The Billionaire Who Wasn't (31 page)

The first two months were plagued with teething problems. Early one morning, Padraig Berry came across Feeney running a vacuum cleaner over the lobby carpet where workmen had been doing repairs. Berry made the mistake of saying, “You can't do this kind of stuff!” He still remembers the sharp rebuke in Feeney's expression. “He would be very fussy, to see that everything was absolutely right,” said Berry. “He had incredible attention to detail. It was almost an obsession. The one time he and I had a row, over somebody who should be fired, he said, ‘If you are unwilling to do it, why do I need you?' He looked me in the eye, with cold blue eyes like steel.”

When he stayed in the hotel Feeney always insisted on a different standard room and never took a suite. No one was allowed to say he was there. Roger Downer, who succeeded Ed Walsh as Limerick University president, remembered a clerk saying, “We have no record of a Mr. Feeney staying here,” while he knew Feeney was upstairs.

In Ireland, and especially in his hotel, Feeney was more tempted to let his hair down. After the grand opening of the $25-million foundation building and concert hall at Limerick University, officiated by U.S. ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith in September 1993, which he observed discreetly from a spot where he wouldn't be noticed, Feeney joined a celebration dinner for local dignitaries at Castletroy Park Hotel. His philanthropy and his lifestyle were by then an open secret among the invited guests. Ed Walsh joked in an after-dinner speech that the donor was so secretive that he had been relegated to the laundry room. To turn the tables on Walsh, Feeney slipped out and arranged for the hotel's closed circuit television to show him hanging his shirt on a clothesline. Everyone enjoyed the joke. Feeney did in fact often do his own laundry in hotel rooms. His frugality was a talking point on the campus. John O'Connor remembered a conversation at the Castletroy Park Hotel with Feeney and John Healy about multi-million-pound investments, during which Feeney made six calls to Bonnie Suchet, his secretary in London, to get a cheaper air ticket. The message O'Connor got was, “Don't squander money.”

As time went by, Ed Walsh became more ambitious. He got Chuck Feeney and his foundation board chairman, Lew Glucksman, together and said: “Look, we need to raise £25 million for the library and I am going out of the room for fifteen minutes and when I come back, I want the two of you to tell me how we are going to build the library.” He left the two men in the room. When he came back, they said, “Well, OK, here's how we are
going to do it.” Both Feeney and Glucksman pledged significant funds, and Glucksman's name went on the building.

The university then came up with a plan to construct a sports arena to house an Olympic-size swimming pool. John Healy was skeptical about the ability of finance officer John O'Connor to procure sufficient government funds, though he considered him “the smartest guy in the field.” In an unguarded moment, he promised O'Connor he would come and swim two laps, naked, if the fifty-meter facility was ever constructed. The magnificent pool was completed and was opened in 2002 by Prime Minister Bertie Ahern. Every time he went to the university afterward, Healy was cheerfully reminded of his promise to swim two laps naked. “I did it quietly one night when nobody was there,” he protested with a straight face, adding, “I didn't say I would do it in front of an audience.”

CHAPTER 21

Four Guys in a Coffee Shop

In January 1993 Chuck Feeney got a call from a publisher friend, Niall O'Dowd, in New York asking him to meet for dinner. They went to P. J. Clarke's on Third Avenue. With its low ceiling and dimly lit rooms, it was a perfect place for a conspiratorial meeting, which was what O'Dowd had in mind. Part of his friendship with Feeney was that he never, ever, asked him for anything. This would be the first time. Leaning across the little wooden dining table, the publisher came straight to the point. “OK, Chuck,” he said. “Here's what I'm doing. I'm putting together a group of Americans to go to Ireland. I think the IRA [Irish Republican Army] will call a cease-fire. I think that they are ready to reach out to America. I think that this is something that is very important you get involved in.”

Feeney's reply came without hesitation. “Yeah, definitely,” he said. “I feel very strongly about my roots, and I will be very much committed to whatever you want to do.”

