B009HOTHPE EBOK (44 page)

“Ed McMahon,” I say. They ring through. Steve is sitting on the toilet, listening in on the other phone.

“Meester McMahona?” I say (using my German accent this time because the hotel managers over there, they’re all Germans). “This is Helmut Schweitzer downstairs at the front desk there. Thank you very much for coming to the hotel, such an honor to have such an important American personality. We got a call from some fellows, two people, that Mr. Anka arranged an appointment for you at Cifonelli, the tailor. That’s not going to be the problem, because you vant the white suit, okay.”

“Thank you,” says McMahon.

“But vee have a problem Mr. McMahon; they’re doing some construction here at the hotel. And you know for the fall they’re getting ready and we gotta do some sand-blasting. Unfortunately it’s right now on your floor.”

“Oh, okay.” He was an accommodating kind of guy.

“We’re gonna sandblast de floors, de valls, and de ceilings. For ten hours a day it’s goin’ on. It’s gonna make a mess and, o, boy, ze dust!”

“Oh,” he said.

“But don’t vorry,” I say. “Ve gonna make dis offer for you. We can move you down to the second floor, we give it to you half price, but the view it not so nice—the wall of the American Embassy. Or … You can stay where you are for nothing, no charge, and we give you zee sound proof ear muffs.”

Now he goes, “One moment. Victoria! They’re gonna sandblast
blah blah.
We can go downstairs for half the price but if we stay here for nothing we’ve got the soundproof ear muffs.” She says, “Take the ear muffs; we can spend the money on something else.” So he says, “We’ll take the ear muffs.” They thought, hell, we’re out all day, they’re not going to be sandblasting at night, why not settle for the free breakfast, we’ll wear ear muffs and that’ll be that.

“Fine decision. That’s vonderful,” I say as the German hotel manager. “Oh, Mr. McMahon, about Regine’s. You want to go to the discotheque? Everything is taken care of.”

“Great!”

“But zay are very busy in the summer and you called a little late. Because we got the people from all over: zee Arabs, Scandinavians, Germans, zhey all come here. But don’ta worry—we gotta you a good slot.

“A slot?”

“This is a small discotheque, Mr. McMahona, we can’t put all the people in the same hour. But you got your own slot with the wife at five in the morning.”

Now Ed’s fucking going crazy. “Are you kidding me?” he shouts.

“So sorry, but dat’s all that’s available.”

“Victoria! It’s busy but we got our own slot, five till six in the morning?”

“Well, whatever you wanna do, Ed,” she says.

“Okay, we’ll take the slot.”

This is all getting too much for Steve. He is choking with laughter and trying to stay quiet at the same time. He is waving at me from the toilet seat with his hand cupped over the phone. In a loud whisper he is saying, “Paul you have gone too far—I don’t want to be a part of this. Just tell him it is you. I can’t do this anymore, I can’t take it.”

So I tell him, “Ed, this is Anka and Wynn … and we were just having a bit of fun.” He laughed in a stricken kind of way.

Eleven

MOVING ON

Adnan Khashoggi is one of the most interesting personalities I’ve ever come across. If ever there was someone who could be called larger than life, he was it. Adnan was flamboyant as they come, a character and a half. He was a billionaire, and that’s just for starters. He was a Saudi arms dealer and businessman and was involved in the 1987 Iran-Contra deal in which several senior members of Ronald Reagan’s administration had secretly sold arms to Iran.

Khashoggi loved Las Vegas and that’s how I got to know him. He would come and just wrap the town up. Everybody was dazzled by him, especially the casino owners, including Kirk Kerkorian who had a special affection for him. He was just a likable guy—and a big spender.

Khashoggi would throw lavish parties and invite everyone in town. He would come with his family to see my show and bring forty or fifty people, and have a party afterward to boot. It would be the most opulent, wonderful bash you could imagine. He would throw it at the Sands Hotel, and there’d be over-the-top food, booze, entertainment, and just good, good times.

