On August 1, at two in the morning, Carmen went to Yeslam’s building in Old Geneva and found him with another woman. “The discovery of the affair was a devastating blow for Carmen,” her attorneys wrote. She said she wanted a divorce. Yelsam moved to write a separation contract.
On August 17, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached its all-time high, and then began to fall.
Carmen slipped into a dire emotional state, and a week later, a doctor in Geneva, allegedly anticipating her divorce negotiations with Yeslam, issued a medical certificate indicating that her “anxiety and panic attacks had recently increased” and that “any decision or signature” by her should be “deemed null and void.” She was soon hospitalized, suffering from exhaustion.21
In London, an accidental power surge of about one thousand volts, originating in the city’s electrical grid, “burned all the hard disks” on the Russell Wood computer system, as Sauter recalled it. The surge destroyed all records of stock and option trading by the firm’s clients. There were no backup disks, according to Sauter. What happened next is not entirely clear. Sauter recalled that some stockbrokers at the firm had drawn many of Russell Wood’s clients into a risky options trading scheme involving the shares of a beer pump manufacturer in Croydon, England, and that suddenly, amid the confusion caused by the computer breakdown, some rival brokers made a run on these shares, causing Russell Wood’s positions to collapse. In any event, that autumn, the brokerage’s finances declined very rapidly. In October the stock market suffered its biggest one-day crash since the Great Depression of 1929. By the end of the year, Russell Wood had lost £3.5 million sterling, or about $6 million. In filings for British regulators, the firm blamed its trouble on the computer failure, which had led to “a breakdown in accounting controls.”22
All in all, it had been a discouraging encounter between the Bin Laden family and the forces of globalization. There would soon be worse.
19. THE GRINDER
BY THE MID-1980S, the twenty-four Bin Laden brothers who owned shares in the main family company resembled a bloc of legislators from the same political party—professional interests bound them, and they often acted with unified purpose, but their membership had distinctly liberal and conservative wings. On the left stood the family’s unquestioned leader, Salem, as well as Yeslam and several others who favored Europe and Beirut. Osama and Mahrouz held down the family’s fervent, activist religious wing. In between, fashioning more traditional and centrist Arabian lives, were the four rising brothers who had all trained as civil engineers: Bakr, Ghalib, Omar, and Yahya. They were inclined neither to collect five hundred pairs of shoes nor to volunteer as jihadi fighters in foreign wars. They were observant Muslims, but they were notable more for their technical expertise and their willingness to work—they were the grinders among Mohamed’s sons, and they invested long hours at the office and on job sites.
Of the four, Bakr, Salem’s full brother, who had been born just a year or two after him in Mecca, had emerged as a sort of chief operating officer for the family and its businesses. His title was Field Project Manager for the construction division of the Mohamed Bin Laden Organization; he sat on that company’s board of directors, as well as on the boards of several other joint ventures that had emerged from Salem’s separate Bin Laden Brothers enterprise. Salem was the one “who got all the business for the Bin Ladens,” recalled Mohamed Ashmawi, the Saudi oil executive. “Bakr managed it.”1
He had the efficient air of a natural bureaucrat; he favored wrinkle-free, white traditional thobe gowns, perhaps with a pen or folded business papers in the breast pocket. “Where Salem did everything from the gut,” recalled Francis Hunnewell, the investment banker who worked on the telephone project, “Bakr was much more conservative and more process-oriented.” Michael Pochna remembered him as “a very intelligent person,” but he never heard Bakr say anything in front of his elder brother besides “Yes, Salem.”2
While his older brother had learned Beatles songs at his Essex boarding school, Bakr had studied in Syria and Lebanon. He spoke some French, but his English was less well developed. After his father’s death, Salem decided that both his younger full brothers, Bakr and Ghalib, should pursue university degrees in civil engineering in the United States, so that they could spend their careers running construction projects for the family. Bakr finished high school first, and at this time, in the late 1960s, Salem had very few acquaintances in America. However, his great carousing Turkish friend from boarding school, Mehmet Birgen, known to all of Salem’s acquaintances as “Baby Elephant,” had moved to Miami. He was a good-looking, loquacious young man with a thick head of black hair. At the time, he was rooming with an American airline pilot, taking a few college classes, and devoting much of his considerable energy to the pursuit of the opposite sex. Salem telephoned and announced that he was dispatching Bakr to attend college in Miami, and he asked Baby Elephant to serve as Bakr’s guardian.
This was not a natural match; like Salem, Baby Elephant was less than fully devoted to the traditional precepts of Islam, while Bakr, although young, was nonetheless devout; he had formally studied the Koran. Baby Elephant enrolled him initially at Miami-Dade Community College’s North Campus, several miles north of downtown, at 119th Street, three blocks from Interstate 95. He bought Bakr a Vespa scooter, helped him find an apartment, and talked up Miami’s many social enticements. He found it difficult to tempt him, with one exception. He invited Bakr to Shorty’s Bar-B-Q, on South Dixie Highway, a pungent room where customers sat side by side at wooden tables and doused their ribs with hot sauces squirted from plastic bottles. Baby Elephant ordered a big rack of steaming ribs; when Bakr asked apprehensively if they were pork, his guardian assured him that no, they were beef. Bakr engorged himself, and for months afterward, he returned again and again. Finally, a visiting cousin from Saudi Arabia pointed out that, actually, he had been eating pork ribs all along, in violation of Islamic law. Shocked, Bakr asked a waitress for confirmation, stormed over to Baby Elephant’s apartment, and confronted him: “What kind of guardian are you! You knew! You lied to me!” He telephoned Salem and complained, but his brother only replied, “At least he allowed you to discover how good pork ribs actually taste.” Shorty’s, however, lost a customer.3
Bakr polished his English, adjusted to American classrooms, and transferred to the engineering school at the University of Miami, then a sprawl of palm trees and low-slung concrete buildings in Coral Gables. He joined the class of 1973. There were more than four thousand Jewish students at the school, and just over fifteen hundred international students—from Taiwan, Venezuela, Iran, Algeria, and elsewhere. Protests over the Vietnam War roiled the campus. The Republican Party staged its convention in Miami in 1972, and university students joined other protestors in violent battles against police. Three quarters of University of Miami students smoked marijuana, according to a professor’s poll. “Three things are essential for a pot party,” noted the 1972 edition of the university yearbook, “namely, people, a place and pot.”4