"Don't the Arabs Understand I Wanna Make Them Rich?"

I wish I had met Rolf, the German, before he left Beirut for Paraguay on his cut-rate stolen airline ticket. If I had, perhaps I would have learned more about his mission to South America and the extraordinary business arrangement that he was widely reported to have made with the president of Paraguay. If the stories I heard were true (and nobody in Beirut financial circles seemed to doubt them), Rolf's arrangement would result in his dividing with the (continued on page 94)"Don't the Arabs Understand"(continued from page 87) president the profits from everything that Paraguay imports and exports. The proceeds from this venture would be deposited in a Zurich bank, and Rolf's personal security (meaning his insurance against unexpected death) would be guaranteed by a double-signature procedure for withdrawals.

It was Harvey, the Chicago commodities speculator, who told me about Rolf. "You shoulda seen the guy," said Harvey, who seemed uncommonly elated by the encounter. "Your typical Von Stroheim kraut--shaved head, bull shoulders, pig eyes. Looks like the kinda guy they used to put in charge of the pilot lights in the gas chamber, only he told me he fought the Russians in the Battle of Berlin when he was fifteen."

Harvey was openly envious of Rolf's Paraguayan coup, and he had even asked if there was any chance of getting a slice of the deal, but Rolf had turned him down. Harvey was cynically philosophical about it. "I figure he's good for three, maybe four years before some geezer knocks him outa the box," he said. "There ain't no way of keeping that kinda money to yourself forever. Some lunatic is bound to get hungry and dangerous before long."

Harvey met Rolf in the Beirut office of Colby Truman, an American investment specialist who has been based in Lebanon for several years, selling pieces of America. (During Harvey's Middle East tour, Colby was trying to close a deal with a Saudi Arabian for a chain of gas stations in the southwest United States.) Colby is an immensely respectable-looking young man, tall, straight-backed, reverential and neat, the kind one might find arranging youth activities in a wealthy suburb. Before he moved to Beirut, he was a salesman for Investors Overseas Services, Bernie Cornfeld's organization.

Harvey refers to Colby as "my guy in Beirut." It was Colby who, in effect, imported Harvey from Chicago for his tour of three Arab countries last summer; Colby who prepared the itinerary; Colby who set up the introductions to Harvey's prospective clients. Colby went with us when we left Beirut for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to sell Harvey.

I don't mean that literally, of course, the part about selling Harvey; what they were doing, Harvey and Colby, was selling Harvey's expertise in the commodities field. Specifically, they were hoping to persuade certain Arab investors to give Harvey a minimum of $25,000 apiece for Harvey to speculate with in the American and European commodities markets. It was also hoped that employees of Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, would be willing to form investment groups and contribute their collective resources to Harvey for the same purpose.

Harvey was confident that the venture would make him richer by about $5,000,000 during the following year, $2,000,000 at the very least. According to information he received from Colby before he left Chicago, there was one fellow in Saudi Arabia who had at his disposal a Saudi government investment fund of ten billion dollars, and Colby had claimed he could get to the man.

Harvey raised no objection when I asked if I could join his expedition and write about it, though he neglected to tell me as much about his past as he might have done, in particular about his conviction not too long ago for securities fraud, mail fraud and other regrettable lapses from the business ethic. This I discovered by accident after we returned from the Middle East. Since these incidents have no obvious bearing on Harvey's Arab venture, I have used pseudonyms for Harvey and Colby Truman, both of whom, so far as anyone can tell, were engaged in nothing more questionable than taking from the rich to give to the rich. In the world of high finance, this is known as sound business method.

• • •

At the age of 36, Harvey has made a lot of money by speculating in the commodities market, which means, in his case, using other people's money to buy and sell things that other people produce. His favorite commodities are raw foods in bulk: grains, soybeans, coffee, pork bellies, orange juice, cocoa, eggs. He is also active in plywood, gold, silver, copper and platinum. He describes himself as a market fanatic; he says the market is like a monkey on his back, that if bubble gum and dominoes were listed, he'd trade them, too. Harvey says he lives, dreams and will probably die trading commodities.

He refuses to say how much he's worth. "Let's just put it at well over a million and leave it there" is the way he generally answers this question. He encourages people, particularly prospects, as he calls his clients, to ask. His casual response to the question defines his status as an expert and helps to create in the minds of prospects a vista of unlimited money, money for Harvey, money for them. Harvey maintains that while he certainly likes money, he gets his greatest satisfaction from being right; making the right guess at the right moment, outwitting the market. "Being right is an ego trip," he says. "If you're right in a big way, you can feel good the rest of your natural days."

When meeting new clients, particularly neophytes in commodities, Harvey gives them the bad news before the good news. He tells them that an amateur in the market can lose his shirt in the first trade, which is why they need his advice. Then he tells them about the fortunes that other men have made in commodities, about the inventor who earned $2,500,000 on an investment of $18,000 in soybeans, the suburban-Chicago doctor who made $5,000,000 in silver, the former Chicago policeman, now an important man on the exchange, who made between $50,000,000 and $60,000,000 in the insane soybean market of 1973.