I got to know him pretty well over the years and would see him whenever I played Vegas, went to Europe, to New York, or to Paris. I did little favors for him as he had done for me. On one occasion he invited me to his New York apartment where he introduced me to a gorgeous young girl who wanted to be a singer. Unfortunately, she was a singer who couldn’t sing. I advised her to get into acting and maybe take some voice lessons, trying to be as kind as I could. On that occasion I stayed for a few hours, which he thought reason enough to give me a few extravagant pieces of jewelry. I really didn’t want to take them, but I knew he would be insulted if I didn’t. Let’s just say it’s an Arab tradition: you accept a gift when offered to you.

A few years later, I was doing some shows in the Philippines, where I often went to perform. After my concert I was invited to the Palace by Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos. Imelda was very outgoing, gregarious, personable. Marcos himself was a quiet fellow. But every time I’d go there to do a concert, I’d have to go to the Palace after the show, around eleven at night, and socialize with ambassadors and VIPs. We had the usual outlandish dinner and after midnight Imelda got up to sing. Well, she would start to sing, and then she sang and sang well into the night—truth be told, it felt like an eternity. She’d sing till two in the morning. She didn’t have a great voice but she had some tonality—it was bearable. She had a lot of desire and a big heart and was always a very gracious hostess. She’d be singing “Moooon Riii-Ber” and Marcos would be sitting there next to you—the poor guy got so tired after a while he’d be falling over. He needed his sleep. One night he fell asleep on my shoulder (he’d obviously been through this many times before). That particular night she finished around three-thirty in the morning, and that’s when she got it into her head that she had to give me a tour of the Palace to show me her famous shoe closet. I think I got to bed around five that morning.

(On a one-to-one basis Imelda was a very gracious hostess and fun to be around. But she played the whole royalty thing to the hilt. There was a lot of money there.
Lots
of money.)

The next thing I know, I’m in Paris at Khashoggi’s apartment. He asked me if I would help him sell three properties he owned in New York City (the Crown Building on Fifth Avenue, the Herald Shopping Mall, and the 40 Wall Street Tower).

He said if I could sell the properties for him he would give me a commission. We agreed and I proceeded to look for a buyer, but as I did so, I became more and more suspicious. Everybody I talked to was telling me Khashoggi didn’t really own the buildings—they were the property of the Marcos family. People were warning me to be careful: “Watch out, Paul, it’s a powder keg.” I called Donald Trump to see if he was interested and he confirmed to me that Khashoggi was fronting for Imelda Marcos and that he had never owned the buildings.

I called Khashoggi and asked him why he hadn’t told me Marcos was the owner. Turns out the properties were bought secretly in the late 1970s and 1980s and were the subject of a heated dispute between the Philippine government, New York Land Company, Canadian Land (run by Ralph and Joseph Bernstein and attorney Philip Carter), and Khashoggi, who was a friend of Ferdinand Marcos.

At that point I had to go to Khashoggi and say, “Don’t put me in this awkward position. You know these buildings aren’t yours, they’re hers.” I told him I didn’t want to be involved in this stuff and that I was out of the deal. About a month later, he gets in trouble with the government and ends up in jail. Khashoggi was also the head of the Triad Holding Company, which built many properties in the United States and abroad. But he is mostly known as an arms dealer. He brokered deals between the U.S. and the Saudi government in the 1960s and 1970s. His luck ran out in 1988 when he was arrested in Switzerland and accused of concealing funds. He was held for three months, then extradited to the United States, where he was released on bail and subsequently acquitted. Well,
he
may have been acquitted, but let’s face it, I felt I was obviously in over my head.

So in 1990, a U.S. federal jury in Manhattan acquitted Khashoggi and Imelda Marcos, now a widow, of racketeering and fraud. Justice? Go figure. But through it all, I have a fondness for Adnan, a good man, with an incredible lady by his side, his wife Lamia.

*   *   *

Through Adnan I came to know Khashoggi’s brother, Essam and his lovely wife Layla, also gracious hearts and good people. Visiting them, I almost didn’t get out with my life. In Europe, my wife Anne and I were at Essam’s house outside of London, being royally treated by Khashoggi, an incredibly lavish host—that’s what billionaires do best. On the last day there, we were waiting to be taken to Heathrow Airport to board his private airplane, a 737, for the trip home.

