She was remarkably beautiful, standing every inch of six feet with slender limbs, long and perfectly shaped to her body. Her black hair flowed in waves all the way to the small of her back, thick and curly, stunning. It accented her neck, making her appear even taller than she was. When she passed by the table where Lacey sat, her smell sent shivers up his back, across his shoulders and deep into the cheeks of his face. He breathed slowly, feeling his heart pound quickly. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. He watched her every movement. Lacey’s journal described in great detail how she placed the napkin on her lap, how she took the wine glass and switched its place from her right to her left hand, how she gently pushed her hair back letting it slide across her bare shoulder. Despite the dim light, Lacey saw her smooth, dark complexion; the graceful lines of her face; her long and high, sharply pointed nose; wide mouth; full lips; and coal black, oval-shaped eyes set beneath heavy brows, eyes that seemed to slant upward, just slightly, giving them a unique appearance, at once penetrating and vulnerable.
“She is quite lovely, is she not?” asked Lacey’s host with what Lacey described as a fatherly smile.
“Yes, she is,” Lacey replied. “Yes, she certainly is. Tell me, do you know her? Is she Turkish? Kurdish perhaps? Or maybe from the Caucuses. Georgia or Azerbaijan?”
“You’re quite amazing,” said the older man. “She is Georgian. Aminette Messadou is her name. She is the youngest daughter of Djemmal-Eddin. He’s the man with her, and to be sure, one to be reckoned with. A man of Muslim nobility, two generations a Christian, adored by his people, of both great faiths. You are a most remarkable young man, Mr. Lacey. By the way, just what is your actual rank? What should we know you by now that we’ve concluded our business with a true and honorable sense of mutual satisfaction? I’ve heard everything from Commander to Midshipman.” He laughed a friendly, respectful laugh. “Who can know about a man so young with so much… ability.”
“My rank is servant to my King,” said Lacey. “I would like to meet her. Can you help?”
“Of course,” the older man answered with a big smile, a generous chuckle and real admiration. “Your King is most fortunate.”
Ninety years later, these words, written in Frederick Lacey’s own hand, would so overcome Harry Levine as he read them, he would have no choice but to put the page down and stare at it. “My rank is servant to my King,” Lacey had written. Who could read that and not shake their head in wonder, in awe. What a man. What a man.
Lacey married Aminette Messadou in 1919 and, when his wife got pregnant in 1920, he resigned from the Navy. He started the first of his shipping companies, a legitimate, highly successful and never questioned cover for serious smuggling, the source of his real money. When he was only twenty-three years old, he was able to furnish things and move them in a way no one else on earth could duplicate. No longer a servant to his King, he served himself and those he loved.
Later that year, Aminette died giving birth to Audrey. Lacey was disconsolate, heartbroken. Page after page of his journal was filled with little more than Frederick Lacey’s misery written all over them. He raised his daughter by himself. Audrey was the light of his life, until she committed suicide in 1940. He was devastated by her loss as well as the unanswered questions she left behind. Thereafter, Frederick Lacey lived alone. He did not marry again until well into his sixties. His second wife, a mature and wealthy Englishwoman, widow of a close friend, died of natural causes after fourteen years of marriage. There were, of course, no children from this union. Clearly, he was fond of his second wife, but Aminette and Audrey were the women he loved. Lacey’s sense of personal despair, at the loss, first of his wife, then of his daughter was so great, reading about it seemed to Harry an unwarranted imposition on the man’s privacy.
During the 1920s Lacey met and allied himself with Joe Kennedy in a lucrative liquor-smuggling chain. Lacey was the European end. His ships delivered the stuff, mainly Irish whiskey, English gin and French wines, to Cuba, where Kennedy’s special friends picked them up. Lacey’s partners included what he referred to as “men of exalted position” in Sicily. Their counterparts in the United States participated also, not as his associates but as Kennedy’s. Taking a cue from his father, Lacey had money everywhere, in a multitude of currencies. Sometimes huge amounts. In London dinner party conversation, it was said, by more than a few who claimed to know, that Frederick Lacey could be stranded in any country of the world, cut off from his funds elsewhere, and still be a very wealthy man. Some stories had him with secret stashes of cash in Asia, Latin America and other faraway places. And of course, there were always the rumors about the Czar’s gold.
