had different problems than the very wealthy. Dealing with a billion dollars was different from dealing with $100 million. “If you had a billion dollars I would think the last thing you should be worried about was money, in truth money was what you most worried about. How to make more of it, how to give away more of it, how to protect your children from it, how to hide it from your wife or husband, how to minimize your taxes on it. The traditional wealth service structure, an accountant, and investment advisor, a personal lawyer, and an idiot brother-in-law, became hopelessly outdated as amounts exponentially increased. “You can’t spend a billion dollars, you can just reallocate it to a different investment class. And you can’t give away a billion dollars without a vast staff, in effect going into the business of giving away money, yet another business you are likely to know little about.” For a period, one part of his activities, he says, was recovering monies for countries looted by exiled dictators or military strongmen. Then, in his telling, he was representing a series of vastly wealthy people and families—not just doing their bidding or their investing, but helping them to navigate the ambitions of their wealth. If they had big dreams before, it’s nothing to what they can have now. If early in his career he might have seemed like a sort of George Peppard (there’s a physical resemblance) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a charming hustler, later he’s George Peppard in Banacek, a smart and astute operator. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022882