The Billionaire Who Wasn't by Conor O'Clery Page A

from Harvard Law School. Feeney and Miller asked him to do a tour of their global operations to see how the company could be restructured to avoid crippling tax liabilities. It was the start of a relationship that would eventually make Harvey Dale the most influential person in Chuck Feeney’s life.
    The tax problem also brought Chuck Feeney into contact with another lawyer, a colorful and voluble Italian American, who too would play a large role in Feeney’s business affairs. Anthony M. Pilaro, fresh out of the University of Virginia Law School, had just joined the law firm and had been brought into the meeting to take notes. Despite his diminutive size, Tony Pilaro had been captain of his high school baseball, football, and basketball teams. Feeney was impressed by the smart, cocksure, junior associate, and later, in December 1964, when he heard that Pilaro was planning to take a job with a law firm in the Bahamas, he persuaded him to join Tourists International instead. Sensing that Feeney was a gifted entrepreneur and destined to be enormously successful, Pilaro agreed. He didn’t quite know what was expected of him, but he guessed he would be a tax consultant and deal maker.
    Harvey Dale soon established that what the four Cornellians were facing was more serious than bankruptcy. “The way they were operating carried legal risks that could have put them in jail,” he recalled. “It was very serious because what they were doing, not intentionally, was they were taking trust funds that were there for Jones, and spending the deposit to make delivery
to Smith—that is a Ponzi scheme, and that’s a fraud. If things had gone in the worst possible light there could have been criminal liability for that. It involved serious risk, financial and criminal for the owners.”
    The financial crisis brought another figure into the company who would play a pivotal role in years to come. A senior partner at Price Waterhouse who was going through their books advised them to get a good accountant and gave them the name of Alan Parker. Born in England and raised in Rhodesia, Alan Moore Parker was a talented forensic accountant with a high-domed forehead and large spectacles, then living in Geneva. Feeney asked him to come to London for an interview. Parker remembered the occasion chiefly for the speed at which Feeney walked along the street in London. “I was always three steps behind him,” he said. “No matter how fast I walked I could never catch up with Chuck.” Feeney’s fast walking was by this stage legendary. Bonnie Suchet, his London office manager, said, “Sometimes he would talk to you while he was walking away, and you had to run after him down the stairs.”
    Parker was hired and quickly established that “people were spending money like crazy. In Geneva everybody had gone out to lunch on the company. Bob Miller would pick up the bill, or Jeff Mahlstedt. I stopped it pretty quickly. I said, ‘You just can’t go on like this.’”
    Worse was to come. What Feeney had started on the Canadian border had become too big, and under pressure from members of Congress whose states were hurting, the White House had stepped in to stop the mail-order liquor sales. On February 25, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson announced legislation to cut the five-bottle duty-free allowance to one bottle and to restrict the privilege to adults of at least twenty-one years old. No longer could a traveler claim an allowance of five bottles for everyone in his car, including the kids. Johnson justified his move by arguing that in the light of a balance of payments problem, the spending by Americans who were going abroad in record numbers “is not presently warranted.”
    His bill had to be passed by both houses of Congress before it became law. Feeney flew to Washington to lobby House and Senate members against the measure. He took Tony Pilaro with him. They were young