A NEW employee once asked Marc Rich for advice on trading. He expected, perhaps, “Buy low, sell high”, or “Think long-term”. Or perhaps, given Mr Rich’s habit of going to the office at daybreak, “Up with the lark”. Instead, Mr Rich picked up a knife and ran a finger across the edge. “As a trader you often walk on the blade,” he said softly. “Be careful and don’t step off.”

Few walked it more skilfully than Mr Rich. Obsessively, he scanned the globe to see crises coming, wars brewing, shortages looming. He bought before anyone else did, and was first there when countries began to look round for oil or zinc or nickel. After the Korean war, as a mere junior trader at Philipp Brothers in New York, he created a market in mercury, which the army needed for batteries. The price soared. From the late 1960s, somehow anticipating the Arab oil-export embargo, he began to create a spot market for oil. Previously, all crude was tied up by the big companies in inelastic long-term contracts. Starting in Tunisia, Mr Rich began to buy and sell it for immediate delivery, like any other commodity. When the embargo bit after 1973 he was swimming in oil when the majors were struggling, and was able to sell it at a mark-up of as much as $14 a barrel. Some called that profiteering. Mr Rich called it a service charge. He could have demanded more, but that would have been “like taking candy from a baby”.

A free agent in this exhilarating new market, he went from strength to strength. Turning on his insistent, feline charm, he sought out buyers and sellers while his partner Pinky Green arranged shipping. It was a winning combination, forged at Philipp Brothers but soon outgrowing it. In 1974 the two of them, peeved that their bonuses were still so small, left to form Marc Rich + Co. The main office was in Zug in safe, secret Switzerland, no questions asked.

From there, with cat-like tread, Mr Rich found his way round any political or moral obstacle. He sold Soviet oil to apartheid South Africa, despite a UN embargo, and between 1979 and 1994 made profits of around $2 billion there. He sent Soviet and Venezuelan oil to Cuba in exchange for sugar, ignoring America’s ban on trade. He sold on the global market surplus Iranian oil that had flowed to Israel down a secret pipeline, and kept the arrangement going seamlessly despite the Iranian revolution of 1979, another embargo, and the American hostage crisis. The Iranians respected their contracts, he explained. They could not sell their oil, so he bought and sold it for them, using shell companies wherever necessary. Keeping well below the radar, as he always did, he was soon the world’s largest independent oil-trader, with a turnover in 1980 of $15 billion.

Then he stepped off the knife-blade. In 1980-81 he violated America’s domestic oil-price controls by relabelling Texas crude from old fields as new-found, jacking up the price by as much as 400%. He made profits of $105m and shipped them abroad, avoiding taxes of $48m. Once federal prosecutors were after him for that, they charged him with 64 other crimes, including racketeering and “trading with the enemy”. In 1983 he fled to Switzerland with his family, having also tried to spirit away two trunks of subpoenaed business papers.

The outsider

Thereafter he became a fugitive, a star of the FBI’s most-wanted list. He remained—until 1994, when he sold his stake and his company became the vast, tentacular Glencore—the world’s biggest trader of metals and minerals, while darting between Spain, Switzerland and Israel, a citizen of all three. In Marbella or St Moritz, beside a $9.5m swimming pool or among his Braques and Picassos, with a fortune estimated at $2.5 billion, he reconciled himself to exile. His father died in America; he had to say kaddish down the telephone. You cry a little, you move on.

In his own mind he was shy, modest and innocent of everything. American embargoes, he maintained, did not apply to companies based in Switzerland. Bribes, such as the $1m he gave to Nigeria’s transport minister, were paid “in order to be able to do business at the same price as other people were willing to do the business”. Getting round the price controls on oil from old fields was something many of the oil majors had done, too; but only he was faced with criminal prosecution for it.

Why? Perhaps, he mused, because he was Jewish, always the outsider: the refugee boy from Belgium who changed schools so often that he had no friends and hardly talked to anyone. Perhaps because he loved Israel more than America, showering it with money for good causes, helping to airlift Jews from Ethiopia and Yemen, and giving Mossad’s agents contacts in Iran. Or perhaps just because he was making an awful lot of money. He always saw profit where others didn’t care, or dare, to look; he got that from his father, who had started in business by peddling round Antwerp pieces of fabric and scrap metal that factories had thrown away.

In 2001 Bill Clinton pardoned him, his hand pushed by the Israeli prime minister, the king of Spain, an ex-head of Mossad and Mr Rich’s ex-wife Denise, who had given generously to the Clinton library and to Democratic campaigns. The president later regretted his action, calling it “terrible politics”. Mr Rich, oblivious to politics, would have called it good business.