Armand Hammer WINS once more lots of money

It is the most difficult negotiation of life! When his jet to Tripoli airport, in the month of August, 1970, Armand Hammer knows that it would broadly. A year earlier, the King Idriss of Libya indeed was overthrown by a coup organized by colonel Gaddafi. Once installed, the new regime takes to Western interests. Gaddafi requires the renegotiation of the treaties of oil concession by King Idriss. Decided to fold the companies, the new master of Tripoli has not hesitated to sabotage the pipeline built by the Aramco in Syria, to evacuate the Saudi oil to the Mediterranean. This "accident" has had to place the Libyan black gold in the heart of the oil game and resulted in a very timely outbreak courses... Armand Hammer, it was not long to take the measure of the threat. Dependent almost exclusively on Libyan oil, his company, Occidental Petroleum, is indeed directly exposed to the manoeuvres of Gaddafi. It has everything to lose in a confrontation with Tripoli. In summer 1970, the businessman is committed to do everything to preserve the jewel of his empire. Left to play, once more, his own game...

A pure opportunist

Impose its own rules: more than a simple strategy, a genuine second nature at Armand Hammer. Rarely character was as controversial as this capitalist atypical, also familiar with the Kremlin and the White House. Its real two engines were the power and respectability. His fascination for power led him to weave, including through trade, close ties with the leaders of the two superpowers, Lenin to Gorbachev and Roosevelt to Reagan. Paradox: that the FBI suspected long Fund espionage on behalf of the USSR was a US unwavering support of the Republican Party and financed the campaigns of several Presidents of the United States, including that of Nixon. In return, the White House he was appointed on several occasions missions informal with the Kremlin in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1961, Kennedy thought even for a mission of good offices to Khrushchev after the case of the U2 spy plane.

These missions, Armand Hammer was with delights. They enabled him to buy respectability, another great obsession of his life. Backed to achieve this, it does away to nothing. At the end of the 1980s as he desperately sought to award the Nobel Prize in peace, making huge donations to past winners and large princely sponsors of the prize and devoting a large part of his fortune to cancer research. In vain: the Board preferred him to the Dalai Lama. In its relations with the great of this world as in its affairs, Armand Hammer is in fact more often by pure opportunism.

An art in which it was, since long, master! Very precisely from this day of 1919 where he took in hand the Allied Drug, the small society of pharmaceutical products and hardware store founded by his father, Julius. Julius: a character itself surprising. A Russian Jewish family immigrant to the United States at the end of the 19th century, Socialist in the soul, pillar of the Congress of the Socialist International where he met with Lenin, this doctor of training has been one of the founders, in 1919, the Communist Party of the United States, which won him trouble with the FBI. That same year 1919, he also put on the back a bad deal which sent him to the penal colony for a few years: the brutal death of one of his patients, wife of a former officer of the tsar refugee in America. A good pretext to fall... and which had the effect of propel Armand, then twenty-one years old and just graduated from the Faculty of medicine, Columbia, at the head of the small family business. Affairs, Hammer will now live for them. Alcohol works of art from the wheat, oil, automotive and fertilizer, it will affect to almost any, winner in each lot of money.

Because the man has the humpbacks of the trade, and no qualms! It shows as early as 1919 by boosting the Allied Drug stagnating for years. The recipe is simple: a mundane dye ginger alcohol. Malignant, Hammer was immediately given the party that he could draw from this product: full prohibition, the Americans are indeed ready to drink anything as long as there is alcohol! Is therefore for the dyeing of ginger... Hammer sells astronomical amounts, lawfully, cashing in the passage of comfortable profits. When the authorities become aware of the deception and prohibit the product, it is too late. Hammer has pockets full and a new project in mind: the Soviet Union.

Armand Hammer is sometimes in 1921, mightily aided by name and his father and monitoring networks to the trace by the FBI. The exact reason for his coming is still a mystery. Officially, it is in the USSR to help the Government fight the typhus. But, according to some, he agreed, in the course of this trip, to work for the Chekist future KGB and to finance, via the company Allied Drug, espionage activities in the United States. Communist, the young man is yet not and never will be. But it is a pure opportunist. No doubt he understood that the Russia, deserted by Western companies, offered the most daring of huge opportunities for development.

Barter with Moscow

He took advantage of his stay to give the Soviets a vast system of barter: American grain for furs, wood, caviar and Russian precious stones. The proposal is passed by former intimate of Julius Hammer to Lenin in person. In memory of Julius and because he has large need to give a little air to the Russian economy, it is quick to accept.