It is one of Harvey's little jokes that the 1973 soybean market was so frantic that people were flying to Chicago on trading junkets from Las Vegas.

Harvey's air of authority is persuasive when dealing with prospects At school in Louisiana, his home state, he regularly won the Elmer Gantry contest for his impression of a revivalist preacher, moving people to tears and hysteria with his hell-fire sermons. "It was all a buncha crap," he says now. "They believed that stuff 'cause they had nothing else to believe in."

He lies about his age and tells people he's 32 because he thinks they are more impressed if they believe they're dealing with a young genius. Actually, Harvey was a kind of genius in his youth.

At 21, he bought shares at $50 each in a company that made birth-control pills. He sold out when the stock climbed to $525. The following year he and a friend from New Orleans formed a real-estate partnership in the Bahamas. At election time, they were asked to contribute $25,000 to the incumbent's campaign. "We were kinda like forced to," Harvey says. Their man lost. The winner told Harvey and his partner that if they didn't leave the islands immediately, the new government would revoke their real-estate license, confiscate their bank accounts and, in all likelihood, take more drastic measures. They left.

By the time he was 24. Harvey had accumulated about $450,000 and was bored with real estate. He tried Wall Street for a while but got fed up with that because, he says, it was a game for widows and orphans--bingo, penny ante. Besides, the Securities and Exchange Commission had just brought a suit against some associates, naming Harvey as a defendant, though not a principal. The SEC accused Harvey's friends of masterminding a scheme whose principal components were "paper" banks in Panama, mineral rights in Arizona and several million dollars in unregistered bonds. Harvey, exonerated by the court, decided to set himself up as a speculator in the commodities trade.

"Most people are so dumb about commodities, they don't know what it means," he says. "The way I see it, it's one place where you get big money fast, and now's the time to make it, because sooner or later they're gonna start making rules. Right now, we don't have too (continued on page 102)"Don't the Arabs Understand"(continued from page 94) many rules, which is why we gotta lotta thieves in commodities. I guess you could say 99.9 percent of the people in commodities have got larceny on their minds. Same as a lotta people in other lines of business, am I right?"

His success has not robbed Harvey of the down-home country-boy style he sometimes brings to the surface, as in his pet phrases--"I'll bet dollars to doughnuts" or "That ain't honest; that's like going to the bank with a gun and a mask"--and in his "definitions," the definition of a Louisiana virgin, for instance, being a seven-year-old girl who can run faster than her brother.

Harvey is currently the president of his own company, a financial-management concern in Chicago. He is the author of a weekly market letter, a lecturer in commodities trading, a respected figure in the business. He is a member, in some cases with his wife, of exchanges in Chicago, New York and London.

Harvey's wife disapproved of the Middle East venture. The Arabs, she said, are scum. She persuaded Harvey to contribute a large slice of his profits from the trip to the United Jewish Appeal, a family charity. The idea tickled Harvey, a Catholic, because of its deception. But his wife, a Jew, was still not happy about the trip. She shudders when she uses the word Arab.

She also made Harvey promise to take her to Paris when he returned home. Because of Harvey's job, which keeps him occupied for an average of 15 hours daily, five days a week, he can rarely get away, but he and his wife usually take a ten-day Christmas break in Florida or Puerto Rico. During these vacations, Harvey spends much of the time writing cables or talking on the phone to agents and brokers all over the world who keep him informed of current trends in the market.

The morning we arrived in Beirut, Harvey made several of these calls and received two cables, one from Guatemala about New York coffee stocks and one from an agent in Brazil who reported that the current season's coffee harvest was endangered by a frost. Harvey was then holding a large position in coffee, though he declined to tell me how large. "Let's just say I gotta lotta beans," was his answer.

Every day in Beirut, he would visit a local broker to check the telex machine. In the hotel coffee shop before setting out on this expedition, he would spread the Beirut English-language newspaper and the International Herald Tribune across the table, searching for news of natural or political disasters that might affect one of his commodity positions.

"You gotta keep up with these moves or you get caught holding your pants," he said one morning. The Europeans didn't keep up with the moves in 1973, which is why, in Harvey's vernacular, they got gouged in soybeans. Other unfortunates took a bath in potatoes, got tarred and feathered in beef or murdered in cocoa. In recalling these colorful atrocities, Harvey says the trouble with the goddamn Europeans is they're asleep at the wheel. He has no time for people who don't keep up with the moves. Nor does his philosophy embrace the belief that catastrophe on a large scale is necessarily a bad thing.

"What we pray for in our business," he said after reading his Brazilian-coffee cable, "are things that ordinary people hope will never happen--things like war, famine, pestilence, drought, hardship and strife. You know, anything that makes food scarce. Like right now, I'm praying for a big frost in Brazil."

