The Mansions of Limbo (17 page)

The Swami introduced Pamella Bordes to Khashoggi after she failed to be entered as Miss India in the Miss Universe contest of 1982. Pamella, a young woman of immense ambition, was invited to Khashoggi’s Marbella estate, La Baraka, shortly after meeting him. In her
Daily Mail
account of her five-day stay, she said, “I had a room to myself. I used to get up very late. They have the most fabulous room service. You can order up the most sensational food and drink anytime you want.” She despised the other girls who were sent along on the junket with her, referring to them as “cheapo” girls who “ordered chips with everything. They smothered their food with tomato ketchup and slopped it all over the bed. It was disgusting.” The girls were taken shopping in the boutiques of Marbella and told to buy anything they wanted, all at Khashoggi’s expense. In the evening, they dressed for dinner. She described Khashoggi as always having a male secretary by his side with a cordless telephone. “Non-stop calls were coming in.… It was business, business non-stop.” She slept with him in what she described as the largest bed she had ever seen. “I was very happy to have sex with him, and he did not want me to do anything kinky or sleazy.”

After their liaison, she became part of the Khashoggi bank of women ready and willing to be used in his business deals. In the article, she described in detail a flight she was sent on from Geneva to Riyadh to service a Prince Mohammed, a senior member of the royal family, “who would be a
key man in buying arms and vital technology.” The prince came in, looked her over, and said something to his secretary in Arabic. The secretary then took Pamella into a bathroom, where she was told to bathe and to wash her hair and blow-dry it straight. The prince, it seemed, wanted her with straight hair. Then she went to the prince’s room and had sex with him. The next day she was shipped back to Geneva. “He was somebody very, very important to Khashoggi. Khashoggi was keeping him supplied with girls. Khashoggi has all these deals going, and he needs a lot of girls for sexual bribes. I was just part of an enormous group. I was used as sexual bait.”

In an astonishing book called
By Hook or by Crook
, written by the Washington lawyer Steven Martindale, who traveled for several years with Khashoggi and the Swami, the author catalogs Khashoggi’s use of women in business deals. The book, which was published in England, was then banned there by a court order sought not by Khashoggi but by Mohammed Al Fayed.

In Marbella, Adnan Khashoggi is a ranking social figure and a very popular man. He has a magnificent villa on a huge estate that he bought from the father of Thierry Roussel, the last husband of the tragic heiress Christina Onassis. After Khashoggi bought his house in Marbella in the late seventies, he said to Alain Cavro, an architect who for twenty years has worked exclusively for him and who refers to him as A. K., “I want to add ten bedrooms, salons, and a big kitchen, and I want it right away. I need to have it finished in time for my party.” Cavro told me that he had ninety-three days, after the plans were approved. Workers worked twenty-four hours a day, in shifts, and the house was completed in time for the party. “A. K. has a
way of convincing you of almost anything,” Cavro told me. “He can persuade you with his charm to change your mind after you have made it up. He builds people up. He introduces people in such a flattering way as to make them blush. He finds very quickly the point to touch them the most. Afterwards, people say, ‘You saw how nice he was to me?’ People feel flattered, almost in love with him.”

Khashoggi was responsible for bringing Prince Fahd, now King Fahd, of Saudi Arabia to Marbella for the first time. That visit, which resulted in Fahd’s building a mosque and a palace-type residence in Marbella, designed by Cavro, changed the economy of the fashionable resort.

In the summer of 1988, a Texas multimillionairess named Nancy Hamon chartered the ship
Sea Goddess
and invited eighty friends, mostly other Texas millionaires, on a four-day cruise, starting in Málaga, Spain. The high point of the trip was an elaborate and expensive lunch party at the Khashoggi villa in Marbella. Khashoggi, already in severe financial distress, put on the dog in the hope of lining up some of these rich Texas backers to shore up his failing empire.

