parties for young Saudi financiers, socialites, foreign executives, and ambassadors. These were casual events where alcohol flowed freely, steaks were grilled on the barbecue, and English was prevalent—a California-influenced refuge amid the kingdom’s Wahhabi awakening.1
Yeslam shared Salem’s obsession with speed. He had trained as a race car driver as well as a pilot, and over the years he had collected Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches. His full brother Ibrahim had a fondness for Rolls- Royces. After Yeslam’s return to Jeddah, his brother-in-law—the husband of his full sister, Fawzia—suffered fatal brain damage in his Jeddah garage when he snapped his head while backing an imported Formula One racer out of his garage too quickly. Increasingly, among the Bin Laden men, jets and fast cars beckoned as a measure of manhood.2
In business, because of his USC classes and his encounters with bankers in America, Yeslam was more comfortable with the complexities of securities markets than were many of his brothers. He imported computers and began to think about how he could build up a modern investment advisory service, run by Saudis for Saudis, to compete with the American and European brokers who flocked to the kingdom to promote stock investments to the newly wealthy.3
As his ambitions in this field grew, so did tensions with Salem, who expected utter deference from younger brothers. Yeslam resented being patronized. Still, Salem rewarded him handsomely for his rising contributions. Yeslam earned the equivalent of more than $1 million in 1976, according to filings in a Swiss court by Carmen. Two years later, she reported, he was paid almost $1.5 million in salary and other compensation.4
Yeslam and Carmen escaped periodically to Geneva, where they had first met; in 1978, in the suburb of Genthod, at number 1, Chemin de la Petite-Voie, they bought and furnished an old estate. They paid just over 1 million Swiss francs for the property. He lavished her with jewelry—by her count, between 1975 and 1985, he gave her more than $2 million worth of diamond, emerald, ruby, and gold pieces. (“I admit I can be vain,” she later conceded.) Her routine spending money sometimes totaled 20,000 Swiss francs per month. They kept a box of cash in their Jeddah home that often contained about $50,000.5
Like many of the Bin Laden brothers—other than Salem—Yeslam spoke softly and projected a mild, gentle demeanor. He was a thin, fragile-looking man who had his own streak of vanity—he dressed in fashionable designer brands, and he seemed to favor visible labels. He could seem more at home in Switzerland or California than in Saudi Arabia, and as the months passed after his return to Jeddah, he struggled in his search for a comfortable identity. As he approached thirty, he was rich and successful in business, and a father of two young daughters, but he was plagued increasingly by panic attacks.6
He managed for a time to fight through these episodes, but in 1979, that year of multiple upheavals, anxiety finally overwhelmed Yeslam. He “hid himself away in the house,” according to Carmen’s assertions in court filings. She spent “whole nights trying to give him reassurance.” His behavior grew erratic: He “wanted to play backgammon day and night and he was forever waking his wife up and asking her to join in this mania.” During the Mecca uprising, Carmen recalled, he dashed “from house to office like a man unhinged.” In the aftermath of the violence, “he had nightmares. He was frightened of everything—frightened of dying, especially.”7
For his part, as his interior struggles deepened, Yeslam felt that his wife was less than understanding. As his attorneys put it in Swiss court filings, “His wife seemed to take a malicious pleasure in aggravating his condition through constant violent scenes, during which she would scream and threaten to commit suicide if her capricious demands were not immediately satisfied…Her usual line was that she was going to drive her car into a tree.” Carmen denied these allegations; she felt that she had done “everything she could to help him take care of himself and stay in control of his destiny and his business.” In any event, unable to cope with either his demons or his wife, Yeslam sought professional help in Geneva, but he found no relief. He flew to Los Angeles for six weeks of medical treatment. According to Yeslam’s court statements, this produced some improvement in his condition.8
In the midst of these struggles, he decided to lead his family into the international stock and bond markets. He bought computers that could support a stock trading operation, and he opened, in Jeddah, the first Saudi Arabian stock brokerage, designed, as one of its brochures put it, “To dispose of the idea that one has to live on Wall Street in order to make money.”9
Yeslam quickly emerged, during the early 1980s, as the Bin Laden family’s pioneer in global stock trading, syndicated real estate investments, and the use of offshore companies in Caribbean, Central American, and European tax and bank secrecy havens. Bin Laden family charity funds had become entangled with Osama’s increasingly disoriented international radicalism; in a similar way, some of the family’s investment money would become entangled with Yeslam’s global financial vision, his anxiety disorders, and his deteriorating marriage.
