Business was already booming when, late one night in 1990 while rummaging through old NIOC documents stored at his house in Tehran, Bouzari came across an appraisal memorandum addressed to the pre-revolutionary shah's oil ministry. Back in 1976, engineers with the offshore drilling giant Reading & Bates (now Transocean) had explored a natural gas condensate field shared by Iran and Qatar. The field, the engineers had concluded, was one of the richest light gas reserves in the Persian Gulf. The memo referred to the project as the "Qatar North Dome." The name stung Bouzari's sense of Persian pride. During a late night brainstorming session over pizza and non-alcoholic beer, he and a close Tehran-based associate coined a new name for the project: South Pars. The name would become one of the global energy industry's most famous; South Pars is the largest gas field in the world.

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Ayatollah Rafsanjani, Bouzari's old boss, had just been elected president of Iran. Though today's Iran is dominated by Supreme Leader Seyyed Ali Khamenei, Rafsanjani was then by any measure the most powerful man in the country. Khamenei had only recently replaced Ruhollah Khomeini as the religious Supreme Leader and was widely viewed as lacking sufficient theological or jurisprudential training for the job.

Bouzari believed that his former colleagues at NIOC would be unlikely to support his South Pars idea. Too many of them were focused on surviving the leadership transition and wary of risky new ventures. So he reached out to his non-Iranian clients instead. "I went after a whole bunch of foreign companies," Bouzari recalled. "I described the project and said, 'if you go forward and suggest something to Iran, I will help you win the bidding process.'" Several European and Japanese companies formed a consortium to do just that. The major players included Technip (France), TPL and Saipem (Italy), Machinoimport (Russia), and JGC and Chiyoda (Japan); Halliburton, from the U.S., was a subcontractor. (A letter from TPL executives, introducing Bouzari to the U.S. Embassy in Rome as a consultant, can be found here.)

After weeks of intensive negotiations with the Iranian government, they reached an agreement that valued the project at $1.78 billion and required the consortium to put up 90% of the initial costs. Bouzari had been so central to the deal that, when the consortium decided to accept the deal, the group's head called him directly from his private jet. "Dr. Bouzari, you got it," he said, according to Bouzari. "You got it!"

Bouzari, who was set to collect a $35 million commission, popped a champagne bottle.

Not long after both parties executed the letter of intent, Bouzari, now back in Rome, received an unexpected phone call urging him back to Tehran. President Rafsanjani had taken note of Bouzari's role in the lucrative new project, the caller said, and sought an audience with his former aid. Having successfully rebranded himself as a private entrepreneur, Bouzari was reluctant to re-enter Iranian government circles. But this was an invitation he could not decline. Three or so weeks later, he was in Tehran, seated across from Rafsanjani and his son Mehdi. "Thank you for your patriotic initiatives related to South Pars," the president began. "We are proud of you. But we have called you here to discuss our son, agha-Mehdi here, who has just graduated from college. He is very interested in maritime industries, and you must help him learn the business."