How the Smartest Fugitive Beat the FBI for 17 Years transcript

Zug, Switzerland. Two US Marshals sit in a parked sedan, slowly going numb in the cold. 40 ft away, behind a single pane of office glass, sits the most wanted white-collar fugitive in America, Marc Rich. 65 federal counts, a theoretical 300 years behind bars, a bounty of 3/4 of a million dollars riding on his head. He is right there, close enough to read the time off his watch, and the Marshals cannot move. Because the moment one of them reaches for the door handle, Swiss police step to the car and deliver a warning that rewrites the entire chase.

"Touch that man, and we arrest you." The most powerful law enforcement machine on Earth, the FBI, the US Marshals, and the entire Justice Department, has chased this one target across four continents and missed him every single time, by hours, by a day, by a foreign door slammed in its face. Now they have him cornered on his own doorstep, and somehow they are the ones being warned they'll leave in handcuffs. A handful of Swiss officers just checkmated [music] the United States of America.

Here's the part that should stop you. Marc Rich never fired a gun in his life. [music] He's a businessman, a man in a tailored suit who sits in a glass office and buys and sells oil. And he will do it in plain sight for 17 years, in cities where his hunters can walk right up and breathe on the window, and stay completely untouchable. The largest tax fraud case in American history, [music] not a single day in a cell. So, how does one oil trader stare down the most powerful country on the planet and win?

What does a man have to possess to make the United States unable to lay a single finger on him? 1941. The boy at the rail is not yet 7 years old. His name is Marcel Reich. He was born in Antwerp, Belgium, [music] on the 18th of December, 1934. A Jewish child in a Europe that has just decided his family should not exist. The Nazis have rolled through the low countries. So the Reich's run. From Belgium into France, from France toward the coast, and finally up the gangway of a crowded ship bound across the Atlantic.

Packed shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other families carrying entire lives in a single suitcase. Salt wind, engine smoke, a gray ocean swallowing everything the boy has ever known. Picture what that does to a child. A government, a thing made of flags and stamps and soldiers, has looked at your family and decided you have no right to exist on the ground under your feet. You learn, before you've even lost your baby teeth, that a border is just a line other people draw to decide whether you get to live.

Marc Rich never forgets that lesson. He just spends the rest of his life flipping it on its head. The family lands in America. Marc Rich becomes Mark. He grows up an outsider with an accent, a refugee kid in a country still deciding what to make of him. And he watches very closely how money moves through a world that had recently tried to erase him. And he notices something. Money doesn't check your passport. Money doesn't care which flag you fled or which one wouldn't have you.

In 1954, he takes a job in the mail room of a commodities house called Philipp Brothers. The mail room. Sorting other men's letters. From there, he claws his way up onto the trading floor. And there he meets a quiet, brilliant man named Pinkus Green. Pinky, who will be his partner for the next 40 years. Together they master the oldest [music] game on Earth. Buy a thing where it's cheap, sell it where it's dear. Pocket the difference.

But where the old traders are cautious, Rich is relentless. He'll fly anywhere, call anyone, sit across a table from regimes other men wouldn't be seen near. He has no homeland to embarrass, no flag to salute, and that, it turns out, is a kind of superpower. This is the trick that made him untouchable long before any indictment landed. Imagine a supertanker, a quarter of a million tons of crude oil somewhere out on the open ocean steaming toward a buyer.

Rich doesn't own that ship. He doesn't own the oil. He never lays eyes on it, never touches it, never smells a single drop. What he owns is knowledge. He knows a refinery in one country gasping for that exact crude and a seller in another who needs cash today. So, while the oil is still at sea in international water flying no nation's flag, he buys it and sells it in [music] the same breath. The tanker never changes course.

By the time it docks, the cargo has already changed hands, his hands, and he was never within a thousand miles of it. That's the whole game. Oil that exists everywhere and nowhere at once. A fortune made in the gap between borders, in the one place on the map where no single country's rules quite reach. And Rich understands something the rest of the world hasn't caught up to. If your entire business lives in that gap, out on the open sea, inside the wire transfer, in the empty space [music] between flags, then an embargo is barely a speed bump.

