fashionable destination. If anything, he seemed drawn to its lack of pretension. After his dinner with Sowell, he flew into town regularly. He leased houses at Bay Point, then the region’s only luxury resort, located on a peninsula of pine trees and sand along the intercoastal waterway. About a year later he brought Randa from Cairo and installed her in a Bay Point home. He told Sowell that he wanted his sister to take flight lessons until she was certified on a Cessna. He said she would require a cook, a female chaperone, a driver, and a car. Sowell usually sent a Lincoln.
They all adapted to Salem’s demands and to his nocturnal schedule. He rarely turned up for flight lessons before late afternoon, and by the time he figured out what he wanted to do for fun each evening, most of Panama City’s restaurants and stores had already closed. The city had but one enclosed shopping mall—a modest place downtown at the corner of 23rd Street and Highway 231, anchored by JCPenney, Sears, and Dillard’s department stores. Sowell paid store owners to remain open after hours. It was, he reflected, the sort of thing “you would hear about with Elvis Presley.” Each Monday, Randa went shopping. On one occasion, Sowell watched Salem hand her twenty-two thousand dollars in traveler’s checks for a trip to the mall.3
Salem found at the mall a piano and organ store that particularly attracted him. Jack Pizza managed the place along with his wife, Anita Pizza, who was an accomplished pianist. Jack called Don Sowell one night, reporting breathlessly that there was a Saudi in his store who was using Sowell as a reference. The customer wanted to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of pianos and other musical instruments, and he wanted them shipped immediately to a home at Bay Point. Pizza asked if there was a dollar limit on how much he should agree to sell. “No, there isn’t,” Sowell recalled telling him. “Whatever he wants, you send it.”4
It was the beginning of a long and unlikely friendship between the Pizzas of Panama City and the Bin Laden family of Jeddah. Jack Pizza dabbled in computers and tried to sell the latest models to Salem. Anita proved to be a graceful accompanist for Salem’s singing ventures, as well as a faithful companion to Randa.
They hosted dinner and song parties at Bay Point, where royal visitors from Saudi Arabia sometimes mingled with wisecracking pilots from Panama City and Houston. Salem was not a heavy drinker, but he developed a sipping taste for Dom Perignon champagne, which he insisted should be served chilled about two minutes after opening— not too bubbly, not too flat. For one party, Sowell bought up all the Dom Perignon in the Panama City region but ran out nonetheless. Salem “sent myself, and my Lear, and my pilot, and we flew to Columbus, Georgia, and loaded the airplane with cases of Dom Perignon, and flew it back,” he recalled. Soon Salem insisted that Sowell and the Pizzas fly with him around the world, particularly so that he and Anita could perform together in restaurants and at parties.5
Salem learned in these years that he could buy his way onto just about any stage where he wanted to sing. He paid a bandleader at an Academy Awards party in Los Angeles hundreds of dollars to let him sing “House of the Rising Sun” in seven languages. At an Oktoberfest in Germany, he handed audience members occupying a table in front of the stage two thousand German marks to make room, bought a video camera from another audience member, and spent more still to persuade the bandleader to let him take the stage and belt out a Bavarian folk song; its title, roughly translated, was “On the Green Meadow, the Rabbits Eat the Grass.”
There was an undercurrent of mutual contempt in these episodes—Salem’s contempt for normal protocol and his insistence on purchasing entry, matched by the growing contempt among some Westerners during the 1970s toward showy Saudis who had become rich from rising gasoline prices. And yet, between Salem and his European and American friends, this taint, while an occasional source of discomfort, was almost always washed away by Salem’s innocent exuberance and his transparent need to be adored.
