The 90s — Nothing Succeeded Like Excess

Malcolm Forbes, Robert Maxwell, and Donald Trump — Moguls of The 90s

Jeff Cunningham

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Once Upon A Terroir

55 min readMay 31, 2021

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Marrakech, Morocco

During the summer of 1990, if you were somebody, you were there. If you weren't invited, you lied and said you couldn’t make it. That’s how it was. The 90s were about fun and that meant with the right people who had the right moves and hung with the right people, or so the partygoers believed. They had worked to find the American dream, and now it was time to let it hang out. The surprise was it would be the last time.

The guests at the birthday party as rich as kings. In fact, richer than Hassan II, their host the king of Morocco. The gathering was a veritable yellow pages of celebrityhood from Hollywood, business, politics, and some were just plain famous like Calvin Klein. The gossip columnists went crazy when they realized gathering in one place on one weekend was Donald Trump before he would play larger roles, Robert Maxwell before he died and before his daughter, Ghislaine would abet a child molester, Henry Kravis before he divorced Carolyne who shortly would appear on Fortune’s cover “Trophy Wives.” The Barry Dillers were there which Diane von Furstenberg would make the fashionistas go crazy, the two media mogul Walters — Annenberg and Cronkite — were martini guzzling while holding court, and let’s not forget Henry Kissinger, Lee Iacocca, Gianni Agnelli. Women were out in force. Washington Post CEO Kay Graham, Bianca Jagger, and of course, Barbara Walters, rounded out the gang of notables.

They lived on a higher plateau. Henry David Thoreau said, “most men lived lives of quiet desperation.” They discovered the cure. It wasn’t just money. They had come into that a long time ago. It was that ineffable attribute called style. It meant your life was never boring, never lonely unless they wanted to be. They were masters of the universe. Until that fateful night in 1990 when they had an appointment in Tangiers.

I cornered Walter Annenberg or more accurately he asked me to sit with him to chat. He asked if I wanted to hear about his latest magazine idea. The owner of TV Guide (then richer than the three TV networks) was asking me if I wanted his new idea? The answer was yes, please. The big idea was “obituary,” the name he wanted to give this new magazine. I sat there and stared out into space.

Malcolm Forbes’s

I had lunch with Donald Trump, the real state mogul who would become the most famous or infamous president in American history. He was asked for his autograph as we walked around Casablanca. I

I had lunch with Kay Graham, honcho of the Washington Post, praised the party as she very ungraciously filed gossip-mongering stories back in D.C.

I asked Henry Kissinger which president he admired the most, and it turned out to be Gerald Ford.

These were the kind of people whose achievements, successes, and accolades made them the equivalent of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and Hall of Famers in baseball. Their decorations were denominated by commas in their bank accounts and blue ribbons.

They learned how to play three-dimensional chess called world politics and global business. Their boldness was equaled only by their savvy, which gave them a feel for a good deal. The only thing they did not count on was a delusion.

The media was there in full force, naturally. Acting like a friend, drooling like a predator. They had a ringside seat to an unimagined level of opulence and they weren’t going to miss pending day of the hunting season.

Morocco was theater and stage. The journalists would make sure the glamorous guests would be seen, and hopefully, Morocco would be in the spotlight. As it turned out, the spotlight could cast a harsh lens, and it was why this party was a gathering unlike any the world had seen or would ever see again.

Although the reason they came to Morocco was ostensibly to toast the birthday of the most charming and dynamic impresario of them all, Malcolm Forbes, in fact, the overriding concern was to see and be seen. To them not being seen was next to dying, something not all of them believed would happen to them.

Moroccan had a history of such things. Since Hannibal sacked Rome in 219 B.C. in the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian leader learned the hard lesson that you can only conquer what you control. The Roman general Scipio called Hannibal’s bluff and slaughtered his northern African homeland fifteen years later. The lesson is, “whatever you do unto others, do it so that they can never do it unto you.”

King Hassan was returning the favor. The VIP and the 600 emissaries of capitalist glamor were now his guests for a long weekend to enjoy a balmy late August as a reward for their overpowering success. In the middle of the wrangling, there would be more than a soupçon of frivolity, as Berber dancers whirled their costumes, people feted on pigeon pie called Pastilla, and sweetened mint tea was served at every turn. It promised to be a long, glorious, hedonistic, carefree weekend. Like many promises, it was broken.

The weekend coincided with the exquisite Atlantic breezes that ordinarily wafted along the coast so reliably in August that hotels didn’t bother to install air conditioning. If guests wanted it cooler, all they did was open the window. Few saw that 1989 would be the last year the world was a simple place dividing the world into two Manichean spheres of hot and cold, good and bad, dark and light, set against each other inexorably, or shorthand for the Soviet Union vs. the United States. Now the world would change and would have a similarly distressing effect on the inhabitants who no longer had a center of gravity.

The consequence of so much wealth and unhelpful attention meant this would be the last time the rich and famous felt so daring as to get together in one place. As my old boss used to say, “being rich is to expensive.” He didn’t know how high the price could go.

Palace Guard

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
— William Shakespeare, King Henry IV

When you visit Morocco, you will be greeted by crisply dressed waiters serving sweet mint tea in crystal goblets while watching the evocative undulations of strolling Berber dancers and a seaside floral scent so powerful it can be intoxicating. In 1989, partygoers experienced a somewhat different sensation. The hot, dusty, powerful North African wind known as Sirocco, traveling at speeds upwards of 60 mph, deposited raw heat and sand on the unwary. These summer storms can last a half-day or a week, and locals believe they cause heart failure to migraine headaches and mood disorders. What they certainly do is to make people feel miserable. It isn’t party weather unless your goal is to promote climate change. Oh yes, Siroccoas are good for one thing, anchovies, which can only be caught during season. While pizza lovers may rejoice, the celebrities felt more like the steam bath of the century.