Government can ban a country's oil. It can't ban the ocean. He proves it early, and he proves it in the most dangerous way imaginable. Through the 1970s, Marc Rich becomes the discreet middleman moving Iranian crude, the oil of a Muslim power, quietly into Israel. Two sworn enemies linked by a single [music] steel pipeline and one trader who answered to neither of them. Remember that pipe. It is going to matter far more than anyone watching could possibly guess.

By 1974, Rich is done working for other people. He plants his own flag, or rather, he plants no flag at all in the small, discreet Swiss town of Zug, a place practically engineered for money that prefers not to [music] be asked questions. Marc Rich & Company AG, and within its first year, the firm is already moving more [music] than a billion dollars in commodities. A man with no country of his own now sits at [music] the dead center of the world's raw materials, and he has built his empire in the exact spot where no government can squeeze him.

He believes he has made himself untouchable. He is almost right. Then, on a November morning in 1979, a mob pours over the wall of the American embassy in Tehran. 52 Americans are dragged out, blindfolded, paraded in front of the cameras of the entire world. The United States goes rigid with rage, and Marc Rich, the man who taught himself that no embargo is ever real, is about to make the one deal that brands him in the eyes of a furious nation a traitor.

For 444 days, America watches its own helplessness on live television. Every nightly newscast counts the days out loud. Day 100, [music] day 300, day 400, a running tally of national impotence. Yellow ribbons go up on trees from Maine to California. President Carter slaps an embargo on Iran. No American may touch a single barrel of Iranian oil. It's more than policy. It's a line drawn straight through the country's humiliation.

And while the nation boils, Marc Rich sees something nobody else in all that fury is looking at. He sees a seller sitting on an ocean of oil with nowhere to sell it. He sees in other words, the gap. According to the case later built against him, Rich buys Iranian crude directly from the National Iranian Oil Company in the middle of the crisis. Roughly 6.2 million barrels. A deal worth around $200 million bought straight from the regime holding American citizens hostage at that very moment.

Did it trouble him? Not the way it would trouble you. To Marc Rich, the hostage crisis was weather. A market condition. Nothing more. The oil didn't know whose embassy had been stormed. The oil needed a buyer, and Marc Rich was always always a buyer. The frightened refugee boy, the child a government once marked for death, had grown into a man who would sell to anyone alive, precisely because he learned at the rail of that ship that governments were the enemy and never the rule.

Same wound from 1941. It had just gone cold. The boy you watched lose everything to a state is now cashing a check from the regime holding your countrymen blindfolded in a Tehran basement. Both things are true. And there's one date to hold on to here. January 20th, 1981. Remember, it comes back at the very end of this story in a way you will not see coming. Now, here's what almost everyone gets wrong about Marc Rich.

They think the United States hunted him for the Iranian oil. The trading with the enemy. And yes, that's real, and it's ugly, and it's in the indictment. But it is not the crime that stacked 65 federal counts on his head. The real crime was quieter. It was a magic trick performed with paperwork. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. They called it the daisy chain. Watch closely because it is genuinely elegant, and it is absolutely a con.

Take one barrel of oil. Just one. American law in the 1970s capped the price of certain old already discovered domestic oil, but let new oil sell free and high. So, Rich's people take that single barrel and run it through a chain of companies, a string of them, some little more than a name in a Swiss mailbox, selling it from one to the next to the next. Same barrel, same oil. It never physically moves an inch. But with every paper sale, its label quietly changes until cheap, price-controlled oil comes out the far end stamped and certified as expensive free market oil.

And the price difference, call it $15 a barrel, doesn't evaporate. It gets routed offshore into Switzerland, into the accounts of a company that, on paper, no American tax collector can ever reach. Now, multiply that one barrel by millions of them. The figure prosecutors land on for taxes evaded is staggering for its era, roughly $48 million. The single The single largest tax fraud case in the history of the United States.

Same barrel, two names. The money simply walks across a border and disappears. The man who decides to end all of it is 39 years old, fiercely ambitious, and not yet a household name. Rudolph Giuliani, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In 1983, he picks up the Rich file and does something audacious with it. He refuses to treat it as a dusty tax case. Instead, he reaches for RICO, the racketeering law built to dismantle the Mafia, and aims it squarely at a commodities trader in a tailored suit.

Why does that matter? Because RICO lets Giuliani treat Rich as the boss of a criminal enterprise rather than a clever accountant. 65 counts, tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering, trading with the enemy. Conviction on all of it could mean a man dies in a cell. It is the kind of case that builds an entire career. Giuliani is about to land the biggest white-collar fish anyone in America has ever hooked. There's just one problem.

