She was a formidable character—Isabel Bayma, a Brazilian who had grown up in poverty in her native country, migrated to the United States, and found her way to Beverly Hills. She had had a child by a previous marriage by the time she met and won Khalil. He adored her, according to people who knew them, and he showered her with luxuries she had never known. Some acquaintances described her as strong and stalwart; others as difficult and demanding. They married at the Riviera Country Club in Bel Air. They started a family, and as their household brimmed with young Saudi-Brazilian-American children, they bought a home in fashionable Brentwood, on Jonesboro Drive, and contracted for a $600,000 luxury renovation.2
At USC, Khalil met a Beverly Hills jeweler, Michael Kazanjian, who sold high-end pieces to members of the Bin Laden family. Kazanjian was a client of Alexander Cappello, a young USC business graduate who aspired to build a boutique investment bank with global reach. Cappello was a handsome, dark-haired, Gatsby-esque character from Bakersfield, California, who would become an assiduous collector of Italian Renaissance art and statuary. He met Khalil through the international students department at USC. He operated from well-appointed offices in a prestigious skyscraper in Century City. Initially, he helped Khalil with real estate investments.3
Khalil’s business goals were vague. “If I don’t know what’s going on, I just say no,” he would explain as he turned down one American promoter after another. He seemed mainly to be hedging his bets against political trouble in Saudi Arabia, trying to build up enough American real estate and business activity to generate a secure $200,000 to $300,000 in annual income outside the kingdom, just in case. He tinkered and continually generated new ideas. He was attracted, as were many in his family, to tangible investments such as real estate and aircraft leasing, but he was also willing to consider some unusual ventures.4
Early on, Khalil registered a Delaware company called Kabeltan Corporation, where Alex Cappello served for a time as president, according to company documents. Kabeltan acquired a one-story blond-brick office building in Carrollton, Texas, outside Dallas, about five miles north of the Lyndon B. Johnson freeway. In nearby Garland, at 3737 Dividend Drive, the company bought a light warehouse rented out to industrial tenants. Other investments were more exotic. Through Cappello’s firm, Khalil purchased an interest in a loan made to the country singer Kenny Rogers for the purchase of an Arabian horse named Nujad, which was estimated to be worth $10 million to $20 million. The breeder who had sold the horse kept a ranch in Northern California and had agreed to lend Rogers a portion of the purchase price. Later, because he needed to raise cash quickly, the breeder offered to sell Cappello’s firm the loan at a considerable discount. Cappello made sure the horse had adequate life insurance, and Khalil agreed to participate in the transaction; his only risk involved the creditworthiness of Kenny Rogers, which proved to be a sound bet. Bin Laden made a profit of more than 30 percent in less than a year from the country singer’s loan.5
During one of his annual sojourns in Saudi Arabia, it occurred to Khalil and Isabel that the kingdom lacked a proper toy store of the kind they and their children had grown accustomed to in Los Angeles—a supermarket for children, like Toys “R” Us. They decided to launch Saudi Arabia’s first large toy store, a somewhat daring venture in a kingdom where many religious scholars regarded dolls as blasphemous idols. Khalil explored the possibility of purchasing a Middle Eastern franchise from Toys “R” Us itself, but the price was too steep. (Companies that issue franchises under a famous brand name can also be sticklers about requiring a franchise owner to perform extensive hands-on work at the business, to ensure its success. The Bin Ladens explored purchasing McDonald’s franchises for the Middle East, according to a family member, but learned that owners were required by headquarters to put in long hours frying hamburgers and french fries; there was some joking within the family about which Bin Laden brother could be dispatched to deep-fat-frying school in America, but they ultimately decided to pass.) In the end, Khalil decided to launch his own business, Toyland, in Jeddah. To stock its aisles he hired in Los Angeles an experienced American toy merchandiser, Mark Love, and they used a new company, BIN Corporation, to handle purchasing and shipping between America and Jeddah.6
As these endeavors flourished, Khalil slowly became entangled in American legal proceedings. He seemed allergic to property taxes, and over the years he allowed a number of his real estate properties to fall into arrears, which led government attorneys for the State of California and Dallas County, Texas, to file civil cases against him. His Brentwood home-renovation project produced vituperative civil lawsuits between Khalil and his Iranian-owned building contractor in Los Angeles, a dispute that carried particular irony for a descendant of such a famous contracting family.7 But his greatest trouble began, in the aftermath of Salem’s death, as Khalil moved into the novel business of private American prison leasing, through the auspices of a new company he formed called America in Motion Corporation.
America in Motion shared an office suite with BIN at 15260 Ventura Boulevard, a granite-and-glass building more than twenty stories tall in Sherman Oaks, California, in the San Fernando Valley, just over the chaparral hills from Hollywood. When he was in Los Angeles, Khalil worked at the Sherman Oaks office from time to time, but mainly he delegated day-to-day management to his American executives and employees. By the late 1980s, Alex Cappello had faded from the scene. He was replaced by Franklin Frisaura, a real estate broker who was Khalil’s brother-in-law—Frisaura had married Isabel Bayma’s Brazilian sister, Regina, whom he had also met at a Los Angeles nightclub. Frisaura brought a touch of entertainment-industry cachet to the Bin Laden enterprise. He had grown up in Southern California; his father was a comedian, and his mother, after performing as a young adult in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, had also earned a living as an entertainer. Frisaura had attended junior high school with the sons of Mo Austin, the former president of Warner Brothers Records. The Bin Ladens had accommodated relatives by marriage in jobs at their various enterprises for almost a half century, and Frisaura followed in this tradition; he served as an adviser and manager for Khalil on real estate and other business projects.8
America in Motion made an initial foray into tax-oriented aircraft leasing, but this did not turn out very well. One early customer was Steven McKim, the president of a small Northern California company, Magnum Aircraft International, whose investors included Clint Eastwood, the actor then renowned for his Magnum Force and other movies. Magnum Aircraft, headquartered near Eastwood’s home in Carmel, was involved in research into retractable landing gear for helicopters. For reasons that remain opaque, McKim persuaded Khalil to purchase and lease back to Magnum a vintage 1958 twin-engine Spanish fighter jet, according to court documents. McKim’s successor at the company, Darius Keaton, later said that Magnum was “a small corporation located in Monterey with no business outside the state. None of the employees of Magnum did any significant travel…The last thing needed was a $225,000 jet.”
In any event, soon after its purchase, Magnum stopped making lease payments. America in Motion sued. Khalil Bin Laden’s lawyers named as defendants not only McKim but also Clint Eastwood. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed without a judgment against the actor-director or the payment of any settlement. America in Motion wound up in possession of an old jet suitable for aviation hobbyists.9