Well, I happened to look out of the window of our bedroom, which was on the second floor overlooking the driveway below and saw a big van pull up along with two Rolls-Royces. I see what appears to be a jewelry box, a foot and a half by a foot and a half in size being loaded all by itself in the back of their car while all the luggage was placed in the back of the van. Essam and Layla Khashoggi had a large staff. When it came time to leave Anne and I went downstairs to get in the car. The van and Essam’s limo proceeded out of the grounds ahead of the car that Anne and I were in.

As our car approached the gate to the property, it suddenly closed in front of us. I found it unusual but paid it no mind. Why had the gate closed so quickly? This delay in waiting for the gate to reopen caused us to fall behind by a few minutes from the other vehicles.

The neighborhood that Essam lived in was out in the woods, very secluded. As we headed to the airport we passed several industrial parks. We’re driving along and all of a sudden an orange car passed us and pulled in between us and the other two cars, which had driven on and were about a quarter of a mile ahead.

We reached the top of a hill, giving us a view of the road below. As we descended to the highway, Essam’s two cars approached another industrial park on the right-hand side of the road. I was looking ahead and I saw two other cars come from behind a building and cut off Essam’s car, while another car from another building bolted out and parks behind them.

Now they had Essam’s vehicle boxed in. Then these guys got out with their masks and Uzis and they were running toward the car that has the jewelry box. I was looking at this and not believing what the hell I was seeing. It was frightening and chaotic and it suddenly hit me what was really going down. It was definitely a heist and maybe even a kidnapping and we were right in the middle of it. I told my wife Anne to get down on the floor of the car.

“Stop!” I said to the driver. “Turn around and get out of here. Look what’s going on.”

I saw Essam’s car; his driver had been taught evasive action. He pushed one car out of the way, got over this ditch, turned into a field, and started off in another direction. My driver now stopped the car as I instructed him to do and made a U-turn on the highway. I saw that all the cars were also starting to head back. Anne was still frightened but things were settling down as we drove back to the compound.

We got back to the estate, and when Scotland Yard shows up to interview everybody, I took one of the detectives aside and said, “Hey, I’ve been around stuff like this most of my life, and I can tell you I smell an inside job.” I told them over the weekend I’d seen some members of his staff exchanging looks and whispered asides. I mentioned the incident at the gate. I explained that I had told my driver to get out of there as fast as possible.

They said they would do a full investigation of the heist. We composed ourselves and were just thankful to be alive.

They drove us to the Khashoggis’ plane under police escort. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. A couple of months go by and Essam calls me to say, “I’m sending you an article from the
London Times,
which lays out what happened. You were right. It was an inside job.” Some of his staff ended up in prison in England. It was all about the jewelry—which was worth millions. I have to admit it was all pretty wild and exciting—but only in retrospect—and the scariest by-product of fame that I’ve ever been involved in.

*   *   *

In my life I’ve been introduced to many different people. When I meet people either through friends, business associates, or showbiz colleagues I take them at face value, but over the years I’ve learned to be cautious and rely on the advice of my close advisors.

Critical to my financial health has been my business manager, Mickey Segal. I’ve known Mickey and his wife Lee for over thirty years. He’s not only my business manager, but also a great friend.

Mickey’s astute scrutiny and careful research saved me from a disastrous situation in the mid-1990s. I was performing at the Mirage Hotel when I was introduced to a woman in Las Vegas who was a broker at Merrill Lynch. She came recommended by my Las Vegas throat doctor, who always took care of me and who I’ve known for many years.

Her name was Janie Thomas. She was known at the time as a broker to “an elite clientele in the business and entertainment industries.” I decided to act on my friend’s recommendation and use her services as a broker. I told Mickey to give Thomas some money to invest in the stock market. The market at that time was not doing so hot and was relatively flat. Nobody was making money from the market.

He was a little nervous about using Thomas despite the fact she had been recommended by my friend. I invested some money with her and to everyone’s surprise, the early returns on the investment were encouraging. I was very pleased, although Mickey remained skeptical and decided to check out her credentials. Mickey called Merrill Lynch and confirmed that she was employed there. He told me that she was a broker, she had business cards, and apparently she was legitimate. But Mickey told me he wanted to take it one step further. He said the best way to tell if Thomas was legitimate was to ask her for some money back from my investment. He came up with a story about me having to pay taxes to the government and needing some money in a hurry. But she came through with the money and even he was surprised by the kind of return she was able to make on my initial investment.