Somewhere inside the machinery, Marc Rich gets tipped off. And before the indictment can be unsealed, before a single agent can knock on a single door, he is already gone. Onto a plane, up out of American airspace, and down into the gray, discreet, quiet of Zug. Some of his most sensitive corporate files [music] vanish out of the country right along with him. By the time Giuliani stands up to announce the biggest case of his life, the defendant is sitting comfortably in a country that has already quietly decided it will never hand him over.

So, picture the position that leaves the prosecutor in. He has the indictment of the decade, the cameras, the headlines, the largest tax case in American history with his name on it, and no defendant. So, how exactly do you catch a man that no country on Earth is willing to surrender? For years, the explanation everyone accepted was simple and a little boring. Switzerland won't extradite for tax crimes. Rich hides behind Swiss banking law.

Case closed. That explanation is true. It's also nowhere near the whole story because the manhunt kept slamming into one wall it could never describe out loud. According to his biographer, Daniel Ammann, who got closer to Rich than any journalist alive, the famously secretive trader quietly admitted that he had helped the Mossad, [music] Israel's intelligence service. Ammann says a former Israeli intelligence officer confirmed it, and a former director of the Mossad, Shabtai Shavit, later said that Rich let Israeli agents use his offices, his contacts, and his sprawling global network whenever they needed them.

I'll be honest. When I first read that, I assumed it was the usual fugitive mythology, the haze that grows around rich men who get away. It isn't. It comes from his own biographer, and from a former head of the service itself. And the loyalty did not come from nowhere. Remember that pipe the Iranian crude Mark Rich quietly fed into Israel all through the 1970s back when two sworn enemies needed one man who answered to neither flag.

That was the first threat. Keep a nation's refineries alive through a crisis and that nation does not forget who did it. Israel never forgot Mark Rich. Think about what that actually means. Mark Rich's trading desks were never just trading desks scattered across the planet in cities his hunters couldn't safely enter. They doubled as quiet infrastructure for the intelligence service of America's single closest ally. The man buying and selling the world's oil had made himself operationally useful to a friendly spy agency.

The kind of useful you protect. So the manhunt was never failing on a legal technicality. It was failing on leverage. You do not send a snatch team after a man who is >> [music] >> in some unspoken and deniable way an asset of an allied government. Not unless you want to light a diplomatic fire you [music] can never put out. Grab Mark Rich on foreign soil and the blowback lands on something far bigger than one fugitive.

An international incident with the one ally America could least afford to humiliate. Switzerland was the wall he stood behind. Israel was the reason no one dared climb it. That did not stop them from trying. God did they try. The US Marshals with the legendary fugitive hunter Howard Safer driving it turned Mark Rich into an obsession. They drew up [music] plans that read like a screenplay. A rendition, a grab on foreign soil, even a scheme to physically lift him out of Switzerland and set him down somewhere American law could finally close its hand.

And every time they moved the chase ended the same way. England. Agents have worked him for weeks. The hotel he favors, the car that collects him, the hour he breaks for lunch. They wait for the one narrow window when a US warrant might actually bite. And then they move on the building. They are hours behind him. Marc Rich is already at altitude, wheels up and climbing. Gone before anyone reaches the lobby. Jamaica. They miss him by a single day.

Germany. They get close enough to taste it, and [music] the German authorities shut the door in their faces. Every approach had the same architecture. Weeks of patience, a few hours of opportunity. Then the window slamming shut a heartbeat before they reached it. He always seemed to know. He always seemed to be standing on the one patch of ground where an American warrant turned to wet paper the instant it touched [music] down.

And in Zug, when they finally got within 40 ft of him through a pane of office glass, it was the Swiss police who ended it by threatening to arrest the Americans. Every tool the United States owned, it reached for. Extradition, blocked. The courts, blocked. The quiet covert route. Too radioactive to ever pull the trigger on. Snatch him, and you humiliate an ally. Lean on Switzerland, and you get a lecture about sovereignty.

Wait him out, and he only grows richer, more connected, more deeply woven into things that matter. The noose the United States kept tightening was tightening on the hunters, not [music] the prey. That is the answer to the question this whole chase kept asking. A faster fugitive can be run down. But Rich was never running faster than his hunters. He was load-bearing. Pull him out of the wall, and something the United States needed came down with him.