“Oh, darling, it was an experience,” said one of the guests. “There were guardhouses with guards with machine guns, and closed-circuit television everywhere. The whole house is gaudy Saudi, if you know what I mean. They have Liberace’s piano, with rhinestones in it, and the chairs are all trimmed with gilt, and a disco, naturally, with a floor that lights up. Do you get the picture? You can see Africa and Gibraltar from the terrace—that was nice. They had flamenco music pounding away at lunch. Some of the guests got into the flamenco act after a few drinks. I’ll say this for Mr. Khashoggi, he was a tremendously gracious host. And so was the wife, Lamia. She had on a pink dress trimmed with gold—Saint Laurent, I think—and rubies,
lots of rubies, with a décolletage to set off the rubies, and ruby earrings, great big drop earrings. This is lunch, remember. He has built a gazebo that could hold hundreds of people, with silver and gold tinsel decorations, like on a Christmas tree. The food was wonderful. Tons of staff, as well as a lot of men in black suits—his assistants, I suppose. After lunch we were taken on a tour of the stables. The stables are in better taste than the house. Everything pristine. And Arabian horses. It was marvelous. It was amazing he could continue living on that scale, Everyone knew he was on his uppies.”

These days, Khashoggi is constantly discussed in the bar of the exclusive Marbella Club. Very few people who know him do not speak highly of his charm, his generosity, and the beauty of his parties. The cunning streak that flaws his character is less apparent to his society and party friends than it is to his business associates. “When Adnan comes back here, I told Nabila that I’ll give the first dinner for him,” said Roy Boston. “He has been a considerable friend to some people here in Marbella. He is always faithful to his friends. He remembers birthdays. He does very personal things. That’s why we like him. Now that he’s in trouble, no one here is saying ‘I don’t like him’ or ‘I saw it coming.’ ”

“He is a fantastic host,” said Prince Alfonso Hohenlohe. “He takes care of his guests the whole night—heads of state, noble princes, archdukes. He has a genius for seating people in the correct place. He always knows everyone’s name, and he can seat 150 people
exactly
right without using place cards. All these problems he is in are because of his great heart and his goodness. I was at a private dinner party in New York when Marcos asked him to help save them. For A. K., there were no laws, no skies, no limits. With all the money he had, he should have bought the
New
York Times
, or the
Los Angeles Times
, and NBC. He should have bought the media. The media can destroy a president, and it can destroy Khashoggi.”

One grand lady in Marbella reminisced, “Which party was it? I don’t remember. Khashoggi’s birthday, I think. There were balloons everywhere that said
I AM THE GREATEST
on them, and he crowned himself king that night and walked through the party wearing an ermine robe. It was so amusing. But odd now, under the circumstances.” Another said, “He’s the only host I’ve ever seen who walks each guest to the front door at the end of the party. Even when we left at 8:30 in the morning, he walked us out to our cars. He’s marvelous, really.” Another, an English peeress, said, “Alfonso Hohenlohe’s sister, Beatriz, the Duchess of Arion, invited us to dinner at Khashoggi’s. I said I wouldn’t
dream
of going to Mr. Khashoggi’s on a secondhand invitation, and the next thing I knew, the wife, what’s-her-name, Lamia, called and invited us, and then they sent around a car, and so, of course, we went. There were eighty, seated. It was for that Swami, what’s-his-name, with a vegetarian dinner, because of the Swami—delicious, as a matter of fact. I said to my husband, or he said to me, I don’t remember which, ‘That Swami’s a big phony.’ But Mr. Khashoggi was very nice, and he entertains beautifully. Most of the people down here just feel sorry for him. For God’s sake, don’t use my name in your article.”

An American writer who spends time in the resort said to me, “That gang you were with last night at the Marbella Club, they’re all going to like him, but I know a lot of people here in Marbella who don’t like him, the kind of people he owes money to. He gives big parties and owes money to the help. I’ll give you the number of the guy who
fixes his lawn mowers. He owes the lawn-mower fixer $2,000.”