The Dar el-Makhzen Palace near Tangiers was the King’s summer home, and like the rest of the country, was unpleasantly warm by 10 a.m. as Garde Maroc officer Sabti took toured the property. He wasn’t wondering if the weather would make people uncomfortable. That was a certainty. He wanted to find out how they would react. Would they complain, especially women? Or would they take a “let’s have a great time just the same” attitude? What kind of trouble would they make? Would it encourage celebrities to wander the streets of Casablanca or Marrakech, where they could get into real trouble? The mathematical odds of 600 of the world’s most famous people sweltering in a country like Morocco with nothing to do but drink and dance were daunting.

In this part of the world, security details keep their weapons on display, the better for Ali Baba to frighten off the forty thieves. Only it wasn’t thieves the Royal Guardsman worried about, but assassins which came in the form of FLN insurgents, known to be as brutal as they were effective. Unfortunately, the other enemy was the one from within, high-ranking members of the Moroccan Army who would like to overthrow the King. Now, the reward for a palace coup would be the taking and potential extortion or worse of 600 potentates, the richest, most vivid, most creative, most beautiful, and by all accounts most famous ever assembled. The birthday gathering presented a tempting target for the right aggressor.

As an officer in the Royal Guard, Sabti’s mission was the safety of the royal family. Still, this week he had to protect a famous American celebrity along with the wealthiest and most famous people in the world. He had read their dossiers and then memorized the names. He repeated them at his desk, in the shower, and before he went to sleep. They made for a tempting target, and it made him queasy to think about it. The Garde Maroc increased the threat level that morning because the VIP was to appear. It meant the odds of an assassination attempt were about the same as clouds in the Atlas mountains, where his Berber ancestors came from.

If there was such a thing as a safe zone in a region like this, the Moroccans left nothing to chance. They stationed a guard every twenty feet while a sniper with a long-range scope viewed the action from high. Assassination attempts came and went in the country like lady’s hemlines, and insurgents had already made six attempts on the king’s life. There were two potential bad guys, FLN insurgents from Western Sahara and rebels within the Moroccan Army, a fifth column of rebels always ready to sacrifice their own life to remove a King. To the Garde Maroc, it was never clear if the enemy would attack from the front or behind. The CIA had given the latest intel to the security forces earlier that day, reassuring them there were no threats according to signal intel. Sabti knew from experience they were rarely wrong, but there could always be a first time.

oo expensive,” and the price they were about to pay rose to unimagina

Sabti repeated “mushkila, mushkila” repeatedly to no one in particular, practicing the official code word for an advanced threat level. If Sabti’s mic had been on, snipers on the rooftop would adjust their rifle sights, and paratroopers would jump out of planes. But on this occasion, the word calmed Sabti and helped him to relax. His nerves were on edge. He wanted to know they were prepared for every eventuality, especially of that kind that happened in 1972 during the King’s birthday when the first assassination attempt took place, or the five subsequent attempts. The King would joke he wanted to beat Queen Victoria’s six attempts so he could say he had more than a half dozen.

In most countries, a birthday meant jubilation. In Morocco, it recalled memories of bloodshed. Everyone has enemies, but kings have more, and birthdays seemed to be the preferred venue. The radical insurgents that made five assassination attempts must have read Sun Tzu, “Attack the enemy where he is unprepared,” as happened in the 1970s. The throng of party-goers seemed blissfully unaware of the present danger as they waited to greet the King. They felt only mounting excitement and a sense of preternatural calm, knowing they were under the watchful eye of the Garde Maroc.

Insurgencies in the Middle East tend to come in litters like puppies, and they all look identical until they get older. A revolt in one country links with a neighboring region, drummed up by the same insurgents and paid for by the same taskmaster, either the Soviets or Chinese in the old days, Iran and North Korea, more now. They tended to connect like bulbs on a Christmas tree, as one lights up and inspires the next and so on.

Tribal flare-ups in Western Africa were purely local and inconsequential at one time. They then became supercharged after the Second World War, as global powers like Russia and the United States saw a chessboard when they looked at a world map and played the game with a checkmate mentality. Cold Warriors like Secretary of state John Foster Dulles pushed nascent democracies like Egypt and Iran against old-world imperialists, or so he thought, like Britain and Russia, as he moved his pieces around the board to our favor. There was a feeling that the U.S. would be left standing as one region after another revolted and replaced monarchies with religious and military elites. Only it happened that they were kings without crowns, and equally if not more corrupt.

His training led him to expect the worst, and at the moment, he would have given anything for a shower. His ancestors taught him that washing was a sign of respect for the Berber sun god Gurzil who ironically doubled as the god of war. In family lore, a Berber would head down to the sea every day before sunrise to purify themselves along with their animals. It ended when Islamic scholars declared it a pagan rite dating from the most famous Christian, St. Augustine, a Berber from Hippo or modern Algeria.*

* Augustine left us over 5 million words of his teachings. Through them, we know the practice of baptism was not a Christian rite as much as it was a Jewish practice called a Mikvah. It became ritual when an itinerant Jewish preacher whose Hebrew name was יוֹחָנָן or Johanan‎, took a young boy named “Yeshua” to the River Jordan for his Mikvah. He “commanded the Jews to wash with water for the purification of the body.” By the way, the young boy’s name Yeshua translates to English as Joshua. So how did it become Jesus? When the Hebrew/Aramaic Old Testament Yeshua was translated into New Testament Greek, which lacks a sound for ‘sh,’ the spelling changed to ‘Jesus’ or Issa in Arabic.