• • •

Beirut was being torn down and rebuilt when we arrived. Great clouds of rubble dust hung over the city and the clatter of riveting echoed across the ancient roofs. "They're fighting in the mountains," I heard a woman say to her daughter in the hotel bar one afternoon. "No, Ma, they're building the new parking lot behind the Holiday Inn."

The city was crowded with foreigners, many of them cloaked and hooded Saudis and Kuwaitis who sat in the cafés along Rue Hamra and eyed the passing nipples and bottoms through heavy dark glasses. Americans and Europeans gathered with Lebanese and Armenians, talking in low voices about brokerage, letters of credit, commissions and government rebates. The mosque near Colby Truman's office summoned the faithful to prayer five times a day with a taped exhortation broadcast through powerful speakers in the minaret. Harvey, when informed of this, said, "I guess the priest guy is too busy with his broker." At the Beirut Yacht Club, where we had lunch the first day on the lawn, beneath a tree that shed small blossoms on the plates, a large private cruiser with a Venezuelan registration was moored at the pier. Under the canopy on the afterdeck, six men sat around a table, making expressive gestures over a heap of scattered documents and arguing in Spanish, English and Arabic about an oil survey on the lower Nile.

I got the impression that half the population was making deals with the other half. An associate of Colby Truman's, a Lebanese-American who had recently returned to Beirut after 25 years in Southern California real estate, told me about a transaction that had been set up the previous month by another Lebanese to import Russian cement from Sevastopol for delivery at Tripoli and overland shipment to Kuwait.

"This guy had no money, literally nothing," Colby's friend said. "But it didn't matter, you see, you don't need money here. He paid for the cement with a contract guaranteeing payment on delivery. Then he took the contract to a bank that gave him a letter of intent to back the deal. He took that letter and the cement contract to a Greek outfit that supplies ships and crews. The bank held a lien against the ships in case anything went wrong. So. What you've got this far is a penniless Lebanese who suddenly finds himself the owner of a fleet of ships and thousands of tons of cement. It can't work, right? Hah! The guy delivered and he got paid off. I can't figure how, but it worked. That's the way people do business here--they spend months putting together deals that cannot possibly work, deals that have huge important chunks missing, and the crazy thing is, they work. It's madness, sheer goddamn madness. I have to keep reminding myself: Remember, Arabs like cats and backgammon. That's the kind of people they are, you see. Maybe they're uneducated by American standards, but, boy, they sure know how to count."

We lunched at the yacht club every day. It was always crowded with beautiful girls in bikinis who sun-bathed by the pool and played noisy water games with middle-aged men, many of whom bore remarkable resemblances to the shah of Iran or the late King Farouk. Colby would sometimes point out the more notorious members, like the free-lance Swiss prostitute and the wonderfully depraved-looking Italian who was reputed to have swindled his brothers out of the family money and was now running a string of girls for visiting dignitaries. His most recent accomplishment had been supplying two girls for a videotape movie filmed at 30,000 feet over the Saudi Arabian desert in a Learjet belonging to a gentleman from one of the gulf oil sheikdoms.

• • •

Harvey's business itinerary during our three-day stay in Beirut consisted of half a dozen meetings with individual prospects, the wealthiest and most influential men Colby knew in the Beirut community, and two seminars that were held in a rented conference room in Harvey's hotel. I went to every private meeting and attended both seminars.

The meetings invariably followed the same routine. Colby would introduce Harvey by describing his successes in the market, successes that, he never failed to mention, had brought substantial personal wealth to Harvey. This would be followed with a soft-spoken, rather hesitant suggestion that what Harvey had done for himself he could do for others. Finally, the money; Harvey's minimum (continued on page 202)"Don't the Arabs Understand"(continued from page 102) account was $25,000. This was for discretionary accounts, meaning that the client put up the money, Harvey played the market and took 20 percent of the profits. Unlike other brokers, however, Harvey charged no fees for his handling of discretionary accounts.

Throughout this preamble, the prospect would sit in his chair, nodding thoughtfully, asking the occasional question and, in some cases, fingering a string of worry beads. Not all of the prospects spoke English.

At the offices of an Iraqi export/import company, the discussion was conducted through the chief clerk. The prospect interrupted frequently and fiercely, shaking his head firmly when Colby's remarks had been translated and delivering a short burst of urgent Arabic.

"He say you give him your money and he get you a return of 18 percent," the interpreter said.

Harvey gave one of his hungry snarls.

"Who needs that? I can already get 100 percent-plus."

The Iraqi's eyes narrowed scornfully. There was another, more voluble stream of Arabic.

"He say his door go both ways. He say he and his two brothers work 14 hours a day and they don't want no more money. He say he can make you 30 percent if you interested. Also he prefer dealing with other Iraqis and looking for investment in Arab countries. He want to know how you make 100 percent on your money. He have many friends who will like to meet you. He understand what you selling but he is opposed. On religious grounds. He say goodbye."

"Jesus," Harvey said as we drove back to the hotel, "I've heard of some peculiar things before, but I ain't ever heard of anyone in business saying he was against making money on religious grounds."

