without incident, but one day he drifted too close to the power lines. His engine caught one of the lines, and he flipped over and crashed.
He broke his back but he was fortunate; he suffered no permanent damage or paralysis. He was immobilized in the hospital for a time and then recuperated at Desert Bear. It was one more close call in the Bin Laden annals of aviation. It would not be the last.10
SALEM OPERATED AN OFFICE in the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan. His local partner was Robert Freeman, a former investment banker whose father had befriended King Faisal decades earlier. Freeman’s wife, Gail, had met Salem’s wife, Sheikha, in the first-class cabin of a commercial airliner flying from London to Jeddah. The couples clicked, and they remained close even after Salem and Sheikha divorced. Salem asked Freeman to work for him as his personal financial adviser; Freeman proposed instead that they create a holding company in New York for investments in America. They called their Delaware-registered corporation Amarco—for American Arabian Company. Salem and Khalid Bin Mahfouz each took 40 percent and Freeman took 20 percent. Freeman hoped they would enrich themselves through ambitious undertakings, mainly in commercial real estate; he discovered that Salem was averse to stocks and other intangible assets.11
Freeman introduced Salem to Donald Trump. The Bin Ladens owned a vacant tract of land near a royal palace in Riyadh, and Freeman thought the property offered “an excellent opportunity for Donald Trump to build one of his signature buildings, like the Trump Tower in New York.” When they met in Trump’s office, the developer told Salem that he was intrigued, but he would require $25,000 in cash plus two first-class tickets to Riyadh for himself and a colleague. According to Freeman, Trump explained that given his reputation, he did not feel that he should be spending his own money on “exploratory ventures in faraway places.” Besides, Trump continued, if Salem was willing to put up the $25,000, it would show that he was serious about the deal. Salem declined. People were clamoring to do business with the Bin Ladens, he said; they did not need incentive pay. The meeting ended in stalemate, to Freeman’s regret. Salem and Trump, he observed, were “very strong personalities, and there was very little give-and-take for either of them.”12 Trump’s spokesperson denied that such a discussion took place. Asked to review the author’s written source materials describing the meeting, the spokesperson did not respond.
Freeman pitched investment idea after investment idea to his Saudi partners, but Salem rarely expressed interest. He seemed to regard his Manhattan operation mainly as a platform for shopping. When he was in New York, his first priority was to head down to 47th Street, where he expended great energy bargaining for jewelry and consumer electronics with the Hasidim who owned many of the district’s retail stores. He bought bags full of diamond necklaces and earrings for Bin Laden mothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia. Other Saudi tourists swaggered around Tiffany’s, proud to pay the sticker price and to carry conspicuously the Tiffany’s shopping bag, but Salem “was looking for deals,” Freeman recalled. He loved haggling with Hasidic retailers but feared losing out, so he ordered Freeman to find an appraiser who could examine particular pieces of jewelry and offer a sense of what he should pay. Freeman located an Italian appraiser with a second-floor office on 47th Street, to whom he could ferry jewelry entrusted to him by the store owners downstairs. He was never entirely sure, however, whether the appraiser was secretly in cahoots with the jewelers. It hardly mattered; Salem relished the negotiations more than the results. He had imbibed the anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews are the world’s canniest bargainers; he seemed to regard shopping at Hasidic stores as a feat of daring.13
He prowled the nearby electronics stores for the latest portable phones, calculators, cameras, music players, and miniature televisions, all of which he bought in bulk. “He’d buy hundreds of these things for the princes,” recalled Gail Freeman. He would walk the aisles and peer through the glass cases, asking “Now, tell me the truth: These are brand new? Nobody’s seen them yet, right?” Like a salesman who uses season tickets at Madison Square Garden to cultivate clients, Salem used his mobility and expertise in American consumerism to acquire gadgets that he could use back in Saudi Arabia to ingratiate himself with princes.14
Khalid Bin Mahfouz bought two apartments at the Olympic Tower, but he and Salem usually preferred the room service and convenience of hotels; when in New York, they stayed mainly at the Helmsley Palace or the Plaza. Salem threw an extravagant twenty-eighth-birthday party for Randa at the Plaza. Since he didn’t know too many people in the city, he asked the Freemans to fill up the private room with friends from their neighborhood in suburban Long Island. Salem sang his usual repertoire of corny folk and Christmas songs. “We were his playthings,” Freeman recalled. Salem’s lack of interest in ambitious business projects frustrated him—he had, after all, given up a career at a major investment bank.