For the King of Morocco, the weather was not a major concern, but there were two things he did care greatly about. This was the largest gathering of superstars, with over 600 celebrities from the media to business tycoons, from Mick Jagger’s wife to Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters, and Gianni Agnelli to Calvin Klein. Those who were not invited were watching with a pained expression. It meant you were a nobody. The sensationalism meant the media would cast Morocco either as a nation blessed by tradition and beauty or as a medieval theme park with headlines promoting the Casbah and terrorists. The difference was going to be made by the pictures that resulted, and the individual experience, which the King intimated was Sabti’s job.

There was another consequence. The rich and famous reputation would be on display, and the party would mark the last time they met in guilt-free opulence as if the world didn’t care how the rich behaved. When the 600 guests flocked to = Morocco, their private jets outnumbered commercial airliners, and yachts larger than the Moroccan navy were parked in the harbor like cars in a suburban train station. It was a sight that people would never permit again, their wares and baubles on display conspicuously for all to see, and as it turned out, to despise.

And while it may have been the best of times for the wealthy, it turned out to be the worst of times for the media. Or perhaps the journalists got a collective case of the sirocco blues. In the way they covered the party, the reports were as acrimonious as artillery. It pulled down the high and mighty and inaugurated the phony era of Davos do-goodism and social justice virtue bragging. It was surprising that journalists didn’t care for the rich; the journalists were there as guests, not writers and reporters. They were expected to behave, and they drank and ate like the pashas they dreamed they might be. Only they had jobs to do, and the temptation to throw shade on their hosts was too great when one was a King, and the other was the most famous millionaire in the world. Never again would the successful talk about succeeding, and thus the era of pretending we are all equal in ability began. The three days didn’t change the world, but they changed how wealth, success, and achievement reveal themselves.

CIA STATION

Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The man who headed CIA Station Casablanca was an inveterate chain smoker of unfiltered Camels. He held the cigarette between his ring and middle finger in the English style, often burning his hand as he typed CIA cables. He was not known for overreacting or for emotional flights of fancy. The following was dated February 1972, and the title expressed the state of the country as well as his mind, “A Rough Future For Morocco’s King Hassan.”

The CIA concluded that by March 1970, Moroccans were looking at an insurgency due to the country’s strong alliance with the U.S., a country seen as an enemy of Islam because of its friendship with Israel. The station chief felt the King’s hold on the country was tenuous, relying mainly on his military strength and loyalty. With what the CIA station chief poetically referred to as “a deft combination of force and favor,” he might survive for a few more years by buying off detractors or having them killed. He was warning the U.S. should be on the lookout for regime change, which meant trouble for America and a power struggle in the Middle East.

The insurgents that the CIA feared would wage an assassination attempt on King Hassan II were the same groups that toppled regimes in Algeria, Egypt, as the timestamp of revolt ushered in strong man dictators with the blessing of mob rule. Thugs like Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 1969, Sadam Hussein of Iraq in his 1968 coup, and Yasser Arafat’s disastrous war against King Hussein of Jordan in 1970, took control. They had little administrative ability and even less comprehension of the tribal and religious groups that dominated the public discourse. Still, they cracked down through strong man political takeover, and the result was peace, at a price.

The consequence was brutal and bloody rebellions in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Bangladesh. The final coup took place in 1979 when Iranian student revolutionaries overthrew the Shah of Iran, which led to the return of the Ayatollah Khomenei and the formation of the Islamic Republic, and one of the most totalitarian regimes in the world. As an object lesson in how perspectives are shaped, Khomenei was born to parents of Indian heritage, studied Persian starting at age six, and was the most well-known Muslim revolutionary cleric. He was a poet and a scholar of Aristotle. But power is an aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger said, and the Aristotelian scholar became a devotee of its pleasures.

As rebels across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East looked on, every miscreant with an ax to grind wanted regime change or harbored an ambition to mount the throne. Suddenly, the region’s growth businesses became arms dealing, extortion of the local inhabitants, and religious fervor against enemies, most of all the United States. These movements began as underground rabblerousing but quickly turned into widespread contagions. As Hemingway said in The Sun Also Rises, it became a land where things changed in two ways: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

As a watchful CIA chief of station or COS based in Casablanca noted with concern, the Sahrawi tribesmen of Western Sahara and their Polisario liberation movement were likely to topple King’s regime Hassan II. The bosses in Langley realized there was trouble in the royal court. The National Intelligence Estimates, as CIA cables were called, was that King Hassan II was in a dubious position. Religious insurgents opposed to U. S. military bases in the country were aroused and planned to overthrow him. This outcome was unacceptable as far as the CIA station chief was concerned. He had spent a decade drumming up support among the royal family for a more robust U.S. presence in the country, a bulwark against a creeping tide of anti-Americanism and terrorist fantasies.

During the early stages of the Cold War, the United States was in a peculiar position as oil-rich Arab and Muslim nations were courted by Soviet Russia. It left Morocco as the single Muslim nation with Arab ethnicity that looked to the West for its allies. The Soviet Union promised weapons to the Middle East in return for shifting loyalties. As everyone understood, the Arab countries intended to use the arms for the destruction of Israel. To the King of Morocco, this was unacceptable. Morocco had long been a friend to the Jewish people. Mohammed V was the only Arab potentate to defend Jews during the Vichy regime under Nazi Germany when most Arab nations were aligned with Hitler. If Mohammed V were alive today, he would receive the Nobel Prize. In the 70s, his gift was an assassination attempt on his son, Hassan II.

The station chief was prophetic.