He liked the Beatles, but also traditional sing-alongs, such as “On Top of Old Smokey,” or its children’s parody, “On Top of Spaghetti.” No setting was too august for him, no audience too prestigious. In Cairo, he forced his friend Rupert Armitage to play the guitar while he sang badly at the wedding of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s daughter. However mortified they might feel, his friends learned to go along, because, as was true with his piloting antics, any expression of resistance or fear only encouraged Salem to go further. His voice never improved, but after he met Anita Pizza in Panama City, her skill at the piano elevated his recitals to a greater level of tolerability.6
America became a place for singing, flying, and, above all, shopping. Salem ordered Cadillacs for the Saudi royal family and had them fitted with armor so that they could repel machine-gun fire. With Sowell’s help, he also ordered about a dozen Lincolns and shipped them over to the kingdom from New Orleans. He ordered five thousand cases of Tabasco sauce and flew it to Saudi Arabia—he said he liked the taste. Coca-Cola was subject to the Arab boycott against Israel, so Salem discovered an alternative soft drink called Mello Yello and had it shipped home in vast quantities. He found a small plastic airplane toy that tickled him and he bought thousands to take home as gifts. To decorate the desert gardens of a palace his family firm was building for Crown Prince Fahd, he shipped home in refrigerated containers what seemed like a substantial portion of the vegetation of the American Southwest: 481 large American cacti, 360 small cacti, 485 mixed cacti, 100 yucca trees, 625 orchids, and more than 5,000 other desert plants, bushes, and trees.7
Salem invited Fahd himself to Panama City, according to Sowell. The crown prince landed his customized Boeing 707 at the city airport; at the time, it was the largest plane ever to have touched down there. Sowell leased extra houses at Bay Point for Fahd’s armed bodyguards. It was an “interesting ordeal,” he remembered. Fahd’s entourage “played bumper cars with the golf carts,” and they damaged about half a dozen of them so badly that Sowell had to pay for replacements. Robert Freeman, another of Salem’s American partners, remembered that the cost of the broken golf carts was about fifty thousand dollars. Sowell said he sent the bill to Jim Bath, Salem’s business partner in Houston, since it involved Salem’s relationship with Fahd and the crown prince’s private travel in the United States. Bath, Sowell said, “handled all those arrangements.”8
JIM BATH had grown up in Louisiana. He studied journalism and then became an air force fighter pilot; later he joined the Texas Air National Guard as a reserve pilot. When he was still a young man, he and his wife, Sandra, loaded their belongings into a car and moved to Houston, where Bath went into business as an airplane broker and, eventually, a real estate developer and eclectic international entrepreneur. He was a tall, slim man with a rich southwestern accent, who seemed determined to live by a certain male Texas creed—think big, take risks, seek riches, live freely, and do some hunting and fishing along the way. He undertook some of his early carousing with George W. Bush, whom he befriended around 1970 when they were both pilots in the Texas Air National Guard. This was before the future president attended business school, a period when Bush was drinking and, by his own indirect admission, may have indulged in illegal drugs. In any event, Bush would remember Bath as “a lot of fun,” although eventually the relentless questions about their relationship would drain the subject of mirth. By the mid-1970s, partly through Bush, Bath had gotten to know a number of significant figures in Texas politics, such as Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, who became director of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976; Lan Bentsen, a son of the longtime Democratic U.S. senator and eventual vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen; and James A. Baker, a Houston lawyer who would later become U.S. secretary of state.9
At this time, Bath’s principal business was JB&A Associates, his aircraft brokerage. In 1975 he was trying to sell a Fokker-27 propeller plane owned by a tobacco company in North Carolina; the plane was outfitted with a small bedroom in the cabin. Salem Bin Laden was looking for a plane to support his company’s road-building work in the Saudi deserts. They made a deal, and Bath accompanied the plane to Jeddah. Like just about every American entrepreneur who could find the Middle East on a map, Bath seemed determined to cash in on the Saudi oil boom. He didn’t just want to make a few commissions from airplane sales; he wanted to develop deeper partnerships with the rising younger generation of Saudi sheikhs, to help them invest their money profitably in the United States. “He talked a mile a minute,” remembered Rupert Armitage, who was working in the Bin Laden Brothers office when Bath turned up. Still, Salem found Bath entertaining. Salem “loved larger-than-life people,” said the Houston lawyer Charles Schwartz. Jim Bath “was a wheeler-dealer, and Salem just loved that kind of stuff.”10
American promoters and deal makers besieged Salem; he learned to be cautious. He rarely committed large sums of money to their care, unless it was to buy something concrete, such as an airplane or a house. Yet, at the same time, for work and play, Salem began to acquire offices, residences, and agents in more and more cities around the world. In each place, he chose a primary representative or partner—someone who could help him confidentially entertain visiting Saudi royalty, host Bin Laden family members when they traveled for school or vacation, and assist in business deals. Bath became Salem’s agent and partner in Houston. In a sense, Bath opened a service bureau for Salem in Texas, so that Salem, in turn, could extend his global service bureau for the Saudi