AROUND 1980, Yeslam formed a Swiss company that would become the Saudi Investment Company, or SICO. A Cayman Islands corporation called Falken Limited—controlled by Yeslam and his full siblings—owned the firm. Falken also would hold stakes in other corporations; the full rosters of shareholders and activities at these offshore companies are unknown, but some of their names suggest a slightly Gaelic whimsy: Celta Finance S.A., Galway Inc. Some of these offshore companies were formed to manage single investments in commercial real estate projects or private Bin Laden family residences in the United States or Europe; others may have handled import or leasing operations for Bin Laden companies; still others were set up to channel finance for construction work in countries such as Sudan; and some remain entirely mysterious. In 1983 Yeslam formed the Saudi Investment Company Panama Corporation; he served as president, and a Swiss lawyer, Baudouin Dunand, joined him as a director. The next year, also in Panama, he organized a branch of the Mohamed Binladin Organization Incorporated, with Salem as president, Yeslam as treasurer and secretary, and Salem’s full brother Bakr as an additional director. The paper residue of these and other Bin Laden–related companies in Panama, the Caymans, Curacao, the Netherlands Antilles, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Channel Isles, and elsewhere soon extended across oceans and continents. The firms opened and closed, changed names, bought one another out, or lay dormant for years at a time, their bare-bones registrations punctually renewed by family lawyers or accountants based in London and elsewhere. Yeslam appears to have been involved with many of these offshore companies, particularly those directed at real estate projects in the United States.10
He hired about a dozen employees at the Saudi Investment Company in Jeddah and held “hundreds of marketing meetings introducing the company to the public,” according to a company brochure. In these presentations, Yeslam and his colleagues emphasized the forces of financial globalization: “Since the Kingdom provides much improved communication networks, the information gap to foreign markets is getting very small, enabling us to compete against foreign brokers, and that’s exactly what we planned to do when we laid the ground work to cover American stock markets for our customers,” the brochure said. Saudi Investment sent several of its brokers abroad to study the operations at foreign brokerages, and it created a department in Jeddah specializing in American and Japanese stock markets. By the end of 1983, the firm claimed to hold more than $10 million worth of stocks for its Saudi customers; it reported annual turnover of almost $200 million. Computer-aided stock trading, which sought to exploit price gaps in markets scattered around the world, and which could increase an investor’s speed and volume, was now roiling stock markets in Tokyo, London, and New York; Yeslam, in effect, promised to bring a small piece of the action to Saudi Arabia.11
He also developed contacts at Wall Street investment banks. Through one of them—Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette—Yeslam arranged to clear trades for Saudi customers in the American stock markets, which made it much easier for them to buy and sell stocks on the New York Stock Exchange and in over-the-counter markets.12
Investment bankers at Donaldson, Lufkin introduced Yeslam to Charles Tickle, the chief executive of Daniel Corporation, an American real estate development company. Tickle sought partners who could fund office and residential projects in the United States; Yeslam said he was interested. Yeslam formed another Panamanian company called Saudi Investors, Incorporated, whose shareholders were described in a company document as “Mohamed Binladin Family.” In 1980 they joined with Daniel to develop Imperial Plaza, in Richmond, Virginia, a twenty-two-acre adult-residential community with a restaurant, auditorium, barbershop, bank, pharmacy, library, nursing home, and four high-rise towers containing 891 apartments. Three years later, they invested in Woodgate West, a development of 34 two-story apartment buildings in southwest Houston. One of Yeslam’s brochures described these deals as “a unique concept of investing in American property.” The company expected to have “purchasing power” of $100 million by the spring of 1984.13