Once you leave the veritable oasis of Moroccan coastal cities like Casablanca and Tangiers and venture into western Africa, it becomes a stark landscape of relentless desert and tribal allegiances reflecting Berber origins before being conquered by Arabs in the late 7th century. After the conquest of Egypt, Arab armies traveled across western Africa, creating a new Muslim empire ruled from Damascus in 705 A.D. By the 11th century, the local Berber tribes had become partially or entirely Islamized through empathy for its ideology. It is why Morocco today is one country united across many tribes by one religion. Where the ideological lines cross the political lines is hard for anyone to fathom. These religious and tribal loyalties’ and their fierce independence are a fault line for a political tectonic shift, like the one in 1972.

As the map illustrates, the region of Western Sahara to Morocco’s south is of genuinely strategic importance to Morocco and the West. Many maps, including Google’s, show a dotted line to mollify the insurgents, which the media continues to refer to naively as “refugees,” which we will get to shortly. The official Moroccan map brooks no such distinction.

By March 1970, it became increasingly clear that the situation was deteriorating at a pace that was even faster than the CIA had predicted. According to the station chief, the loyalty of the armed forces was waning. Only Hassan’s “combination of force and favor” would permit him to reign any longer. The CIA was concerned he would not hold out for long, claiming his hold on the throne “is open to serious question.” Then he ominously added, “even today, a carefully hatched plot along Libyan lines cannot be ruled out.” His prescience was astonishing.

The backstory of the assassination attempt of July 1971 on the King’s birthday was the betrayal by the head of the Royal Military Household and commander of the Royal Moroccan Army, General Mohamed Medbouh. He had unfettered access to the King and the Royal Palace. The cause that led to his revolt was when he learned from U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers about an arrangement to pay off several Moroccan ministers in return for military base locations. Upon hearing this from Medbouh, the King fired the ministers, but the General felt this was a light smack on the wrist and that greater punishment was in order. Seeing none forthcoming, Medbouh said he was “disappointed by his king” and was “sickened by his country.”

The insurgents, led by Colonel Medbouh, attacked guests at the birthday celebration around 2 p.m. They stormed the palace, wildly firing automatic weapons and tossing hand grenades. At least 91 people were killed, including the Belgian ambassador, the Minister of Justice, the ex-prime minister, and the King’s surgeon. King Hassan II and his eight-year-old son (Mohammed VI, today’s successor) survived by hiding in a bathroom while Colonel Medbouh stood outside shouting. At about 5 p.m., the King re-emerged and faced one of the rebel commanders and recited the Koran’s opening verse, after which the rebel knelt and kissed the king’s hand. The coup was over, and the King’s life spared.

In the ensuing investigation, one theory was that cadets believed the King was “surrounded by enemies.” They were protecting him, or so they thought. The king believed drugs played a role. In any case, the coup leader, Colonel Medbouh, was killed by a fellow rebel commander when he learned the Colonel planned to spare the King’s life.

The cable revealed a failed coup attempt had taken place: “King Hassan survived a spectacular and nearly successful coup in July 1971. The uprising shook the regime and exposed the vulnerability of narrow-based royal rule. General Oufkir has emerged as the most important personage in the country after King Hassan.”

Then, four months later, in June 1972, the station chief wrote somewhat cryptically, “The king may have survived the military uprising with a narrow escape. This virtually assures that other challenges to the King will take place. The military establishment is both the chief prop of and a potential threat to the crown. General Oufkir has shown no inclination to move against the King.”

But then, on August 16, 1972, the ringleader of an attempt to shoot down King Hassan II’s plane turned out to be none other than General Oufkir. Not surprisingly, General Oufkir died after news of his betrayal, and King Hassan II, equally not surprisingly, took over control of Morocco’s armed forces.

Locals still refer to the event as the محاولة انقلاب الصخيرات, which translates to “Skhirat coup d’état” named after the small beach town where the summer palace lies between the capital of Rabat and Casablanca. The King would survive five further attempts, which left the Royal Guardsman in a state of perpetual vigilance and anxiety.

When dealing with the rich and famous, it pays to remember the lesson of the Book of Ecclesiastes, “all is vanity.” It goes to the heart of what silly people do with their lives, whether it’s building a large fortune than throwing it all away because they have to dip into the till at work to pay for a party or a house refurbishment they could easily afford. The biblical book does not tell us that vanity is a full-time game with hard-hitting rules if you plan to compete against the best in the world. What I saw and heard in Morocco, and later as the publisher of Forbes Magazine, and finally in my reincarnation as a professor when I set out to interview the greatest people in the world, my work amounted to a master class in how to succeed by really trying vying, and not dying or tossing it all away in one unexpected roll of the dice as many did.

Morocco was my first experience with greatness. You never forget your first date. As a student of people who were to business and finance what Nobel Prize winners are to brains and Olympians to brawn, my job was not to get their autograph or a selfie, but to get to know them and how they ticked, what bugged and amused them, what gave them the confidence to persevere against a sea of troubles, who or what inspired their greatness and their pettiness, and most importantly, what made them sad and sentimental and what drove them wild. These became my archeological fantasy, and I set about finding out all of the secrets.

I was also a witness at their endings, the modern version of beheadings and witch-burning, as happens to the more than a few of the rich and famous when they meet their fate. It doesn’t matter if you were the most important financier of the twentieth century, or the most esteemed CEO in business, both of whom went to prison. In modern times, the most decorated officer who had the most illustrious career in the military, rising to the head of the CIA, had to resign in disgrace.

Success isn’t a sinecure, that’s for sure. It can disappear in an instant and at any time for many reasons. Some of them even criminally unfair. But the world looks at success like new TV Shows; they tune in to the latest hit series and give little thought to reruns until a long time later. Those who watch from a distance can turn ugly and mean, without cause or reason, for perhaps they are soothed by the ruin of those with greater potential. It is a rat race, except that humans can be more dreadful than a rat, as I learned in Morocco. The typical road to success of hardship to heroism is punctuated by long gaps of acclaim and fortune when nothing but faith gets one through the night.