The next call was at the office of a wealthy travel agent who was known to have had some misfortunes in the silver market. Colby went through his presentation again, told the travel agent how fortunate he was to have the opportunity of Harvey's expert advice, and did the travel agent think he might like to come in with $25,000--or more, if he felt like it.

The prospect, a small soft man in a roguish yellow jump suit, said he would need a few days to think about it.

"You have to be patient," Colby said when we went out. "These people are difficult, but once you're in, you're there for the duration."

"I know it, but I hafta get in first. Don't they understand I just wanna make them rich? Religious grounds! Jesus jumping Christ!"

• • •

"Wait till you meet the sheik," Colby said. "I just know he's ready for this kind of thing."

The sheik was an elderly Lebanese gentleman in a Cardin suit. He received us in a magnificent apartment in the city's most exclusive residential district, fingering his beads and gazing politely around the room while black servants filled our coffee cups and Harvey praised the sheik's collection of French landscapes and Regency silver. When Colby had finished, the sheik said that he was too busy trading Nigerian cocoa to assume any new obligations, but his son, who had recently married in Paris and was now on a world-cruise honeymoon, might be interested when he came home. The sheik then excused himself, saying that his chauffeur was waiting downstairs to drive him to a lunch appointment with the president of Lebanon.

"He'll come through," Colby said, back on the street. "I'll keep after him. Once we get the sheik, we get everyone who counts in Lebanon. He'll come through."

The last major prospect was the middle brother of a wealthy Palestinian family that owns an export/import trading firm and whose offices we had visited the second day in Beirut. The man had invited Colby and Harvey to lunch, and Colby was optimistic that the occasion would produce an account of considerable value. Instead, the Palestinian delivered a lecture on Middle East politics. The Israelis were bombing southern Lebanon that week and the local press had been filled with photographs of dismembered babies and homemade coffins.

"Everything has changed since October 1973," the Palestinian said. "We've got the oil, we've got the money. You want what we've got, but you must understand your psychological position in the Arab world these days. We don't need you to come here and tell us you can teach us something. You may say you want to cooperate, if you like, work with us, yes. But don't tell us you can teach us, please. We have been here too long for that. You can tell all your friends in America that when King Faisal of the Saudis says he will pray in Jerusalem before he dies, he means what he says. And when we Palestinians make that vow, we also mean it. We will go home to Palestine one day whether the Americans wish it or not. You can delay this, but you will not prevent it."

"I guess this Palestine deal is a big thing over here," Harvey said, in the tone of a man who couldn't understand why. "People don't talk about it like that way back home."

Our host smiled expansively. "I don't suppose they do, my friend. They have to start thinking like that first."

• • •

The seminars proved to be another disappointment. The first night, seven people showed up, five of them from Colby's office, including the office boy, who picked his nose and cast hungry looks at the trays of pastries and coffee at the back of the room. Harvey raced through his material, scribbled some graph lines on a blackboard, answered a few aimless questions, went out to dinner with Colby and got drunk.

The second night brought a much bigger crowd, however, about 50 people, some of them known to Colby as investors. Colby took the podium to deliver his full preamble, saying that after looking at a lot of investment services and financial institutions, and after long deliberation, he had chosen that well-known and highly respected commodities figure, Harvey, who was a bright, young 32 with a proven success record and who had made for himself well over a million dollars and much, much more for his clients.

There was some hard questioning from the floor, parried by Harvey with consummate skill. As always, his theme was: Listen to me, have faith, give me your money and I'll make you rich. Sure, Harvey said, you can make money dealing through a big brokerage firm like Merrill Lynch, but big brokerage firms are too busy to give personal attention of the sort he offered. Go inside one of those big offices and all you see are secretaries sitting around writing memos about pencils, market analysts making a fat $15,000 a year. You ever see a market analyst driving a Rolls-Royce or a Caddie? If they're so smart, how come they ain't rich, tell me that?

The commodities market, Harvey continued, was like a poker game where ten men go in with 1000 bucks apiece and one guy comes out with ten grand while the others go home broke. "You gotta know the odds, 'cause if you don't, the average guy going into the market has about as much chance of making money over the long term as building a snowman in Venezuela on the Fourth of July. See, the market is a very vicious animal, and if you don't know the odds, there's no way you can beat it over the long haul. What you need is someone who knows what's happening on the inside, and that's why I'm here tonight. We're talking about professional management of money. If you wanna let your money earn a safe 11 percent, you shouldn't even be in this room. I'm here to appeal to your greed, not your noble standards."

Nothing. Nobody came forward to embrace the new faith. Some asked questions, a few people expressed skepticism and a bulky Armenian broker tried to pump Harvey for free advice about silver. But there were no takers, not even when Colby mounted the podium again and said that although Harvey normally accepted only $25,000 accounts, he would consider taking a pooled account of $2000 per member. It didn't work. The seminar broke up and we went downstairs to the hotel bar, accompanied by the bulky Armenian, who was rewarded for his wheedling persistence on the silver question with a lengthy and, as I later discovered, compelling explanation by Harvey about why the Armenian should seriously consider the merits of moving into the coffee market.

