Word: khashoggi
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...next day Khashoggi called his wife Lamia into his all-white bedroom to give her a $1.9 million diamond, emerald-and-ruby necklace. "Oh, Baba!" (Arabic for "father") she exclaimed when she saw it. His ex-wife Soraya, who presented her husband with a $2.5 billion divorce suit seven years ago that was resolved amicably, was also at the house: she got a less expensive ruby necklace. Christmas was relatively quiet this year, said Khashoggi, because the family is still grieving the death of his sister in March...
Fantastic parties are a Khashoggi signature. Christmas was a simple tea compared with his 50th-birthday fete in 1985, at which he entertained more than 400 guests at a three-day extravaganza. His birthday cake, a model of Louis XIV's coronation crown, was created by a chef who was flown to the Louvre to study the original. Khashoggi's parties also take place in his 30,000-sq.-ft. quarters incorporating the 46th and 47th floors of the Olympic Towers in Manhattan. Created out of 16 separate apartments, the abode has a pool that overlooks the spires...
...Khashoggi's flamboyant life-style, besides gratifying his own inclinations, is a calculated element in his way of doing business. "Flowers and light attract nightingales and butterflies," he says, a metaphor he prefers to the more homespun "catching flies with honey." As a schoolboy in Egypt, he would earn $100, save half and use the rest to throw a party. He would be broke the next week, but, he says, "I would make a good impression, and all week everyone would invite me over." Some 15 years ago, he chartered a yacht and sailed to Sardinia, docking it between Aristotle...
These days Khashoggi seems to have trouble affording his own fantasy life. Despite the Iranian deals, his days as a big-time arms broker are past. He has invested in ambitious development projects around the world, several of which have come undone. In Salt Lake City where Khashoggi launched a $1 billion real estate venture, his Triad America company is being sued by dozens of contractors and investors for $140 million. In the Sudan, his multibillion- dollar plan to turn the desert nation into a breadbasket failed when his friend President Jaafar Numeiry was deposed. Khashoggi is also suffering smaller...
...Khashoggi's problems are in keeping with the way he operates. In an age of ubiquitous M.B.A.s and computer transactions, Adnan Khashoggi is a wily and gracious trader, an exemplar of the Arab-Islamic values of daring, cunning, loyalty and generosity. For him the deal is the thing, the only thing. Business, love, politics, diplomacy -- they are all forms of dealmaking. He proudly admits that he dissembles, uses women, flaunts his wealth to get an agreement. "When I am trying to broker a deal," he says animatedly, "in diplomacy or business, I don't tell the truth to both sides...