The two had been friends for about six years. A former schoolteacher from County Tipperary in Ireland, O'Dowd had emigrated to the United States in 1979 and cofounded
Irish America,
a journal that focused on prominent Irish Americans and was unapologetically pro-business and pro-nationalist. After coming across the magazine in 1987, Feeney had called O'Dowd to tell him
how much he liked it and invited him to breakfast at Kaplan's on East Fifty-ninth Street, a run-down diner that has since closed. O'Dowd said, “I found this guy sitting there in the corner, very unobtrusive, wearing a Mac, with nobody else around. He told me absolutely nothing about himself. I just assumed he was a businessman. He said he was very happy that somebody was finally chronicling the Irish American community because he felt that Americans had moved on too far from their roots.” They talked for most of the morning. After that, Feeney regularly called O'Dowd when he was in town. They would have coffee at Kaplan's or lunch at P. J. Clarke's, and the Irishman would go for weekends to Feeney's house in Connecticut.

“We hit it off because basically he looks at the world as a fairly absurd place and so do I, to a large extent,” said O'Dowd. “He has a kind of put-down humor, self-deprecating. He very consciously disdains everything that other people would make a fuss about. And he had this long-running dialogue with the waitress at Kaplan's. They were always having a go at each other about his ‘meanness.' She would say, ‘I suppose you only want boring tea?' and he would say, ‘Just give me a glass of water.' One time when someone at a nearby table started talking on a mobile phone, Chuck pulled out a large toy phone made of plastic and pretended to have a loud conversation.”

O'Dowd, who had no idea how rich Feeney was until the October 1988
Forbes
article, saw in him a product of a distinct, family oriented Irish American community in New Jersey. “There's a whole containment thing there, a whole personality, a very identifiable, separate Irish existence,” he said. Feeney became emotional, and was sometimes moved to tears, when talking to O'Dowd about his parents who had passed away and their impact on him. In contrast to other rich Irish-American businessmen O'Dowd knew, who were mostly Republican, he found Feeney leaning to the left of the Democratic Party. “Here was this guy, one of the richest men in the world, a flaming Communist!”

They discussed Irish politics a lot. Feeney was distressed by the violence in Northern Ireland, where the outlawed Irish Republican Army was waging a guerrilla war against British control of the province. The IRA campaign targeted members of the majority Protestant population who had any connection with the British army or the Northern Ireland security forces. On November 8, 1987, an IRA bomb placed at a British war memorial killed eleven people attending a remembrance service in the town of Enniskillen, only a few miles from Feeney's ancestral home. Feeney was in
London. He saw the gruesome aftermath on television. He thought, “This is madness, it has to stop.”

“Maybe I was naive at that stage,” said Feeney, “but I took the view that this is not the way Irish people react—by blowing up kids at commemoration events.” He was particularly moved by the heart-wrenching story of how a nurse, Mary Wilson, died in the rubble holding the hand of her father, Gordon Wilson, saying, “Daddy, I love you very much.” Feeney's daughter Leslie remembered him saying after the Enniskillen bombing, “In my lifetime, I want there to be peace, this has to be resolved in my lifetime.” “He was always taking these things to heart,” she said. “His attitude was—with my wealth I have got to do something.”

O'Dowd had good contacts in Ireland, and he received indications that the IRA was ready to move in the direction of peace. But its political wing, Sinn Fein, and its leader, Gerry Adams, were ostracized by the British, Irish, and American governments, and there was stalemate. With the end of the Cold War and the election in 1992 of a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, O'Dowd believed that the United States could form a bridge to bring the Sinn Fein leaders into the political mainstream and nudge a peace process forward. He got the idea of creating a small delegation of respected Irish American figures to act as amateur envoys to help promote a dialogue among the three governments and all the parties in Northern Ireland. To be politically acceptable, the delegation had to include significant figures from corporate Irish America with no history of support for the IRA. Chuck Feeney was the first name that came to his mind.