You never forget, remember the rest of your life.

When the rich gather, they can’t wait to tell their story. Because I was an outsider and had a natural curiosity, I became a scribe and interrogator and their confessor. I turned from an intellectual (or perhaps pretending to be) into a schmoozer, someone who bends your ear to get you to spill the beans. In short, I became a listener to stories of greatness, heroism, and decline and failure. I was a dialogist.

In Morocco, my appearance was not an accident, although I didn’t realize it would happen. I had two roles, one that brought me there and a second that came to quite suddenly. My main role was to impress celebrities with the host’s style. I was an executive with the company, so it was a job I was equipped to do. In the process of attending the festivities in Morocco, I became a student of the rich and famous, a subject which would occupy me for the rest of my career — the habits of successful people, those who rise above the rest of us make the rules and shift the focus to what they think matters or what they enjoy. It became my calling.

Being able to pick outstanding people is not as easy as it sounds, nor is getting to them or getting to know them. They are well protected and not always interested in revealing their inner thoughts, somewhat like a tech company that hopes not to have their competitor know their source code. In fact, I saw myself as a stock picker, find a good company early and bet hard on it, be willing to take a few losses but let the good ones grow. That is how I looked at people, potential, and passion.

My job was simple — to listen. As I had no real preconceived notions of what it was like to be an ultra achiever, a master of the universe, I did not come equipped with a bias other than curiosity. Eventually, I would turn the petty obsession with success into a career based on the science of succeeding. I found that the world’s very best advice came from asking the high and mighty how they really got to where they are now. It was the first of many such experiences I have since then always been curious, learning, asking questions, wanting to know why some people change the world while others hardly change, and why the high and mighty fall so hard after a lifetime of attaining?

Climate Change

A new threat from an old adversary was troubling al Sabti. It had already wreaked havoc on the United States to India and Japan, and now it appeared to be targeting Morocco. The cause had a long history of human mischief from the Plague of the 14th century to Arctic glaciers. Scientists warned the world about its coming, and even great statesmen like Margaret Thatcher, an Oxford chemistry grad brought it to the world’s attention. What was this new form of terror campaigning to be the world’s bully? An old adversary that had come on the scene with great force and ferocity could destroy with casual abandon.

It was called the weather.

In years to come, extreme fluctuations in temperatures contrary to historical norms would be given a fancy thinktank name, ‘climate change.’ On the day of the biggest party of the century, it was called just called hot. Meteorologists would later claim the cause of the unseasonal climate in Morocco in August of 1989 was that the very late arrival of ordinarily cool breezes that blow off the Atlantic. The consequences for the celebrities, the hotels they lived in during the celebration, and the King and guest of honor were as unforeseen as they were impossible to solve. The weather became more than a phenomenon. It was a witch that cast its mysterious, unpredictable spell on human behavior.

On June 24, 1988, more than a year before the Morocco party, the New York Times ran an intriguing headline based on the testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, “Sharp Cut in Burning Fossil Fuels is Urged To Battle Shift in Climate.” The article stated that “The earth has been warmer this year since measurements began 130 years ago, and the temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution known as the ‘’greenhouse effect, that will affect life on earth for centuries to come,’’ according to Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Hansen went on to warn the Senators that hotter regions of the Earth will be subject to frequent episodes of very high temperatures.

Hansen may have meant Morrocco by hotter region, but Colonel Sabti didn’t care what you called it or what caused it. To him, when 600 celebrities in residence want to escape the heat, the only place is outside, and that is where ‘mushkila’ thrives, the Garde Maroc code word for a rising threat level. His concern was not how to save the Earth but how to safeguard the people he had responsibility for. More importantly, in thinking of what terror lurked in the humid mist over Fez, anticipate the opportunity and the means.

Weather plays a bigger role in terrorism than most people realize. That is not because terrorists sleep late on warmer days like the rest of us, but because people spend more time outdoors. To a terrorist, a convertible looks temptingly like a coffin. A family strolling on the beach means target practice. Even the CIA wanted to play the weather game. The famed agency had begun research into ways to control the climate, called ‘geoengineering,’ to beat our geopolitical enemies to the punch.

There was a second unspoken message in Dr. Hansen’s testimony the year before the great party, and it was a direct one aimed at the rich and famous: your wealth does not matter, this will affect everyone. Never before in history would a calamity strike so wantonly and without regard to socioeconomic status. It didn’t matter if you were king or a peasant, volatile shifts in weather patterns could wreck anything in their path as tsunamis, hurricanes, droughts, and forest fires all claimed the right to destroy a village, business, or in Sabti’s case, a party. These killers were monstrously efficient, too. They could finish up their work over a long weekend at most. The timeframe needed to interfere with a gathering that promised to be the greatest celebration in recent history and one that convened the pillars of society on the scale of passengers not seen since the Titanic, ana very apt metaphor. Instead of 3,000 of the world’s best and brightest, the guest list was pruned down to the top 600 celebrities. They were to descend on the King’s palace that evening, unprepared for what was in store, and unable to cope.

As Sabti took toured the property, he wasn’t wondering if the weather would make people uncomfortable. That was a certainty. He wanted to find out how they would react. Would they complain, especially women? Or would they take a “let’s have a great time just the same” attitude? What kind of trouble would they make? This was an indulgent crowd. They got what they wanted when they wanted it. Life was room service to them. There wasn’t a word for “no” in their lexicon when it came to their desired things.

Henry Kravis, the founder of KKR and one of the guests at the party, once overruled his pilot, instructing him to land the plane in a snowstorm in Vail, Colorado, so he would not miss a weekend of skiing. Would Morrocon’s unseasonably warm weather encourage celebrities to wander the streets of Casablanca or Marrakech, where they could get into real trouble? The mathematical odds of 600 of the world’s most famous people sweltering with nothing to do but drink and dance were daunting.

