dinner was always rather meager because my mother would have run out of her house money by then. It would be baked beans and brown bread. My father was very good at managing what little money he had, and I guess I learned all that from him. I could always make money. As a kid I was always delivering newspapers and usually had cash in my pocket. I worked as a short-order cook at nights while a student at Cornell. I waited on tables in the fraternity house and got my food free. I went right from high school into college and got a small scholarship that helped. My parents had to pay about half, and I could make the other half.”

  His Scots-Irish mother used to tell him, he said, “Money is like manure, spread it around and fertilize things and make things grow and happen—in other words you should enjoy it.” That was her philosophy, and “I think a very good one.” As DFS dividends grew, he noticed Feeney being more troubled about whether they really deserved that kind of success, but “making more money never did seem to bother me; you take where it comes and enjoy it, you know.”