On the face of it, Harvey's three days in the capital of Lebanon had not been a success.

• • •

We left Beirut for Kuwait City on a midnight plane filled with snoring Arabs and sweating drunks, tattooed roustabouts, some of them, going home to the oil fields after their well-deserved binge in the Lebanese fleshpots. Plunging through the blackness over Syria and Iraq, we saw the first distant flares of burning gas waste from the wells scattered across the miniature continent of the Arabian peninsula. Kuwait City formed a brilliant patch of light framed by black desert to the north, south and west, by the gulf to the east. The airline maps, like all maps in the Arab countries, refer to it as the Arabian Gulf, not the Persian. The word Israel never appears. On the relief map hanging on the lobby wall in the Kuwait-Sheraton, the word Israel had been obliterated with a knife and replaced with the word Palestine.

Colby had made only four appointments for Harvey in Kuwait City, one with a small slick oily doctor in a black shirt; he lived in a hotel and drove a new Buick. He was no longer active in the markets, he said; he had moved into a more interesting area, arranging foreign loans at a high rate of interest that gave him commissions of 20 percent. "An international loan shark," Harvey muttered in disgust as we left the doctor and his Buick in the hotel parking lot.

We drove across town by taxi, stopping at a garage to fill up on 90-octane at 22 cents a gallon. The next prospect was an Englishman, general manager of a Kuwaiti trading and contracting firm. He listened in thinly concealed boredom, steepling his fingers under his chin and tapping his well-shod feet on the carpet. "Not our sort of thing, really," he said, wrinkling his eyebrows into top gear. "Can't help you. Sorry."

Harvey's mood sunk with each passing hour. All that money out there and all of it, apparently, inaccessible. A country that boasts the world's second-highest per-capita income (Abu Dhabi, a gulf emirate, is first, with $100,000 per Abu Dhabian per annum) should be bursting with people anxious to multiply their wealth. In 1974 alone, Kuwait, this tiny parcel of land, expected to earn seven billion dollars from oil revenue. By 1980, its foreign reserves would amount to about 100 billion dollars, provided that oil production continued, and there was no reason to think that the flow would stop. And all this treasure pouring into a country smaller than Massachusetts and whose capital city 20 years ago was surrounded by a wall to protect it from desert raiders. The only part of the wall left these days is a chunk of sun-baked blocks that stands on a traffic island at the end of the six-lane highway that connects the city to its brand-new airport.

"These guys don't deserve all that money," Harvey said. "They didn't do anything creative or aggressive to get it, they just sat there scratching themselves until it came out of the goddamn ground."

Colby nodded soothingly. "At least it's been good for the people," he said, ever ready to be noble. "Free hospitals, free education, free phone service. No income tax. People get paid if they work or stay home. I mean, that's what you call a real welfare state."

"Yeah, sure, free. Big deal. Nothing is for nothing. These clowns will find that out one of these days."

The third Kuwait prospect was another washout. A Palestinian, he was due to be sworn in for Kuwait citizenship that day and he was nervous about the occasion, knowing that those in charge of such matters sometimes deny the benediction of naturalization at the last moment. More than half the Kuwait population is foreign born, and half of these are Palestinian. Except at the highest levels of management, they run the state bureaucracy and private business, a circumstance that has led many people to wonder what would happen to Kuwait and other oil countries if Palestine actually became a nation and everyone went home to live there. Harvey's prospect had spent most of his adult life in Kuwait and was anxious to get his papers so that his family could qualify for the benefits, Kuwait being a welfare state only for its citizens. He was therefore unable to concentrate on the question of commodity investments. Besides, he had lost $100,000 in the precious-metals market during the past year and said he felt too unnerved for further risks.

The last appointment in Kuwait was with another Palestinian. We had been in his office for about an hour, seemingly wasted, in which Colby and Harvey went through the usual presentation and finished off with the $25,000 question. The prospect, a ruddy-faced burly figure in a sport shirt and sneakers, appeared to be disinclined. The company had too much on its hands, he said; it already maintained 65 bank accounts in different parts of the world, it had brokers and agents throughout Europe and the United States, and another commitment would mean only more paperwork. It was all rather tiring, he implied, all these telephone calls and telex messages. Yes, it was true, the company was active in silver, quite a lot of silver, actually. The present position was around 6,000,000 ounces, worth $30,000,000 at the prevailing rate.

You could see the hungry flames burning in Harvey's eyes. Thirty million dollars in silver! Christ! This cramped little office--a suite of three or four small rooms crowded with telex machines and desks; this large unshaven man in the Hawaiian shirt, sneakers and no socks, talking about his 65 bank accounts as though they were so much dirty washing and throwing out remarks like, "Oh, yes, we pay quite a lot in commissions, I suppose, about a million a year, something like that."