Izil al-Sabti was an ethnic Berber from the Atlas Mountains, the fiercely independent tribe overrun by Arabs in the 12th century, although never conquered, as he liked to remind people. His family descended from an esteemed jurist, al-Qadi ‘Iyad al-Sabti, and he was justifiably proud of his heritage. On this day, he recalled an ancient Berber myth that Gurzil, the sun god, was also the god of war, and he seemed to be in a fierce temper. That did not augur well for the 600 celebrities about to descend on what the Washington Post dubbed.“the party of the century.”

Long after the party ended and everyone flew back to the state of being they came from, so many lives and careers drifted into oblivion, ruin, death and debacle, or in some cases, fame and greater fortune. Little did anyone suspect the greatest danger came from within, and since it all happened so fast, it got lost in the fabulist retelling.

Caftan Man

The thing I would most like to see is a way of teaching children the difference between right and wrong.
— Robert Maxwell

Security guards dislike crowds intensely because they permit the wrong people to blend in. Unfortunately, that is usually the reason we need security guards. It is why they always seem annoyed if you happen to ask them a stupid question like, “do you have any idea where the parking garage is located,” as they keep their eyes out for terrorists. They might look distracted, but if someone is overdressed or carrying a large backpack, they act as a German Short Haired pointer in a bird hunt. They are equally cautious about the commotion, as it can be artful camouflage for terror operatives. Sabti watched the horizon of people and was trained to look for signs like these when something appeared in his field of vision that, as Samuel Johnson said, “concentrated the mind wonderfully.”

A man meandering through the crowd appeared to head towards the palace gate. His movement was so conspicuous because he was tall and broad-shouldered but also because he was dressed strangely. He wore a white caftan and a jeweled turban.

As the man approached, Sabti tried not to stare at him but to keep a wide gaze on the scene unfolding. His father taught him as they hunted goat in the Atlas Mountains as a young boy that when you stare, it limits your peripheral vision. He could see the colorful silk caftan made him stand out from the gathering, even in a country known for colorful tribal attire, but realized he was not trying to hide, in fact, quite the opposite. No one had ever looked more conspicuous. Sabti wondered why a Westerner would wear such clothing? The answer turned out to be the weather.

Kaftans or in Arabic, قفطان‎ qafṭān, is a Persian word referring to an overdress or tunic discovered in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in the 14th century. It was brought to Northern Africa by Ottomans conquerors and has always been worn by the elite classes across the North African region. This region adapted the style because of the hot climate, which required breezier clothing to keep cool. This was a climate change in stealth mode. The caftan man purchased his outfit in a gift shop for the reason that had manifested itself for hundreds of years. After his sports jacket became drenched with sweat from the humidity and heat, he walked into a gift shop and bought the caftan. Although the shop owner had trouble fitting the 300-pound girth, he was able to pull a triple large from storage and received a $100 tip for his troubles. As the man walked out, he asked the shopkeeper, how do I look. The response was “as if you were meant for it.”

Sabti could see the man was waving a piece of paper in his hand. It could mean trouble. Nothing seemed ordinary here. He slowly pushed in the safety of his M16 rifle as he focused on the voluminous outfit, large enough to hide a bazooka. That was the real problem. Sabti spoke softly into his shoulder mic to the gatehouse, “mushkila” or in Arabic, مشكلة.” He repeated it emphatically.

As the code for “trouble” went forth, a rooftop sniper focused his gunsight on the caftan man. Most people want to project an image of strength. This man had only to walk into a room. His face was broad and friendly, and had a jaw that would have made a brass door knocker on a Roman cathedral door. The eyes were sparkling and intelligent. They conveyed a sense of power and violence, revealing that he had probably been a warrior at one time. That caused concern. The sniper tensed his trigger finger and waited for the signal. Then, he heard through his earpiece his favorite word, yartah or يرتاح, meaning “at ease.” He looked up and saw the caftan man speaking to Sabti. He was smiling like an old friend. The sniper could hear through Sabti’s mic what was being said. The man had an East European accent mellowed by tones of British upper-classness, and in a voice that boomed like he worked in a drilling machine factory, he said, “Hi, tell the birthday boy you have a message from Captain Bob.”

The sniper checked with the security officer in charge, who relayed the signal in Arabic, ‘abaq hadiana, literally “stay calm” ابق هادئا. It was code for chill. The sniper put his rifle down. Maxwell was an invited VIP guest. He just dressed funny.

Sabti then politely, Where are you staying?

Maxwell replied, On my boat, the Lady Ghislaine, named for my daughter.”

“Sir, may I see your identification?”

Maxwell reached into his caftan and pulled out a thick bible sized wallet containing a passport and a security ID issued by the Garde Maroc to attendees of the birthday.

Sabti studied the picture. It was the image of a broad-faced man of strength, humor, and keen intellect. But when he examined him and looked into his eyes, he saw more. He was trained to read faces, and this one conveyed fierce determination, a life force pounding in his brain, a survivor of some kind of harrowing experience. It also suggested a sense of living on the edge, close to the sun, taking chances with his life, and as it turned out, his loves.

The Great Maxwell

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. So he invented just the story of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception, he was faithful to the end.”

Robert Maxwell with his daughter, Ghislaine

In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald stoked an obsession for the American dream with his novel, The Great Gatsby. It gave a name and face to the idea of unbounded ambition and the desire for great wealth, success, fame, luxury, and a high on the hog lifestyle. A mysterious hustler and charmer named Jay Gatsby, “Oggsford educated” as he liked to boast, became the epitome of how wealth and identity were closely related. James Gatz, a seventeen-year-old drifter who despises his impoverished life, takes the first step on the ladder to success by changing his name to Jay Gatsby.