Which should have been the end of it. The untouchable man, the foiled superpower, >> [music] >> the perfect airtight escape. Except no fortress is ever as sealed as it looks from the outside. And the thing [music] that finally broke Marc Rich, the one force that did what the FBI, the Marshals, and the entire Justice Department never could, wasn't coming from outside at all. It was already inside the walls. Inside his own company.

Inside his own family. And it was moving toward him. By the early 1990s, Marc Rich has everything a human being can buy. And the one thing he was born without, a country. And now he is about to start losing the rest. In 1992, he makes a bet. A huge unhedged gamble on the price of zinc. Exactly the kind of all-in wager a younger, sharper Rich might once have nailed [music] in his sleep. This time, the market turns on him.

The loss runs to $172 million. The worst single hit in the company's history. And the aura around the man with the golden instinct, the legend who never guessed wrong, develops its first visible crack. His own people see it. The traders he trained. The partners he made wealthy beyond their dreams. The inner circle that actually ran the empire day-to-day. They start to whisper that the old man has lost his touch. And led by an executive named Willy Strothotte, they do to Marc Rich what the entire United States government never could.

They take him down. In a boardroom revolt across 1993 and 1994, [music] his own lieutenants force the founder out of his own company. They buy out his stake. And then they do the thing [music] that must have cut deeper than any indictment. They scrape his name off the door. Marc Rich and Company becomes Glencore. The empire lives on. The man who built it is quietly deleted from it. 10 years he had spent making himself impossible for governments [music] to reach.

It never once occurred to him that the danger was sitting at his own conference table, signing his own paychecks. The fortress he raised to keep the entire world out had exactly one door he never thought to guard. The one his own people walked in through. But the deepest wound of all is still coming. And it has nothing to do with money. Her name was Gabrielle. His daughter. In 1996, she is dying [music] of leukemia. 27 years old in a hospital bed inside the United States.

The one country on the entire planet her father cannot enter. Machines tick out the count of her last days in the only language Marc Rich ever fully trusted, numbers. And he is not allowed in the room to read them. The box he built around himself had one rule, and it was about to cost him everything. For 13 years, ever since he slipped out ahead of Giuliani's 1983 [music] indictment, Marc Rich stayed untouchable for a single reason.

He never ever crossed the wrong border. His freedom was the cage. The very instant he sets foot on American soil to hold his daughter's hand, he is arrested. 65 counts. 300 years. The cell he has spent his entire life outrunning. So he doesn't go. He weighs it the way he has weighed every deal of his life. The cost, the risk, >> [music] >> the exposure. And the math is monstrous. Go to her and lose his freedom forever.

Stay free and lose her without a goodbye. There is no version of the trade where he wins. The richest stateless man on Earth. A man whose money could reach into any market [music] on the planet cannot cross one line on a map to sit beside his own dying [music] child. And when Gabrielle dies, her father, the man who outran the FBI and the marshals and the Justice Department across four continents, cannot stand at her funeral.

He stays on the far side of the border while they lower her into the ground. The freedom that beat the United States of America [music] was the exact same freedom that kept a father from his daughter's grave. So here is Marc Rich at the close of the 1990s, free, [snorts] richer than entire countries, and more completely alone than that frightened boy on the refugee ship ever was. He has won every single battle and lost the only one that ever mattered.

There is no marshal who can reach him, no court that can take him. But there is one door, exactly one, that even Marc Rich cannot open by himself. A door that needs another man's hand entirely. Because somewhere in Washington, a president is running out of time in office, and a president in his final hours >> [music] >> can do what no court and no marshal on Earth ever could. He can make all 65 counts simply disappear.

The campaign to free Marc Rich is built like one of his trades. Quiet, global, aimed with surgical precision at the single pressure point that actually matters. His lawyer is a man named Jack Quinn, and not just any lawyer. Quinn is a former White House counsel to Bill Clinton himself. He knows exactly how the building works, where the doors are, and which ones to avoid. So he does something [music] clever and cold. Instead of fighting it out with the prosecutors in New York, the office that [music] has spent 17 years hunting Rich and would incinerate any deal on site, he takes the petition straight over their heads, >> [music] >> straight to the president's inner circle.