Whether Khashoggi is really broke or not is anybody’s guess. Roy Boston said, “Is he broke? I can’t answer that. Four weeks before he was arrested, he gave a party here that must have cost a fortune. It was a big show, so he can’t be that broke, but he might be officially broke. If you were once worth $5 billion, you must have a little nest egg somewhere. He’s not stupid, you know.” A former American associate, wishing anonymity, said, “Adnan is not broke. I don’t care what anyone says. He’s still got $40 million coming in from Lockheed. That’s a commission alone.” Steven Martindale thinks he really is broke. “He owes every friend he ever borrowed money from.” When Khashoggi’s bail was set in New York at $10 million one week after his extradition, however, his brothers paid it immediately.

In his business dealings with the Sultan of Brunei, Khashoggi never rushed things. “Khashoggi had a personal approach: he was willing to show the Sultan a good time, willing and eager to take the Sultan around London or bring a party to the Sultan’s palace in Brunei. He gave every appearance of not needing the Sultan, but rather of being another rich man like the Sultan himself who just wanted to enjoy the Sultan’s company,” writes James Bartholomew in his biography of the Sultan of Brunei,
The Richest Man in the World
. Business, of course, followed.

Alain Cavro, who supervised all the building and reconstruction projects undertaken by any of the companies within the Khashoggi empire, was a close observer of the business life of Adnan Khashoggi. In 1975, Cavro became president of Triad Condas International, a contemporary
design firm that built both palaces and military bases, mostly in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia. When Khashoggi met with kings and heads of state, he would usually take Cavro with him. Khashoggi would say to his hosts, “Give me the honor to demonstrate what we can do, either something personal for you or for the country.” He meant a new wing for the palace, a pavilion for the swimming pool, a new country club, or, possibly, but not usually, even something for the public good. Whatever it was that was desired, Cavro would do the drawings overnight and then Khashoggi would present the architectural renderings and follow that up with the immediate building of whatever it was, as his personal gift to the king or head of state. In the inner circle this process was called Mission Impossible; it was designed to show what A. K. could do. “In Africa, heads of state are impressed with magic,” said Cavro. Business followed. Cavro, totally loyal to A. K., said, “But these gifts must not be construed as bribes, but rather as a demonstration of how he could do things fast and well. A. K. felt that the heads of state were doing him a favor to allow him to demonstrate how he did things.”

Cavro described to me Khashoggi’s total concentration when he was involved in a business deal. When the pilot of one of his three planes would announce that they were landing in twenty minutes and that the chief of state was waiting on the tarmac, Khashoggi would go right on with what he was doing until the last possible second. Then he would change into either Western or Eastern garb, depending on where he was landing. In each of his private jets were two wardrobes: one contained his beautifully tailored three-piece bespoke suits from London’s Savile Row, in all sizes to deal with his constantly fluctuating weight; in the other were white cotton
thobes
, headdresses, and black ribbed headbands, the traditional Saudi dress. As he deplaned,
ahe would go immediately into the next deal and give that affair his full attention. He was also able to conduct several meetings at the same time, going from room to room, always zeroing in on the exact point under discussion. He constantly emphasized how important it is to understand what the other party to a deal needs and wants.

But long before Adnan Khashoggi’s arrest in Bern and his extradition to the United States, his time had passed. His position as the star broker of the Arab world was no longer unique. He had set the example, but now the sons of other wealthy Saudi families were being educated in the United States and England, in far better colleges and universities than Chico State, and were being trained to perform the same role as Khashoggi, with less flash and flamboyance. Khashoggi had, in fact, become an embarrassment. A Jordanian princess described him in May of this year as a disgrace to the Arab world.

With sadness, Cavro told me, “Salt Lake City was the beginning of the end for him. And he lost so much money. A. K. began to change. The parties were too extravagant. And his personal life.” He shook his head. “Everything was too frantic. Even his brother wanted him to lower his lifestyle. That kind of publicity is a disease.”

September 1989