In 1923, two years before The Great Gatsby, Labji Hoch was born in Lithuania to Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish parents named Mechel Hoch and Hannah Slomowitz. In 1944, Labji’s parents were transported from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz, where they and his family were killed. By the time Labji was seventeen, the same age as James Gatz, he had joined the British Army, where he had served with distinction across Europe from the Normandy beaches to Berlin and was promoted to captain’s rank in 1945. That was when he changed his name to Gatz. Labji Hoch, the poor Jewish kid from Lithuania, became Robert Maxwell of Britain.

“Gatsby believed in the orgastic future….It eluded us, but that’s no matter, tomorrow we will run faster. And then one fine morning….So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Robert Maxwell was ready to face the world, and his face had all the makings of some kind of matinee monster with a head large enough to make a handsome door knocker on a Gothic cathedral. The rough-hewn brow was broad enough to break a railroad tie, and the ensemble was held together by a permanent smirk. Sir Robert Maxwell, as he would come to be dubbed, was a former Member of Parliament, billionaire, media magnate of colossus girth and ambition, and lately, father of Ghislaine. He lived life fully and contemptuously of ordinary rules, that is, until his 68th year, when his tragic flaw came home to roost. Although he was fallible, remorseless, egotistical, and mendacious in business and love, his great failing on the final day of his life is that he could not float worth a damn.

Maxwell’s story of life, women, billions, and death, and finally, Ghislaine, would make a fitting tribute to Fitzgerald’s depiction of the American dream. One that takes you up, up, and out, like a fountain. But that is to undersell Maxwell (or overhype Fitzgerald). His story is the epitome of the accomplished hero, the ultra achiever who defies the odds, changes the rules, convinces the world to go along, then loses it in one last contemptuous role of the dice. Maxwell was the Great Gatsby of our era, and he marvelously illustrates how nobody can be somebody, how ordinary becomes extraordinary. One person can change the world, if only for a while.

When I met Maxwell in Morocco, he was at the top of his game. His death came by accident, we believe, contrary to rumors at the time, on November 5, 1991, as his ship, the Ghislaine, sailed ner the Canary Islands of Spain.

Before Maxwell arrived in Britain, he was a penniless refugee, and he spoke no English. He spoke fluently by week six, bringing his total fluency to eight languages, joined the British Army, became an officer, and changed his name. That was the part of Maxwell’s existence that made sense.

Maxwell called himself a socialist yet ruled a media empire that pegged his worth at over $2 billion. His holdings included the Daily Mirror, the New York Daily News. He became a member of the British Parliament in 1964 as a Labor Party member and did not buy his first newspaper until twenty years later in 1984. By the 1980s, he was commuting to work by helicopter, owned a $21 million yacht he named for daughter Ghislaine and had the front page of his Daily Mirror faxed to him at sea.

He could shout in eight languages of his management style, prose as purple as a stevedore and louder than a megaphone. He rarely went out without his trademark sailing hat and referred to himself as the media called him, Cap’n Bob.

His gargantuan appetite was minuscule by comparison to his desire for publicity. He adored making a scene as long as he was at the center of it and hired a personal photographer to go everywhere he went, while his wife Betty stoked the embers by giving him a bound volume of his newspaper clippings each year as a birthday present. Despite his reckless ways, she stayed with him for 46 years and bore seven children, including his youngest daughter, Ghislaine.

One fine day on November 6, 1991, the headline reported that Bob Maxwell had vanished. He was later found dead and unclothed in the waters off Spain’s Canary Islands, where he was vacationing on his yacht, the 180-foot Lady Ghislaine. It came out that he had ties to the Mossad, the Israeli security operation, while British Prime Minister John Major called Maxwell “a great character who will be missed.” “He was larger than life . . . the Citizen Kane of his time,” said British Conservative Party lawmaker Anthony Beaumont-Dark. “If you wrote a film about his life, it would be rejected as unrealistic.” And a labor union leader once said Maxwell “could charm the birds out of the trees. And then shoot them.” Mrs. Maxwell had the last word, “her husband was a colossus in life and a colossus in death.″

“He used to get up at night and pee over the stern of the ship. Everybody knew this. And he weighed about 22 stone [140kg] at this time. The railings were wire. So I think he lost his balance because he was very top-heavy,” Lennox says. “He was a Teflon man. I don’t think he committed suicide.”

When the crew discovered Maxwell was not aboard. Capt. Gus Rankin radioed a distress call. The body was found several hours later. It was said that Maxwell loved to “go swimming all the time without telling anybody, and it used to scare the hell out of his crew.” Charles Wilson, director of Maxwell’s Mirror Group Newspapers, dismissed any suggestion of foul play, saying, “We can only assume that Mr. Maxwell slipped and fell overboard.” The last words ever communicated by Robert Maxwell at 4.45 am the day he died was to tell the crew on the bridge, in the gruffest of tones, that they turn up the air conditioning.”

Extraordinary Lives: Robert Maxwell

Maxwells revenge

As Sabti took toured the property, he wasn’t wondering if the weather would make people uncomfortable. That was a certainty. He wanted to find out how they would react. Would they complain, especially women? Or would they take a “let’s have a great time just the same” attitude? What kind of trouble would they make? This was an indulgent crowd. They got what they wanted when they wanted it. Life was room service to them. There wasn’t a word for “no” in their lexicon when it came to their desired things.

Henry Kravis, the founder of KKR and one of the guests at the party, once overruled his pilot, instructing him to land the plane in a snowstorm in Vail, Colorado, so he would not miss a weekend of skiing. Would Morrocon’s unseasonably warm weather encourage celebrities to wander the streets of Casablanca or Marrakech, where they could get into real trouble? The mathematical odds of 600 of the world’s most famous people sweltering with nothing to do but drink and dance were daunting.