Reverence and lust fought for control of Harvey's face. The big one, at last! After seeking the Grail from one end of Beirut to the other, after all the rebuffs and no-shows and losers and wasters, he had finally, God knows how, stumbled onto the source or at least a big rich tributary. Harvey leaned forward in his chair, planting his size tens firmly on the floor. Colby had warned him before about displaying the soles of his feet; Arabs consider it offensive, and though Harvey had dismissed this as the most ludicrous crap (leading Colby to accuse him of having ruined his chances in one of the Beirut meetings) and though the Kuwaiti Palestinian was, in fact, a Christian, not a Moslem, Harvey was not going to take the risk of offending him.

"So you like the metals," Harvey said. "How about gold?"

The Palestinian shrugged heavily.

"I'm bearish on gold," Harvey said. "Everyone else in the world thinks gold will go up, I think it'll go down. Just because the U.S. Government is talking about passing a law allowing Americans to hold gold, people say the price will go through the roof."

"The Americans have been talking about such a law for years."

"Huh! They said man would never fly. Look at Kuwait, a desert 30 years ago. If the U.S. dumps all its Fort Knox gold on the market, don't you think Russia and the South Africans will dump theirs, too?"

"What about Asia and Europe?"

"Sure, but that's what makes markets."

"You talk about a flip of the coin."

"Lookit. Those Americans who really want gold, they already own it, see, in coins or in illegal gold in Switzerland. Gold don't make sense. What can you do with it? Put it in your teeth?"

The Palestinian allowed a faint smile to twitch his lips.

"How old are you?" he said.

"Thirty-two."

The Palestinian pursed his lips. Harvey, all confidence, leaned in for the attack.

"What does your present broker charge?"

"Double commissions. And you?"

"No commission, just 20 percent of what I make for you."

The Palestinian sighed decisively and pushed himself away from the wall, where he had been leaning throughout the meeting.

"All right, we'll work it like this. I'll open an account for $25,000. I'll call you in Chicago 15 minutes before the market opens. Every Thursday, starting when you get back. We can use the telex for other matters or you can call me collect if you need to talk to me."

He shook hands solemnly with Harvey and Colby.

"We've had the feeling for a long time," he said, naming one of the largest brokerage firms in the world, "that we're just another number to them. We want more personal attention and better advice. I don't care about the $25,000, it's only pennies. Let's hope you turn it into dollars. If you do well for us, we may consider transferring our entire brokerage account to you."

Back at the hotel, we celebrated with the strongest beverages legally available in Kuwait. Colby and I had coffee, Harvey had a chocolate milk shake.

"I'm going to come back alone sometime to talk real estate to that man," Colby said. "I think he might be ready to buy a little piece of California."

"While you're at it," said Harvey, who was feeling quite pleased with himself, "why not throw in Los Angeles and a couple of freeways?"

• • •

Dhahran Airport in Saudi Arabia, when we arrived late that night, was the scene of steaming chaos. Stepping off the plane, it felt as though someone had opened a door to the biggest and hottest furnace on earth. We were told later that the temperature at noon had registered 123 degrees, with 100 percent humidity. Although it was nearly midnight, there were about 15,000,000 Arab men milling around in the terminal, shouting and jostling and fondling their privates through dazzling white robes. The mood was that of a crowd that had just witnessed the greatest sports victory in history and was now waiting for an execution.

It took about an hour to clear customs. Robed officials rifled through every bag in sight, looking for booze, girlie magazines, vanilla extract, Angostura bitters, Stars of David and all the other dangerous products that are forbidden entry by Saudi law. We knew about the restrictions. In the list of travel hints we picked up at the Aramco offices in Beirut, we read: "You should dress very conservatively. Government regulations, currently being enforced very strictly, prohibit tight-fitting or revealing clothing on women and long-hair styles for men."

We were met and driven to the hotel by Colby's Aramco friends, one of whom, a leading organizer of the Aramco employee investment group, was horrified to learn that I was a journalist, from Playboy of all things. We had rather a warm discussion about this that ended with the Aramco man--or Aramcan, to use company jargon--warning me that if the Saudis knew I was in the country under false pretenses I would be sent to prison. Unfortunately, I had not entered the country as a reporter; when I applied for my visa in Beirut, Colby had suggested I put down writer, rather than journalist, as occupation.

"What he's really here for," said Harvey, making one of his unfortunate jokes, "is to see if he can set up a catering service for bar mitzvahs."

"That's not funny," the Aramcan snapped. "You could be locked up for making a remark like that."

"Jesus," Harvey mumbled, "what are they gonna do if they find out my wife's Jewish?"

In my room afterward, convinced that our Aramco friend would turn fink (his job in the company was liaison between Aramco and the Saudi government), I destroyed my press card and ripped the letterhead off some Playboy stationery. Then, ashamed though I am to admit it, I wedged a chair and a chest against the door. To be stricken with paranoia in a place like Saudi Arabia is no fun at all.