The career attorneys who know the case best never get the chance to stand up and shout no. Eric Holder, then the Deputy Attorney General, would later admit he had been neutral, leaning favorable. A few soft words that let the whole thing keep gliding forward. And then Marc Rich cashes in everything he has spent his entire life building. This is the moment all that indispensability comes due. The lobbying for his pardon comes from the very top of Israel.

Two Israeli prime ministers raise his name directly with Clinton. So does a former chief of the Mossad. The man whose offices once served Israeli intelligence is calling in the debt, and a foreign government is quietly pressing the president of the United States on behalf of an American fugitive. And in the background, there is Denise [music] Rich, his ex-wife, a prominent donor to Democratic causes, and to Clinton's own presidential library.

Now, nobody has ever proven that a single dollar bought a single pardon. But the proximity, money flowing one direction, an extraordinary favor flowing back the other, is the kind of thing that makes an entire country narrow its eyes. January 20th, 2001. Bill Clinton's final morning in the White House. His presidency has hours left to live. And with the stroke of a pen, he signs. All 65 counts gone. The tax evasion, the wire fraud, the racketeering, the trading with the enemy, the 300 years, the largest tax fraud case in American history, the one Rudy Giuliani built his name on, the one the marshals chased across four [music] continents and froze 40 ft away from on a cold Swiss street.

All of it wiped clean off the books in a single signature. A man who was a fugitive for 17 years, who never once stood inside an American courtroom, who never spent a single day in a single cell, is suddenly, simply free. >> [music] >> And now, that date, the one I told you to remember, January 20th, 1981. The day the 52 American hostages finally walked out of Iran after 444 days, the long national nightmare over at last. 20 years later to the very day, January 20th, 2001, the man who, by the government's own indictment, did business with the regime that took them, walks free himself.

The same date that ended America's humiliation in Tehran ends [music] the case against the traitor who profited from it. 20 years apart. The same square on the calendar. You genuinely could not write [music] it. So, ask the question this entire chase was secretly asking from the very beginning. It was never, will they catch him? From day one, from those two marshals shivering outside a glass office, the real question was always this.

Will the system itself surrender to him? It did. Marc Rich had spent decades making himself part of the machinery the United States could not switch off. The oil markets that kept the West running, the intelligence service of its closest ally, the political money that pools around any president in his [music] final hours. Wind yourself that deep into the things a superpower depends on, and you stop [music] being a fugitive.

You become a cost. By 2001, the most powerful nation on Earth had done the math Marc Rich taught it to do. Erasing the case was cheaper than chasing the [music] man. That is the cold thing buried under all the outrage. The United States was always the stronger party. Marc Rich had simply made himself too expensive to punish. The country did not take it quietly. They named it [music] Pardongate. Congress dragged witnesses in front of cameras.

Editorial pages howled. Even Clinton's own allies winced in public. And federal prosecutors in New York, the very same office now under an attorney named James Comey, opened an investigation into whether the pardon had been bought. They found no provable crime, no smoking gun. So, bought stayed exactly where it sits to this day. An allegation never proven, impossible to fully kill. Which is, in its own way, [music] the most fitting verdict Marc Rich ever received.

A charge that could neither stick to him nor be scrubbed away, left hanging in the air forever. Beyond reach. Exactly like the man himself. Marc Rich >> [music] >> died on the 26th of June, 2013, in Switzerland. A A man who had spent his final decades unable to safely set foot in the nation that once took him in as a refugee. The boy who fled a state that wanted him dead ended his life stateless by choice, beyond every flag on Earth, including the one stamped inside the passport of the daughter he could not cross a border to bury.

They laid him to rest in Israel at Kibbutz Einat beside Gabriel. In death at last, he crossed over to her. And the machine he built never even slowed down. The company that scraped his name off the door, Glencore, is today one of the largest commodity traders on the planet. His former traders fanned out and founded rivals of their own like Trafigura. The independent trading house Marc Rich invented became the template for an entire industry that, right now as you sit watching this, still roots the planet's raw materials through the same gap between borders he first slipped through.

The refugee who swore no border would ever own him got his wish. It cost him a country. It cost him a place at his own daughter's grave. And if you want to watch another man treat the most powerful institutions on Earth as nothing more than one more obstacle to root around, that story is already waiting right here.