Yahya Bin Laden said late in 2005 that he expected the number of employees at the Bin Laden firms to rise from about thirty-five thousand toward about seventy-five thousand during the next decade as oil wealth continued to pour into the Gulf region. He hoped to further diversify the family companies, he said, so that construction contracts of the traditional type might ultimately generate only about a quarter of the Bin Ladens’ revenue. He quoted an Arabic saying: The first generation makes the money, the second generation tries to preserve it, and the third generation squanders it. The family could avoid this fate, he believed. His own children and those of Bakr and other brothers had acquired excellent educations at the finest universities in the West, and some were committed to the future of the business. Younger half-brothers such as Mohamed, not yet fifty years old, were proving to be capable and modern executives. But these younger Bin Ladens were not going to spend two weeks sitting around a Riyadh majlis waiting for a moody prince to sign a contract, as Salem and then Bakr had done patiently and obsequiously for so many years. It was imperative to modernize the company and then hope that something similar would happen to Saudi decision making.6
The chances of this did not look especially promising. As had been true since the 1950s, the more oil money flowed into Saudi coffers, the less urgent seemed any imperative for change. In an unusually candid soliloquy, Bandar Bin Sultan described the assumptions of the Al-Saud:
The way I answer the corruption charges is this: In the last thirty years—we have implemented a development program that was approximately… close to $400 billion worth. Okay? Now, look at the whole country, where it was, where it is now. And I am confident, after you look at it, you could not have done all of that for less than, let’s say, $350 billion. If you tell me that building this whole country, spending $350 billion out of $400 billion, that we had misused or [were] corrupt with $50 billion, I’ll tell you, “Yes. But I’ll take that anytime.” There are so many countries in the Third World that have oil that are still thirty years behind. But more important, more important—“Hey, who are you to tell me this?” What I’m trying to tell you is: So what?7
Not long afterward, citing national security concerns, the British government dropped a criminal investigation into the sale of defense equipment to Saudi Arabia during the 1980s and 1990s. According to a British newspaper, as part of the financial arrangements required by the Saudis to consummate these arms deals, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into bank accounts controlled by Bandar Bin Sultan.8
So what? Unlike Bandar, the Bin Ladens lacked the nerve to ask this question out loud, and yet, the more time passed after September 11, the less significance the attacks seemed to hold for the family’s future. Lawsuits filed in the United States by families of the victims, consolidated under the title
Desert Bear went up for sale in 2004 for about $4 million, more than twenty years after Salem first purchased the estate and began landing his helicopters on the lawn. Since the property was owned and titled in Florida by a Liberian corporation, the purchaser would not be able to buy the land or the home directly, but would have to buy portable bearer shares in the Liberian company and then try to prove ownership to Florida real estate authorities, according to several people who inquired about the property listing. Potential buyers were told that they would have to bring or deliver cash overseas to purchase control of the Liberian corporation; the Bin Ladens did not want to enter the United States to close the transaction. The buyers who persisted through these negotiations planned to subdivide the property and build suburban homes.10 It was an untidy end to the estate’s remarkable history, one that began with a Jell-O patent at the beginning of the twentieth century and ended, in effect, with the September 11 attacks.
As the pressure on the family eased, Bakr flourished. He took as his third wife a much younger woman—she was still in her late teens when he met and married her around 2004. Bakr now wove more leisure into his schedule: he vacationed on a private island in the Maldives, visited a resort in Bali, socialized with other yacht- owning wealthy Saudi businessmen in Beirut, attended air shows in Dubai, and gossiped for hours with colleagues about the latest models of private jets. His sons took up the family passion for fast-moving machines; late in 2006, Abdulaziz Bin Bakr won the U.A.E. National Superstock Bike Trophy.11 By then, Bakr’s confidence seemed to reflect that of Saudi Arabia: The kingdom’s tormentor, Saddam Hussein, was headed to the gallows; Osama was in hiding and Al Qaeda’s attacks inside Saudi Arabia, while occasionally unnerving, had amounted to little more than a nuisance; oil prices were sky high; Saudi politics and succession plans were stable; and the Americans would surely take care of any future threats from Iran. What was there to fear?
IN MECCA, the heart of Islam and the headwaters of the Bin Laden fortune, York International Corporation of Pennsylvania installed during 2005 a complex of industrial air-conditioning units, or water chillers, on a hilltop of volcanic rock called Jabal Al-Qala, or “Castle Mountain.” The units constituted the largest industrial air-conditioning project undertaken by York since it serviced the Prophet’s Mosque at Medina in partnership with the Bin Ladens. This time it was not a religious sanctuary that would be cooled in the desert, but a seven-tower condominium and hotel project overlooking Mecca’s Grand Mosque. According to a York executive, by the time it was completed, this Mecca condo project would overtake the Prophet’s Mosque as the largest air conditioner in the world.12
In the latest oil boom, every Gulf businessman with real estate profits or a corporate bonus to spend seemed to covet a condo overlooking Mecca; by 2005, the real estate rush in the holy city rivaled that in Miami’s fevered South Beach. The Bin Ladens initially thought they would not bother with the time and expense required to sell individual condo units at Castle Mountain, so they sold an entire tower to Kuwaiti investors. When they learned the soaring retail prices units in the building were attracting, the Bin Ladens “were furious,” said Anwar Hassan of York International. The family’s executives decided in the future they would “retail every apartment themselves” to maximize profits.13
With the Faqih family—another Saudi business group with a black sheep living in exile—the Bin Ladens planned for an even more ambitious condominium tower project on Omar Mountain, overlooking Mecca, a project that would require blasting off the volcanic mountain-top in order to build. This development contemplated the construction of four towers, each about thirty stories high, containing one hundred elevators and a total of more than forty-six hundred apartment units. There would be a five-star hotel, a shopping mall, and parking for two thousand cars.14 The sprawl-inducing, profit-making commercial evolution of Islam’s holiest places had reached its apotheosis, and the Bin Ladens were partners in all of the most ambitious projects.
They were partners, too, in the planned King Abdullah Economic City, announced in late 2005 as oil prices moved above fifty dollars a barrel. The new king commandeered undeveloped land along the Red Sea north of Jeddah and announced a city designed to rival Dubai. Abdullah said the project would cost about $27 billion. He planned a Millennium Seaport to rival the largest commercial ports in the world; high-speed rail and air links to the rest of the kingdom; an Industrial District of petrochemical and other plants; a waterside resort to attract tourists, complete with the kingdom’s first world-class 18-hole golf course; a Financial Island topped by two office towers reaching sixty or more stories into the sky; an Education Zone filled with modern universities; and, of course, more condominiums. The project, said a Bin Laden executive, “could either make or break the local economy.” For the Bin Laden companies, the construction work alone would be “absolutely huge in scope.”15
“For the Roads Ahead,” was the headline on a self-promotional advertisement purchased by the Saudi Bin Laden Group in the