The problem of my presence was not mentioned the rest of the time we spent in Dhahran. Colby said later it was because the Aramcans had compromised themselves by knowing I was there and failing to tell anyone. "Just keep your notebook out of sight," he said as we drove through the guarded gates of the Aramco compound. "If you have to write anything down, do it in the john."

He and Harvey spent the next few hours arranging that night's commodities seminar, while I wandered around the compound, which seemed a blend of army camp and suburban tract, full of government-issue huts and company houses that were ranked in size and quality according to the occupant's prestige. In the Aramco commissary, hand-lettered signs on the magazine racks announced which publications had been refused entry or had been censored either by pen or the removal of pages. These subversive periodicals included Reader's Digest, Glamour, Ladies' Home Journal, Vogue, Field & Stream, Redbook and McCall's. The current issues of Time and Newsweek each featured sections of black ink, and certain paragraphs had been excised with scissors. Photographs of girls in miniskirts had been inked over from the waist down.

In a country that for years would not show Minnie Mouse on television because of her gender (though I was told there is now at least one Saudi female on television), these measures are taken for granted. Aramco wives and other females are not allowed to drive cars outside company property, which ends at the compound gates. One lady told me that when her taxi driver collapsed while she was going into town, she took the wheel, intending to drive him to the nearest doctor, but she was stopped by a policeman, arrested and fined. Women who appear publicly in shorts have had their legs sprayed with ink by the ever-watchful religious police.

Conservatism of the most rigorous kind, in all matters, is to be expected in a kingdom where drunks are flogged in public, as are merchants who break the Sabbath rule, and where the hands of thieves are amputated after a third conviction, drug peddlers beheaded. There is virtually no crime in Saudi Arabia, however, nor are there theaters, cinemas, dance halls, national elections, a parliament, political parties, unions or an uncensored press. But there is a king, the frugal, monogamous, ardently religious Faisal, and his people revere him.

He is reported to be deeply concerned about his country's new wealth. During the next five years, it is predicted that Saudi Arabia will accumulate about a third of the world's central-bank reserves, a remarkable transition for a country whose ruler 40 years ago, the legendary Ibn-Saud, was said to have carried the nation's wealth in the saddlebags of his horse.

Harvey's Dhahran seminar drew the biggest crowd of his Middle East tour. He spoke for two hours, seducing his listeners with his staccato Chicago delivery ("I'll be short, long, sideways and upside down--I don't care, just as long as I'm right in the market") and dismissing economic experts and market analysts as people who made predictions and then explained six months later why they didn't work out. The throat mike he wore and a TV camera in front of the rostrum relayed the proceedings to another audience of prospects at the big Aramco base in Ras at Tannura.

When Harvey stepped down, to enthusiastic applause, Colby took over for the money pitch, explaining that Harvey was offering a special rate to Aramcans for his pooled-account special of $2000 a head. A long line of people formed at the back of the hall for copies of Harvey's market letter and account application papers. Afterward, Colby said 55 people had signed up. Harvey went to someone's house to lie down; the punishing heat, and the hotel water, which smelled of vomit and tasted of sweat, had given him an acute case of desert belly. I went with a group of Aramcans to the house of a man who said he was born in Transylvania and was a direct descendant of Count Dracula.

There, in a comfortable living room decorated with nude gatefolds, like a GI bunker at the front line, we sampled our host's homemade booze, some of which was almost a year old. We had 120-proof "Kahlúa," 100-proof brown and white (whisky/bourbon and gin/vodka) and a 180-proof invention called glug that looked like crème de menthe and tasted like high-octane aviation fuel. I was given a copy of "The Blue Flame," a Xeroxed booklet of 25 pages of highly technical instructions for manufacturing all kinds of alcohol, from seven-day beer to ten-day raspberry slob and nine-month bourbon.

"You don't know just how important those three little words are, 'The Blue Flame,'" one of the guests confided. "They count for a helluva lot in this part of the world, almost as much as the Aramco slogan."

"What's the slogan?"

"Keep the concession. That's the slogan and the holy creed around here. No matter what the Saudis do, no matter how much shit they make us eat, we always have those three little words burning at the back of the old brain. Keep the concession."

The next day, our last in Saudi Arabia, we drove south to a second Aramco installation, passing a towering flame that roars out of a cavernous pipe among the dunes and that, an engineer informed me, burns off between $7,000,000 and $8,000,000 daily in natural gases, there being no facilities to collect and store this surplus. The engineer said that compared with some of the waste discharge in other oil fields, the one we saw was quite minor.

Harvey, still not recovered from his stomach troubles, delivered one of his pentecostal-evangelist sermons as we drove through the desert, ranting and screeching with such fervor that the Saudi driver peered anxiously into his rearview mirror. At one point, when Harvey trumpeted into the man's ear with a bellow of singular force, the car swerved wildly across the highway. "Goddamn heathens," Harvey said.

