Geneva, with a population of just 200,000, is a city built on numbers. The hidden trillions in art, gold, and cash—a third of the world's internationally invested private wealth—collect dust and interest in vaults by the Rhone. The largest accounts are referenced by serial codes that reference other serial codes that reference even more serial codes, with names known only to a quiet few.
Nearly half of Geneva's citizens are expatriates, among them a notably lopsided proportion who lay claim to ill-gotten fame and fortune. From Mexico came Raul Salinas, who, according to a U.S. congressional investigation, used Citibank's Geneva branch to launder a $100 million fortune, founded on drug trafficking and graft, during the presidency of his brother Carlos. The city was also an adopted home to Saddam Hussein's son Uday and his personal banker, Barzan Tikriti, both of whom channeled funds intended to feed the Iraqi people into secret bank accounts up and down the Rhone. Kojo Annan, the son of Kofi who was raised among the diplomatic elites of Geneva—the seat of the European branch of the United Nations—played a pivotal role in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal, and Geneva served as the debacle's financial womb. Fleeing a $48 million IRS tax bill, Marc Rich arrived to safeguard a colossal illicit fortune made by trading with Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis, finally choosing the city of pin-striped clerks over prison. This past March, Edouard Stern, one of France's richest men and a onetime heir apparent at Lazard Frères in New York, was found shot to death in his apartment above the Geneva police station. His corpse was clad in a full-body latex suit.
While working at J. P. Morgan's Private Bank in the late nineties, I often heard stories about how Arab sheiks and European nobles tended to shift their assets into Swiss bank accounts. Morgan had a special New York team dedicated to dealing with such people and their "privacy concerns." But it was known that the firm's most highly sensitive accounts were serviced directly from Switzerland, which operated with near-total autonomy from the United States and its banking regulations. The Genevese have always placed a premium on the rights of individuals to manage their assets free from the prying eyes of governments. In the seventeenth century, they became bankers to the French crown, and the tradition of extreme discretion continued until 1934, when the Swiss government formally criminalized breaches in bank secrecy. "Basically, the Swiss are mercenaries," says Baroness Marion Lambert, heiress to the Belgian banking dynasty that founded the Bank Brussels Lambert. "They always were, and they still are. History has proved that people who wear lederhosen are not always nice. The quiet and the cleanliness confuses you."
