Still, he knew that his royal clients required a grander style than he generally favored for himself. In 1980, as construction began at Oaktree, Salem asked one of his partners if he could locate an elegant mansion in Orlando that might be suitable for rental by a vacationing Saudi prince. There was nothing on the open market, but after some effort, they found a wealthy local businessman named Miller McCarthy, who lived on a multi-acre estate overlooking Johns Lake, to the west of Orlando and not far from Disney World. His stunning Mediterranean main house had been constructed in the mid-1920s by a man named Pratt, a chemist who reputedly derived his fortune from patents on coagulants used in Jell-O. Pratt had taste: He purchased fine materials and commissioned arched walkways and careful detailing. The rear lawn sloped down from the swimming pool to weeping willows and palm groves beside the lake. In later years the property deteriorated, but McCarthy and his wife bought it during the early 1970s and spent about $600,000 on a painstaking restoration.5
For a handsome price, the owner and his wife agreed to move out temporarily while Salem’s royal friends moved in. The Saudis surrounded the estate with security guards who had been trained by the CIA, or so Salem told McCarthy. They left the place a mess, McCarthy said; he later billed them for $25,000. Still, “the Prince really enjoyed his stay,” as Robert Freeman recalled, and “that was good news” for Salem. Afterward, in Salem’s “impulsive way,” he immediately asked McCarthy if he could buy the entire property. According to Freeman, Salem thought he could use the place “to do some lavish entertaining of visitors from Saudi Arabia.”6
As they neared an agreement, Salem called McCarthy from Singapore in the middle of the night to bargain. He wanted everything in the house—sheets, pillowcases, even a Chevy van of McCarthy’s that had caught Salem’s eye because it had a phone inside. When they agreed on terms—McCarthy recalled that the total price was just under $2.2 million—Salem sent an emissary with a $250,000 cashier’s check. They closed the transaction in December 1980. Salem’s accountants in New York, at Price Waterhouse, set up a Liberian corporation to purchase and hold the estate, apparently as part of Salem’s international tax-avoidance strategy. Salem dubbed this offshore holding company Desert Bear Limited. From then on, the Orlando estate became known simply as Desert Bear.7
Neighbors around Johns Lake watched in astonishment as Salem and his royal guests transformed the place into a private amusement park. Hot air balloons lifted off the lawns and drifted over Orlando. Helicopters buffeted the palm trees as they landed inside the walls; men in suits climbed out, briefcases chained to their forearms, and jogged to the main house. Salem was friendly to his neighbors, and welcoming, and he tried to keep his parties under control, but the occasional amorous couple did tumble down the lawn, a neighbor said, and according to McCarthy, “they liked to smoke marijuana,” and they “did it openly.”8
When Salem’s brothers and sisters visited Desert Bear with their children, the atmosphere calmed considerably. Salem transformed one of the outbuildings into a hangar for ultralight aircraft. He hired a pilot from Texas, Pat Deegan, to assemble his fleet. Deegan walked into the main house one day and found Salem on a couch in the living room, still in his bathrobe, with a large group of Bin Laden children, all under twelve years old, lined up before him. Salem presided over a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills. “Come on up,” he told the children, handing out one bill after another. Deegan watched for a while and asked, “Hey, can I get in line?”9
By this time, Salem had purchased a seaplane. He kept it in America and used it for family recreation in Florida and Texas. He and Ghalib were among the family’s more active fliers during these years; they would zip above Johns Lake and nearby orange groves in ultralights or else haul out the seaplane for takeoffs and splashdowns. “Kid Brother” Ghalib was becoming considerably more religious than Salem, but he was pleasant and adventurous, and he had a growing family of young children who particularly enjoyed Disney World.
Flying ultralights off the back lawn at Desert Bear required some maneuvers during takeoff and landing; there was a fairly tight glide path between orange trees and power lines. Ghalib had flown the route many times without incident, but one day he drifted too close to the power lines. His engine caught one of the lines, and he flipped over and crashed.
He broke his back but he was fortunate; he suffered no permanent damage or paralysis. He was immobilized in the hospital for a time and then recuperated at Desert Bear. It was one more close call in the Bin Laden annals of aviation. It would not be the last.10
SALEM OPERATED AN OFFICE in the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan. His local partner was Robert Freeman, a former investment banker whose father had befriended King Faisal decades earlier. Freeman’s wife, Gail, had met Salem’s wife, Sheikha, in the first-class cabin of a commercial airliner flying from London to Jeddah. The couples clicked, and they remained close even after Salem and Sheikha divorced. Salem asked Freeman to work for him as his personal financial adviser; Freeman proposed instead that they create a holding company in New York for investments in America. They called their Delaware-registered corporation Amarco—for American Arabian Company. Salem and Khalid Bin Mahfouz each took 40 percent and Freeman took 20 percent. Freeman hoped they would enrich themselves through ambitious undertakings, mainly in commercial real estate; he discovered that Salem was averse to stocks and other intangible assets.11
Freeman introduced Salem to Donald Trump. The Bin Ladens owned a vacant tract of land near a royal palace in Riyadh, and Freeman thought the property offered “an excellent opportunity for Donald Trump to build one of his signature buildings, like the Trump Tower in New York.” When they met in Trump’s office, the developer told Salem that he was intrigued, but he would require $25,000 in cash plus two first-class tickets to Riyadh for himself and a colleague. According to Freeman, Trump explained that given his reputation, he did not feel that he should be spending his own money on “exploratory ventures in faraway places.” Besides, Trump continued, if Salem was willing to put up the $25,000, it would show that he was serious about the deal. Salem declined. People were clamoring to do business with the Bin Ladens, he said; they did not need incentive pay. The meeting ended in stalemate, to Freeman’s regret. Salem and Trump, he observed, were “very strong personalities, and there was very little give-and-take for either of them.”12 Trump’s spokesperson denied that such a discussion took place. Asked to review the author’s written source materials describing the meeting, the spokesperson did not respond.
Freeman pitched investment idea after investment idea to his Saudi partners, but Salem rarely expressed interest. He seemed to regard his Manhattan operation mainly as a platform for shopping. When he was in New York, his first priority was to head down to 47th Street, where he expended great energy bargaining for jewelry and consumer electronics with the Hasidim who owned many of the district’s retail stores. He bought bags full of diamond necklaces and earrings for Bin Laden mothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia. Other Saudi tourists swaggered around Tiffany’s, proud to pay the sticker price and to carry conspicuously the Tiffany’s shopping bag, but Salem “was looking for deals,” Freeman recalled. He loved haggling with Hasidic retailers but feared losing out, so he ordered Freeman to find an appraiser who could examine particular pieces of jewelry and offer a sense of what he should pay. Freeman located an Italian appraiser with a second-floor office on 47th Street, to whom he could ferry jewelry entrusted to him by the store owners downstairs. He was never entirely sure, however, whether the appraiser was secretly in cahoots with the jewelers. It hardly mattered; Salem relished the negotiations more than the results. He had imbibed the anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews are the world’s canniest bargainers; he seemed to regard shopping at Hasidic stores as a feat of daring.13