The commodities seminar was held in the employees' recreation center. Fewer than a dozen people showed up, but Harvey captured them with his inimitable style, and when it was over nearly everyone signed up for the $2000 special. Colby left early to catch a plane. He had private business elsewhere with a Saudi millionaire who had expressed interest in one of Colby's real-estate deals. Harvey and I drove back to the Dhahran hotel and hung around hopefully but vainly in the lobby, where a flight of stewardesses had just checked in, but a troop of bronzed pilots arrived and squeezed us out of the running. "Just as well," Harvey said in the elevator. "You'd probably get the goddamn thing chopped off with a rusty dagger and stuffed down your throat if they caught you screwing someone."

Early the following morning, we drove out to the airport and parted company, Harvey returning to Chicago via Frankfurt. I flew back to Beirut. I wanted to find out whether or not Harvey's advice on commodities had borne any fruit for those who acted on it.

• • •

In Beirut, I discovered that several people, including the bulky Armenian who attended the second seminar, had committed themselves heavily to coffee on Harvey's recommendation. The Armenian had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to a broker I knew from the previous visit and who himself, within the space of a month, was destined to bring his own company to bankruptcy through imprudent speculations in the London commodities market. Several weeks later, when I was back in the United States, I wrote to Colby to find out how the Beirut coffee speculators were progressing. In his reply, Colby wrote: "This commodity has dropped very significantly contrary to Harvey's opinion. This is as wrong as I have seen him on any recommendation. Unfortunately, a number of people here who have been impressed by Harvey's market letter and by meeting him bought coffee heavily. They then proceeded to violate every trading technique that Harvey was advocating. Whereas Harvey got out of his coffee positions with limited losses, these clients continued to maintain positions and are suffering very heavily. Unfortunately, their reaction is against Harvey rather than against the stupidity of their own trading. I am afraid they will take it as an indication of Harvey's poor advice in spite of virtually all his other recommendations being successful."

• • •

Five months have passed since Harvey's first trip to the Middle East. He went back again in September, this time with his wife, via Paris and the Riviera. While they were in Beirut, Spiro Agnew was staying at the hotel, the same one we used when we were there in June. Harvey's wife had walked up to Agnew in the lobby to ask him how he was getting along. Agnew said he was doing all right.

Beirut, Harvey said, had produced nothing except for a client to whom Colby had introduced him on his second visit and who had opened a discretionary account for $25,000. Harvey said he had doubled this man's money. The Kuwaiti Palestinian with the 65 bank accounts sent his check for $25,000, plus a second check in the same amount. Through speculations in silver, wheat, soybeans, platinum, copper and oats, Harvey says he has earned approximately $2,000,000 for the Palestinian since June, partly with the Palestinian's $50,000 and partly with funds still held by the Palestinian's brokers in the United States. The brokers have made an arrangement with Harvey to take his advice on certain speculations.

The Palestinian, who has lost almost $10,000,000 in the recent and severely depressed silver market, sent Harvey a third check for $25,000 as a gesture of appreciation, a personal gift. Harvey says he can see no reason why he should share this with Colby. When Harvey visited Kuwait the second time, the Palestinian gave Harvey's wife a gold necklace worth $3500.

Last week, the Palestinian lost $580,000 in silver. In two days of trading this week, however, Harvey made him $32,000 in soybeans and $20,000 in other commodities.

The Aramcans in Saudi Arabia have also made money with Harvey. Of those who signed up for the pooled account at $2000 each, 20 Aramcans actually committed themselves and ten more signed up later. Their money went into silver, copper, platinum and plywood and their investment has increased in value by 40 percent, Harvey says. I had already received an independent report of the group's progress from an Aramcan I met when we were in Dhahran. "I would classify their program as being off to a good basic start, and in today's market, it could be defined as very successful," he wrote last month. "I would think if their performance continues, they will attract a lot more investors. I have been able to confirm this information by two individual investors in the program and feel it is reliable."

Harvey says he has made about $83,000 for himself in the past five months as a result of the Middle East venture, and though this falls a long way short of the $2,000,000 or the $5,000,000 he expected to make, he says he still expects to reach his original goal before 12 months pass.

When we met the other night, I mentioned Harvey's father, who, I recalled from a previous conversation, ran a still with Harvey's uncle during Prohibition. "He lived by his wits, didn't work too hard, if you know what I mean," Harvey said. "Gambled with cards, horses, raindrops down the window, water off a spigot--you stake it, he'd bet it. Course, he's 73 now, slowed down a bit. Runs a bar and bookie joint in Philadelphia. I guess I learned something from the old man. One of the first jobs I had was in Baton Rouge in a gambling joint. Used to deal cards at night. You ain't ever seen me with a deck of cards. I'm not bad."

I said goodbye to Harvey on a street corner in Chicago. His hardtop Rolls was parked at the curb with a ticket on the windshield. He stuffed it into a pocket, tucked his paunch behind the steering wheel and accelerated into the evening traffic on the northbound lane of Lake Shore Drive. This being the day after Thanksgiving, I expect he's at home with his family, praying, in his own way, for another frost.