Free Gold by Darrell Delamaide Page B

he wasn’t going to pay any taxes on the money, but he wasn’t sure Inland Revenue even had a claim on it. At any rate, the Swiss certainly did not seem fussy about attaché cases full of money being carried across their border, nor were the Brazilians, he presumed.
    The whole thing had been astonishingly easy. These capitalists weren’t really as smart as they thought they were if a nobody like him could plunder them so easily.
    He was so wrapped up in his feeling of satisfaction that he only noticed the car stopping at the curb in front of him when the back door opened.
    ~
    The Gulf Stream office building looked just like the parking garage it was. Like most other office buildings in this part of Kuwait, it was built with tiers of parking space around a core of offices and shops. The building had been done in the transition phase after the first oil shock, when new wealth started pouring into the country but before they really knew what to do with it. Newer office buildings looked more like their counterparts in Europe and North America, glistening towers testifying to the primacy of mind over matter. But Dhow Investment Company liked its offices in the older building near the souk, which it kept in spite of its majority ownership in the new office-hotel complex on Airport Road. The hawkers and bazaar booths on the ground level of the Gulf Stream building—just one hundred yards from the covered bazaar in the old core of Kuwait city—were somehow comforting to Yosuf al-Masari, the patriarch of the family that controlled Dhow.
    Tamal al-Masari adjusted his headdress as he walked into the reception hall from the parking lot. The evening weather was mild, but he suspected the air-conditioning was still running in the building. No matter, he thought; after their latest killing they had less need than ever to think about making economies. Tamal took the elevator to the eighth floor, the privileged space at the top of the building. His two cousins and his uncle were waiting for him.
    Yosuf sat cross-legged on the leather chair at the head of a small conference table. His feet were bare and he fingered his worry beads as the younger men sat down around the table. Tamal was glad he had stopped on the way from the airport to change from his Western clothes. It made everyone more comfortable to be dressed alike.
    “We are very rich,” Tamal announced to the group. An ironic smile flitted across his cousin Abdul’s face. After all, the $70 million they had had before their coup, while small compared to the fortunes of some other families in town, could hardly qualify them as poor. Tamal grinned back at his cousin.
    The al-Masaris had accumulated a respectable fortune in the flush years following the oil shock of 1973-74. They had parlayed their Toyota franchise into sizable real estate holdings, including a hotel in Kuwait and luxury apartment buildings in London and Paris. They had lost money in the collapse of the souk al-manakh, the parallel stock market in Kuwait, but not as much as some others.
    They could not hope to equal the wealth of the emir’s family and their cronies, but they made a respectable showing. When Tamal took charge of the family business, after returning from the States with his Cornell MBA, the al-Masaris started showing a new aggressiveness in their business dealings. Tamal bought his way onto the board of a commercial bank and began playing the markets, demonstrating a creditable skill in moving quickly in and out of world markets with a net gain that was often quite large.
    Tamal wanted to overtake the al-Sayeds, their rivals not only in the auto business—al-Sayed had the Ford franchise—but bitter enemies from an obscure feud that went back ten generations. The competition extended well beyond Kuwait into the major financial centers of the world. The al-Sayeds relied largely on their man in London, David Sangrat, whereas Tamal, comfortable in the West, managed al-Masari activities abroad