Feeney's agreement to participate didn't give O'Dowd much leverage when he went to recruit others. “It was no use at all. Nobody knew who he was, that's the truth. Getting Bill Flynn was much bigger.” Bill Flynn, head of Mutual of America on Park Avenue, was a pillar of corporate Catholic respectability in Manhattan. He was chairman of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a member of countless charitable and educational boards. Trade union executive Joe Jamison and former congressman Bruce Morrison from Connecticut, a hero to the Irish for his success in winning visa concessions, also joined the group, which called itself Americans for a New Irish Agenda. Their first mission was to Arkansas in January 1993 to lobby the incoming Clinton administration.

To show Chuck Feeney that Gerry Adams was serious about ending the violence, O'Dowd arranged for a private meeting between the two men.
Feeney and O'Dowd flew to Dublin and were picked up by Sinn Fein guides at their hotel and taken to a house in a working-class area. At the time, Adams was under constant threat of assassination. On March 14, 1984, loyalist gunmen had fired twenty bullets into his car and he had been seriously injured. The bespectacled, black-bearded Sinn Fein leader was always on his guard and changing his schedule.

Feeney and Adams talked in the cramped living room, one on each side of a tiny fireplace, as burly guards stood outside. “Even though I had been briefed about who this guy was, it was in the middle of one of those mad hectic days when you are meeting a whole lot of people,” recalled Adams. “But I was very impressed by him. He didn't pontificate. He was very unprepossessing, very down-to-earth and ordinary. I talked about the ongoing efforts to build a peace process, the importance of dialogue, the importance of trying to get people outside the box to come in. My view at that time was that you don't change the people, you change the political conditions. If it was a contest between Ireland and Britain, the Brits would always win because it was an unequal contest. It could be that people from outside the box could change things.”

Feeney had “an innate feeling” about Adams. He was convinced that the Sinn Fein leader was trying to achieve what Irish Americans overwhelmingly wanted, taking the gun out of Irish politics. “Chuck can figure people out,” said O'Dowd. “He liked Adams a lot. They were the two smartest men I have ever been with in one room. They had a very good conversation about what America needed to do.”

John Healy, however, was furious when he heard about the meeting. “He screamed at me. ‘What are you doing?'” said O'Dowd. For Healy, there were serious implications for the founder of a major philanthropic foundation having dealings with the head of an organization regarded as the mouthpiece of a terrorist group by the U.S., British, and Irish governments. Adams was widely reported to be a member of the IRA's army council, though he always denied it. In the ghettos of Belfast he was a folk hero, but he was barred from traveling to Britain and America, and his voice was banned from British and Irish radio and television.

But Feeney was undeterred. A second meeting was arranged to show him conditions in war-ravaged Belfast. O'Dowd was told to bring him to a house in Ballymurphy, a working-class nationalist area of West Belfast. He and Feeney traveled in one of Belfast's old-style black taxis that served the
nationalist area. They saw British soldiers patrolling the scorched and rubble-strewn streets with rifles at the ready. They knocked on the door of a two-story row house with a small garden in front. A large man came to the door and eyed the two men with suspicion. “What do youse want?' he asked. “Are youse peelers [police]? Are youse collection men? Are youse here to fucking get me? Get the fuck out of here! Get away from my house!”

O'Dowd had gotten the address wrong. The pair ran down the little garden path with the householder in pursuit. “I was petrified at this stage,” said the publisher. “Then the completely insane thing is, we're out on the street, who comes by in a big reinforced armored taxi but Gerry Adams on his way to meet us at a totally different address.” The doors of the taxi opened from the inside and they climbed in and sped off. “We were in fits laughing,” said O'Dowd. “Here was one of the richest men in the world being chased as a debt collector.” Feeney was taken with the fact that the door of the armored taxi could not be opened from the outside, as a precaution against being ambushed.

Back in New York, the Irish American group arranged to visit Ireland for a round of public meetings with all parties, including Sinn Fein, as a way of bringing them in from the cold. They asked for a brief cease-fire from the IRA to establish the credibility of the Irish American group with the Clinton administration. It took some months to organize, but at last the message went out secretly to IRA commanders: No attacks should be staged for one week in early September 1993. There would be no announcement. Only the White House and the Irish American delegation would know.