He prowled the nearby electronics stores for the latest portable phones, calculators, cameras, music players, and miniature televisions, all of which he bought in bulk. “He’d buy hundreds of these things for the princes,” recalled Gail Freeman. He would walk the aisles and peer through the glass cases, asking “Now, tell me the truth: These are brand new? Nobody’s seen them yet, right?” Like a salesman who uses season tickets at Madison Square Garden to cultivate clients, Salem used his mobility and expertise in American consumerism to acquire gadgets that he could use back in Saudi Arabia to ingratiate himself with princes.14
Khalid Bin Mahfouz bought two apartments at the Olympic Tower, but he and Salem usually preferred the room service and convenience of hotels; when in New York, they stayed mainly at the Helmsley Palace or the Plaza. Salem threw an extravagant twenty-eighth-birthday party for Randa at the Plaza. Since he didn’t know too many people in the city, he asked the Freemans to fill up the private room with friends from their neighborhood in suburban Long Island. Salem sang his usual repertoire of corny folk and Christmas songs. “We were his playthings,” Freeman recalled. Salem’s lack of interest in ambitious business projects frustrated him—he had, after all, given up a career at a major investment bank.
Still, he tried to live as his partner did. Once, on a trip to Jeddah, Salem ordered Freeman and an Italian associate out of a Jeep at night in the middle of the desert. Salem drove away—Freeman and his colleague had to stumble through the sand to the road, and then hitchhike into Jeddah. When they made it back, Salem was giddy; he seemed to regard his prank as part practical joke, part survival test. Freeman waited patiently for his revenge. One night in New York, when they were all out to dinner with Randa, they discovered that Salem had forgotten his wallet and had no money. Immediately afterward, Freeman drove to Harlem, forced Salem out of the car, and sped away. Randa fretted that Salem would never make it back, but he soon strode into her hotel with two new African American friends. He was, of course, delighted: “Bob, you do have a sense of humor.”15
Freeman needed it. Salem was often so pinched for cash that Freeman had to call Jeddah night after night to plead for wire transfers: “Salem, we’ve got to have some money—we’ve got people at our door. We’ve got to pay the rent…What are we doing? Where are we heading?” Salem usually came through with the minimum amounts needed to maintain the office, “but it was always at the last minute.” As best Freeman could determine, the Bin Laden companies in Jeddah, which Salem now firmly controlled, had a reasonably steady cash flow, but there were so many calls on that money—employees, equipment, loan repayments, family—that Salem was not able to tap into it very easily for personal projects. Late payments to his construction companies by the royal family drained his liquidity even more. And yet as each year passed, Salem’s appetite for private jets and real estate abroad seemed only to grow. Oil prices fell during the early 1980s, but this did not visibly crimp Salem’s style. Instead, a pattern set in, according to Freeman and other partners and employees. When Salem needed money, Freeman recalled, “he had to turn to Khalid Bin Mahfouz.”16
THEY WERE CONTEMPORARIES and best friends, each a scion of a Hadhrami business fortune, each adapting to the international imperatives of the oil boom. As they reached their thirties and assumed their inherited responsibilities, however, they exhibited contrasting personalities. When they flew together on their private jets, Salem might joke and sip champagne and play guitar, but Khalid would sit quietly, drinking tea or smoking an Arabian water pipe. He stayed away from Salem’s more provocative parties for decadent Saudi princes. He did seem to enjoy Salem and his outrageous antics, but he would often observe his friend impassively, or issue only a slight, crooked smile. He was “a very quiet man, a very private man—very deep in thought,” said an employee who spent many hours with the two men. “I think he enjoyed seeing that Salem was not afraid to say or do anything, and I think that he kind of vicariously lived through him.”17
Khalid was “just as happy to let Salem run the show,” said a second employee. Among other things, this meant adapting to Salem’s idiosyncratic ideas about when and how to spend his money. Once, on a trip to California, Bin Laden and Bin Mahfouz arranged to meet at the private aviation terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. As they waited, Khalid’s aides watched the country singer Kenny Rogers arrive on a private jet and climb with his entourage into stretch limousines. Salem turned up in a cheap rental car—he waved Khalid into the front passenger seat and they peeled out toward the freeway. “Nobody knows who they are and they couldn’t care less,” recalled the employee.18
Some of their American and European colleagues found the friendship and business relationship between Salem and Khalid to be extraordinarily complex. On money matters, Khalid was clearly the senior partner. Yet it was Salem who enjoyed such easy, informal access to Fahd and other royalty; because of his charm and energy, Salem’s influence in Riyadh exceeded the size of his bank accounts. One European business partner who knew them both believed that Khalid harbored some quiet resentment about this imbalance. As for Bin Mahfouz himself, some of his partners and employees regarded him as an enigma, a man of many contradictions.
The least complicated thing about him was his wealth; by the early 1980s, it was on full display. Salem had befriended Harry Winston, the prominent New York jeweler, and through him, he and Khalid were invited to the showroom of Hammerman Brothers, a wholesale jeweler in Manhattan. Khalid picked out some exquisite—and very expensive—pieces. Bernie Hammerman pulled Robert Freeman aside and asked if it would be too great an embarrassment to ask Khalid for a credit reference before he walked out with the jewelry. Khalid suggested two names, Freeman recalled: Ben Love, the chairman of Texas Commerce Bank in Houston, and Tom Clausen, the chairman of Bank of America in San Francisco. Hammerman’s credit department contacted Clausen, who said he was authorized to clear any check up to $50 million for Khalid Bin Mahfouz. As Freeman recalled it, “This created quite a stir in the showroom.”19
Bin Mahfouz spent much of his time in America in the Houston area. He had met the aircraft broker Jim Bath around the same time that Salem had, and through Bath and other American partners he purchased private jets and real estate. He bought a large ranch on Houston’s outskirts and a mansion in River Oaks, a city neighborhood of oil barons and their retainers who poured their money into antebellum-style plantation houses and columned Georgian estates. The Bin Mahfouz property, at 3800 Willowick, lay just around the corner from Jim Bath’s relatively modest pine-shaded home. Khalid’s main house looked something like Versailles; in the rear was a swimming pool with an island in the middle that could be reached by a footbridge. Bath called it “the Big House,” his partner Bill White recalled. Khalid opened the estate and its guesthouses to the Bin Ladens. Salem’s sisters visited and amused themselves climbing trees on the sprawling grounds. Khalid and Salem hosted parties for the Texas notables who promoted and managed some of Bin Mahfouz’s American investments. At one point during this period, Khalid noticed that tour buses kept stopping on Willowick in front of his estate. “Why do these people keep coming by?” he asked. One of his employees explained that his home was now on the River Oaks celebrity tour. “The next time they come,” he said, apparently quite serious, “invite them in for tea.”20