Marc Rich, who has died aged 79, was the godfather of global commodity trading — and for many years a fugitive from US justice, until he was granted a pardon in the controversial last act of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
The Telegraph [UK]
26 Jun 2013
…Marc was educated at Rhodes preparatory school in Manhattan and New York University, but dropped out to take a job with Philipp Bros, then the leading trader of industrial metal commodities. He first made his mark by buying up mercury to sell to vehicle battery makers supplying the US Army. By the late 1960s he was running the firm’s Madrid office.
In 1966 he had married Denise Eisenberg, the heiress to a shoe manufacturing fortune and later a successful writer of pop songs . After Marc’s hasty exit from the United States their Swiss mansion was adorned with works by Picasso, Renoir and Van Gogh, and the couple became prominent patrons of high culture in Zurich and Lucerne.
What Denise once called “a fairytale marriage” produced three daughters, and she spoke of her husband as a “loving, humane man” who was by no means the “capitalist monster” of his international media image.
That was before he took up, in 1989, with a German-born widow, Gisela Rossi . Denise’s response was ferocious: divorce proceedings culminated in 1996 in a rumoured settlement of $200 million. When asked why she was later prepared to intervene with Bill Clinton on her ex-husband’s behalf, Denise Rich replied: “All I thought at the time was, OK, he’s the father of my children… I’ll do it.”…
The complete obituary is at The Telegraph.