Armand Hammer will devote to this particular trading until 1929, generating huge profits. Familiar with Lenin he meets regularly, at the heart of Moscow in a sumptuous villa, Armand Hammer gets Lenin the exclusivity of trade with the USSR. The instrument of his fortune is Allied American Corporation, founded in 1922. On each shipment of wheat, the company is a 10 commission plus the profits realized on the resale of Russian products. And this is not all

! Strong of its monopoly, the Allied American Corporation becomes the single representative in the USSR of 30 US companies, including Ford. On-site company enjoy exceptional privileges: colleagues, all Americans, can move freely, warehouses are allocated him without charge and armed men keep the asbestos mining the Urals which Armand Hammer was awarded the concession. Many benefits which reinforce suspicions of collusion between the businessman and the Chekist. The FBI are in any case convinced, but will not gather evidence...

In 1929, the arrival of Stalin to power put an end to these successful companies. Deprived of its concessions but largely compensated, Armand Hammer left the USSR in 1930 he did it return until 1961 and returned to the United States. In his luggage, a new "business": that of Russian art objects. Since 1921, the businessman indeed built a sumptuous collection, buying cheap furniture, curios, jewellery and paintings from the former Czarist Palace. It allows him to open his own gallery in New York and to engage in a fruitful trade. Armand Hammer WINS, once more, lots of money. In 1933, with the lifting of the prohibition, it invests it heavily in the sector of alcohol, taking several distilleries and merging them with the Group United Distillers, one of the giants of the sector in the United States. Less than forty years, Armand Hammer is now an industrialist prominent in the United States.

But the man has a terrible reputation. The sulphurous past of his father, his contacts with Lenin, the money earned in the USSR, not to mention his life private he is already divorced twice , make it an unsavoury man. Decided to smooth its profile and to create valuable networks Armand Hammer book, in the 1930s, to a charm from the Roosevelt administration offensive. Lige man of Armand Hammer is then Albert Gore the father of Al Gore, future Vice-President of Bill Clinton which he financed the election to the House of representatives and that serves as its tenure at the White House. Gore paid at Armand Hammer for years. Through it, the businessman was able to make valuable contacts in Washington leaders circles before as a generous donor to the Republican party.

It was in 1956 that Armand Hammer made his entrance in the oil sector. As always, the businessman is initially out of pure opportunism: for tax reasons, he is indeed seeking a financial investment. This will be the Occidental Petroleum. Created in 1920 to exploit oil in California, this oil company is then experiencing large financial difficulties. Hammer attached so little importance to investment that he is injected at the outset that 100,000 dollars, half of them made by his third wife. But when the Western updates a very large deposit in California a year later, he changed his plans. Feeling the good business, he bought the majority of the shares and takes the head of the company. It the lead in person until his death in 1990 at the age of 92...

The Libyan turn

Moribund company, Armand Hammer will do in a few years the seventh oil group in the United States. Not only in the diversified into petrochemicals, including to the manufacture of fertilizers and fertilizer, but also in internationalizing its activities. It is as well as the Western was granted in 1960, a very important Libya of the oil grant was discovered five years earlier. To bring the piece to the 30 competitors who face him, Armand Hammer was not homework on ways: he has distributed tens of thousands of dollars to the entourage of King Idriss and promised the construction, at the expense of the Western, of a fertilizer plant... A sacrifice million worth.

It is under these conditions the issue are negotiations that opened in August 1970 with the Gaddafi regime for Hammer. Very cleverly, it put pressure on the West, the only Western company to have put all his eggs in one basket. Discussions between Hammer and the Libyans last month in which the billionaire will try in vain to obtain the assistance of the American majors to compensate for the fall production, almost interrupted on the order of the Libyans. A month also in which, for security reasons, it will be two times per day, private jet, the journey between Paris where he housed at the Ritz and Tripoli, departing France every morning at 6 a.m. for return on the same night 1 hour! At the end of the marathon discussions, he concedes to the Libyans, ruthlessly and to save his company, an increase of 20 of the royalties paid on each barrel. A turning point in the history of the black gold: for the first time in effect, a producer of petroleum countries imposes on companies his own terms. An example which will school when the first oil shock of 1973.

It has bled the Occidental, Libyan episode is later however it have shot. Very prosperous through its petrochemicals activities, the Group finance all new projects of Armand Hammer. Western thus paying 95 million to lay the foundations in Los Angeles of the current Museum Armand Hammer whose collections are today estimated at more than 400 million before investing more than $ 1 billion in the acquisition of Iowa Beef Packers, the main picker and Packer in the United States meat... It is also the Western is responsible for carrying out the agreement in the amount of $ 20 billion signed in 1972 between Armand Hammer and the Soviet Union, agreement which provides for the delivery to the last twenty years of huge amounts of phosphates and fertilizers. The minority shareholders of the Group try to every time to oppose these investments. The billionaire has cure! If his first experiments, he seeks, in the 1980s and based on the different activities of his group, to promote trade between the USSR and the United States. Even the invasion of the Afghanistan by the Red Army, in 1979, will not interrupt sustainably. Until his death in 1990, "millionaire comrade", as it is called in Moscow, is in fact essential for any commercial transaction scope between the two countries.