Pincus green biography channel

Hi all,

This is the second part of my piece on Marc Rich. You can find the first part here.

Fun fact, a few years ago there was a rumor Matt Damon and John Krasinski would make a movie about Marc Rich. Keeping my fingers crossed this project will make it to the finish line one day.

And another note on star traders. Philipp Brothers first became part of another trading house, Engelhard, before it was spun off and renamed Phibro. Phibro was acquired by Salomon Brothers. And Salomon ended up as part of Citigroup in 1998.

Fast forward to the post-bailout world 2009 when Citi was subject to government supervision on compensation. The Phibro unit had “brought in about $371 million in earnings for Citigroup in each of the last five years, profits that came even as huge losses elsewhere at Citigroup hobbled the banking giant.” And Citi paid star energy trader Andy hall a $98 million bonus for 2008. That didn’t go over well in Washington DC. Phibro was sold to Occidental Petroleum and Hall launche…

Before Gabrielle left New York for Seattle, she had asked Boles to buy a safe she could keep in her room. After her death, Philip Aouad opened the safe to reveal a wedding ring and a note from her in a manila envelope informing her family that the two of them had secretly married in 1993.

The next time Denise Rich saw Bill and Hillary Clinton, in a receiving line at a 1996 White House Christmas party, they both hugged her and told her that they too believed that nothing compared to having a child die. That meant a great deal to her, she tells me.

When Marc Rich’s head hit the pillow every night, the last thing he saw was Ken Hill’s face. —James Comey, assistant U.S. attorney.

For 14 years, until he retired in 1997 at age 50, Ken Hill was the U.S. marshal in charge of tracking down Marc Rich and bringing him to justice. He has never before spoken on the record to a reporter. Hill probably knows far more about Rich than Rich’s own family does. “The philosophy was simple: I could make a thousand mistakes—he couldn’t make one,” Hill tells me. “The only place I could slow him down was in his mind. I contacted anybody and everybody I could to let him know we were on his trail.” Hill now teaches diving in Florida and observes that spending a lot of time underwater is similar to his old occupation: “cold, dark, and lonely.”

In the first seven years alone, Hill pursued more than 1,400 “investigative actions” and followed the activities of 37 of Rich’s close associates and important business contacts in 33 countries. Competitors who were “appalled by Rich’s business practices” were more than happy to give Hill inside information. “I was shocked by the numbers of people who came forward,” he says. “He screwed a lot of people to get where he was.” Some had code names—Concorde, Empire, Merlin, Trader. “I was the Riddler,” Hill tells me, “because it was always a riddle or a puzzle trying to figure out what would or could happen next.”

Some sources assisted because they

German-born metal trader

Ludwig Jesselson (August 29, 1910 – April 3, 1993) was a German-born metal trader who served as president and CEO of Philipp Brothers.

Biography

Ludwig Jesselson was born on August 29, 1910, to an OrthodoxJewish family in Neckarbischofsheim, Baden-Württemberg, the son of Amalie (née Zucker) and Samuel Max Jesselson. His father headed the local Jewish congregation and owned a small store. He had two older brothers Sigmund and Albert. In May 1927, he secured an apprenticeship with the metal trading company Aron Hirsch & Sohn in Halberstadt and became a full-time employee in November 1928. The company did not survive the economic collapse of 1929 although Jesselson secured employment with Erze und Metalle Hirsch Aktiengesellschaft, a company established to continue the trading activities of the Hirsch family where he worked his way up to be in charge of the scrap department. In 1933, with the rise of Adolf Hitler, he left Germany to work for another Hirsch family-owned firm in the Netherlands, Groma N.V., where he met Julius Philipp, another German-Jewish emigree metal trader. In 1934, Phillip introduced him to Siegfried Ullmann who was in charge of Philipp Brothers in New York. In 1937, as the situation in Europe became more difficult, Jesselson inquired of Ullmann for a position in New York City and was hired due to his extensive knowledge of the scrap business. Up to then, Philipp Brothers had focused on smaller transactions dealing directly with dealers and distributors rather than end-users; Jesselson pushed for larger transactions and longer-term contracts dealing directly with the end-users. In 1939, he was given responsibility for a new venture, Filbro Overseas Corporation, tasked with developing Philipp Brothers sale and export of metals and ores from South America and the Far Eas