Joe Kennedy opened the United States to him. Millions of Lacey’s dollars went to Wall Street and when the market crashed in ’29, he bought while others sold. Impressed with Roosevelt’s New Deal, he continued buying. The war in Europe curtailed his taste for American equities, but when the war was over, Lacey doubled his Wall Street holdings and then doubled them again in the 1950s.
In the early years, his friendship with Joe Kennedy was especially close and enduring. Lacey was unattached and Kennedy lived as if he were too. They were young, rich and eager to cut a wide swath through European nightlife. A weekend in Paris, wrote Lacey, ended up being close to a month, with a side trip to Rome. Lacey was not a workaholic. He prized good work over hard work, quality over quantity. He never let work interfere with enjoyment, or enjoyment interfere with work. Joe Kennedy had an eye-more of a need, Lacey wrote-for beautiful women. The more of them the better. Lacey and Kennedy made a great pair. Together, the two of them raised more than their share of hell in London and on the continent.
In 1930, at age 32, Lacey met Anthony Wells-a fresh, young, ruling-class lawyer who was to be, in later years, knighted by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Anthony Wells became his friend and personal attorney. He handled all of Lacey’s private and family legal affairs, but never touched his business concerns in any way. Wells never inquired and Lacey never offered any information about the source of his fortune. Each man found the arrangement comfortable.
During the summer of 1940, while Joseph P. Kennedy was the American Ambassador to England, most of the Kennedy family visited London. Audrey Lacey spent much of her time that summer partying with the Kennedy boys- Joe Jr., the oldest of the four, and his brother Jack, two years younger. To her father’s keen eye, she seemed to be mostly with Joe Jr. When the summer ended, and the Kennedys returned to America, Audrey became depressed and withdrawn. Her father thought it would pass. It didn’t. On a chilly afternoon in September, three days before German planes dropped their first bombs on England, a brokenhearted and pregnant Audrey Lacey committed suicide. She left a note disclosing her condition, mentioning “J. J.” Her grieving father came to understand that to mean Joe Jr. With Audrey’s death, the friendship between Lacey and Joseph P. Kennedy was over. The two men never spoke or saw each other ever again. For Kennedy, who resigned his post and returned to America in disgrace two months later, there was some embarrassment. For Lacey there was only a burning need for revenge.
During WWII Lacey was given carte blanche by Winston Churchill. His “special help,” as Churchill used to call it, not only kept Allied supplies moving, it facilitated communication with underground movements across Nazi- occupied Europe. Many of the relationships Lacey developed in the First War were renewed. He worked tirelessly for a British victory over the Germans. He seemed to be everywhere at once. There were rumors again, and stories, fantastic stories. Churchill was not bothered. “I don’t care!” he shouted more than once at the mention of Frederick Lacey’s alleged excesses. “Even if it’s true, I do not care.” The official complaints stopped, but the talk never halted. It was said he used Allied shipping to move illegal cargo, even treasures of war, from place to place. Lacey’s name became attached to events, about which he later wrote he had nothing to do with. The old tales of Russian gold after World War One gave rise to new claims such as Lacey’s supposed involvement in the matter called the Quedlinburg Hoard. He was rarely asked, but when someone was rude enough to bring the subject up, Lacey calmly denied knowledge-of everything. Still people wondered. Did Lacey have anything to do with this or that? Did he?
All the while, Lacey never let Audrey slip too far back in his mind. He held Joe Kennedy Jr. responsible and secretly vowed not to rest until she was avenged. On August 8, 1944, Joe Kennedy Jr. left on a special, secret combat mission. Flying alone, over the English Channel, his aircraft exploded. In his journal, his confession, Lacey disclosed that it was he-Frederick Lacey-who used his position of influence to mastermind the sabotage of Joe Kennedy Jr.’s plane. Lacey wrote coldly of his satisfaction with young Kennedy’s death. “A debt has been paid,” he penned. “But no price can bring my Audrey back.”
By the end of the war, Lacey, not yet 50, was the wealthiest man in Europe. As reward for his wartime service he was given a peerage-Lord Frederick Lacey. It did not slow him one bit. The worldwide web of his connections continued to expand. His empire grew. Throughout the Cold War, he was the primary source of many items of Western luxury for the power elite of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc nations. Lacey could and did move anything, anywhere in the world. Lacey delivered almost anything someone wished, someone who could pay his