Izil al-Sabti was an ethnic Berber from the Atlas Mountains, the fiercely independent tribe overrun by Arabs in the 12th century, although never conquered, as he liked to remind people. His family descended from an esteemed jurist, al-Qadi ‘Iyad al-Sabti, and he was justifiably proud of his heritage. On this day, he recalled an ancient Berber myth that Gurzil, the sun god, was also the god of war, and he seemed to be in a fierce temper. That did not augur well for the 600 celebrities about to descend on what the Washington Post dubbed.“the party of the century.”

Long after the party ended and everyone flew back to the state of being they came from, so many lives and careers drifted into oblivion, ruin, death and debacle, or in some cases, fame and greater fortune. Little did anyone suspect the greatest danger came from within, and since it all happened so fast, it got lost in the fabulist retelling.

The traditional dress of Morocco is “Djellaba”, a long, loose, hooded garment with full sleeves and it’s for both men and women. As a male tourist, you need to know that wearing anything that looks like underwear or tight swim/ beach clothes in public will always cause uninvited stares.Jun 15, 2017 ma well showed respect

Dress Codes in Morocco — Plan-it Morocco | Travel in Morocco

Caftan Man

The thing I would most like to see is a way of teaching children the difference between right and wrong.

— Robert Maxwell

Security guards dislike crowds intensely because they permit the wrong people to blend in. Unfortunately, that is usually the reason we need security guards. It is why they always seem annoyed if you happen to ask them a stupid question like, “do you have any idea where the parking garage is located,” as they keep their eyes out for terrorists. They might look distracted, but if someone is overdressed or carrying a large backpack, they act as a German Short Haired pointer in a bird hunt. They are equally cautious about the commotion, as it can be artful camouflage for terror operatives. Sabti watched the horizon of people and was trained to look for signs like these when something appeared in his field of vision that, as Samuel Johnson said, “concentrated the mind wonderfully.”

A man meandering through the crowd appeared to head towards the palace gate. His movement was so conspicuous because he was tall and broad-shouldered but also because he was dressed strangely. He wore a white caftan and a jeweled turban.

As the man approached, Sabti tried not to stare at him but to keep a wide gaze on the scene unfolding. His father taught him as they hunted goat in the Atlas Mountains as a young boy that when you stare, it limits your peripheral vision. He could see the colorful silk caftan made him stand out from the gathering, even in a country known for colorful tribal attire, but realized he was not trying to hide, in fact, quite the opposite. No one had ever looked more conspicuous. Sabti wondered why a Westerner would wear such clothing? The answer turned out to be the weather.

The man in the Caftan (Robert Maxwell)

Kaftans or in Arabic, قفطان‎ qafṭān, is a Persian word referring to an overdress or tunic discovered in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in the 14th century. It was brought to Northern Africa by Ottomans conquerors and has always been worn by the elite classes across the North African region. This region adapted the style because of the hot climate, which required breezier clothing to keep cool. This was a climate change in stealth mode. The caftan man purchased his outfit in a gift shop for the reason that had manifested itself for hundreds of years. After his sports jacket became drenched with sweat from the humidity and heat, he walked into a gift shop and bought the caftan. Although the shop owner had trouble fitting the 300-pound girth, he was able to pull a triple large from storage and received a $100 tip for his troubles. As the man walked out, he asked the shopkeeper, how do I look. The response was “as if you were meant for it.”

Sabti could see the man was waving a piece of paper in his hand. It could mean trouble. Nothing seemed ordinary here. He slowly pushed in the safety of his M16 rifle as he focused on the voluminous outfit, large enough to hide a bazooka. That was the real problem. Sabti spoke softly into his shoulder mic to the gatehouse, “mushkila” or in Arabic, مشكلة.” He repeated it emphatically.

As the code for “trouble” went forth, a rooftop sniper focused his gunsight on the caftan man. Most people want to project an image of strength. This man had only to walk into a room. His face was broad and friendly, and had a jaw that would have made a brass door knocker on a Roman cathedral door. The eyes were sparkling and intelligent. They conveyed a sense of power and violence, revealing that he had probably been a warrior at one time. That caused concern. The sniper tensed his trigger finger and waited for the signal. Then, he heard through his earpiece his favorite word, yartah or يرتاح, meaning “at ease.” He looked up and saw the caftan man speaking to Sabti. He was smiling like an old friend. The sniper could hear through Sabti’s mic what was being said. The man had an East European accent mellowed by tones of British upper-classness, and in a voice that boomed like he worked in a drilling machine factory, he said, “Hi, tell the birthday boy you have a message from Captain Bob.”

The sniper checked with the security officer in charge, who relayed the signal in Arabic, ‘abaq hadiana, literally “stay calm” ابق هادئا. It was code for chill. The sniper put his rifle down. Maxwell was an invited VIP guest. He just dressed funny.

Sabti then politely, Where are you staying?

Maxwell replied, On my boat, the Lady Ghislaine, named for my daughter.”

“Sir, may I see your identification?”

Maxwell reached into his caftan and pulled out a thick bible sized wallet containing a passport and a security ID issued by the Garde Maroc to attendees of the birthday.

Sabti studied the picture. It was the image of a broad-faced man of strength, humor, and keen intellect. But when he examined him and looked into his eyes, he saw more. He was trained to read faces, and this one conveyed fierce determination, a life force pounding in his brain, a survivor of some kind of harrowing experience. It also suggested a sense of living on the edge, close to the sun, taking chances with his life, and as it turned out, his loves.

The Great Maxwell

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. So he invented just the story of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception, he was faithful to the end.”

Robert Maxwell with his daughter, Ghislaine