Still, he tried to live as his partner did. Once, on a trip to Jeddah, Salem ordered Freeman and an Italian associate out of a Jeep at night in the middle of the desert. Salem drove away—Freeman and his colleague had to stumble through the sand to the road, and then hitchhike into Jeddah. When they made it back, Salem was giddy; he seemed to regard his prank as part practical joke, part survival test. Freeman waited patiently for his revenge. One night in New York, when they were all out to dinner with Randa, they discovered that Salem had forgotten his wallet and had no money. Immediately afterward, Freeman drove to Harlem, forced Salem out of the car, and sped away. Randa fretted that Salem would never make it back, but he soon strode into her hotel with two new African American friends. He was, of course, delighted: “Bob, you
Freeman needed it. Salem was often so pinched for cash that Freeman had to call Jeddah night after night to plead for wire transfers: “Salem, we’ve got to have some money—we’ve got people at our door. We’ve got to pay the rent…What are we doing? Where are we heading?” Salem usually came through with the minimum amounts needed to maintain the office, “but it was always at the last minute.” As best Freeman could determine, the Bin Laden companies in Jeddah, which Salem now firmly controlled, had a reasonably steady cash flow, but there were so many calls on that money—employees, equipment, loan repayments, family—that Salem was not able to tap into it very easily for personal projects. Late payments to his construction companies by the royal family drained his liquidity even more. And yet as each year passed, Salem’s appetite for private jets and real estate abroad seemed only to grow. Oil prices fell during the early 1980s, but this did not visibly crimp Salem’s style. Instead, a pattern set in, according to Freeman and other partners and employees. When Salem needed money, Freeman recalled, “he had to turn to Khalid Bin Mahfouz.”16
THEY WERE CONTEMPORARIES and best friends, each a scion of a Hadhrami business fortune, each adapting to the international imperatives of the oil boom. As they reached their thirties and assumed their inherited responsibilities, however, they exhibited contrasting personalities. When they flew together on their private jets, Salem might joke and sip champagne and play guitar, but Khalid would sit quietly, drinking tea or smoking an Arabian water pipe. He stayed away from Salem’s more provocative parties for decadent Saudi princes. He did seem to enjoy Salem and his outrageous antics, but he would often observe his friend impassively, or issue only a slight, crooked smile. He was “a very quiet man, a very private man—very deep in thought,” said an employee who spent many hours with the two men. “I think he enjoyed seeing that Salem was not afraid to say or do anything, and I think that he kind of vicariously lived through him.”17
Khalid was “just as happy to let Salem run the show,” said a second employee. Among other things, this meant adapting to Salem’s idiosyncratic ideas about when and how to spend his money. Once, on a trip to California, Bin Laden and Bin Mahfouz arranged to meet at the private aviation terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. As they waited, Khalid’s aides watched the country singer Kenny Rogers arrive on a private jet and climb with his entourage into stretch limousines. Salem turned up in a cheap rental car—he waved Khalid into the front passenger seat and they peeled out toward the freeway. “Nobody knows who they are and they couldn’t care less,” recalled the employee.18
Some of their American and European colleagues found the friendship and business relationship between Salem and Khalid to be extraordinarily complex. On money matters, Khalid was clearly the senior partner. Yet it was Salem who enjoyed such easy, informal access to Fahd and other royalty; because of his charm and energy, Salem’s influence in Riyadh exceeded the size of his bank accounts. One European business partner who knew them both believed that Khalid harbored some quiet resentment about this imbalance. As for Bin Mahfouz himself, some of his partners and employees regarded him as an enigma, a man of many contradictions.
The least complicated thing about him was his wealth; by the early 1980s, it was on full display. Salem had befriended Harry Winston, the prominent New York jeweler, and through him, he and Khalid were invited to the showroom of Hammerman Brothers, a wholesale jeweler in Manhattan. Khalid picked out some exquisite—and very
