Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (3 page)

When Britain declared war on Germany in
September 1939, America was horrified. Harvey rubbed his hands and two years
later, in December 1941, when America joined the Allies after Pearl Harbor, he
never stopped rubbing them. He must have been one of the few people who
was
not delighted by the 1945 Agreement signed in Potsdam by
Truman, Churchill and Stalin, which signalled the end of the Second World War.
However, the peace coincided with Roger Sharpley’s fortieth birthday, and as
Harvey had amassed several million dollars and was becoming bored, he decided
it was time to part with Sharpley & Son. He had in fifteen years built the
profits up from $30,000 in 1930 to $910,000 in 1945. He sold the company for
$7,100,000, paying $100,000 to the widow of Captain Roger Sharpley of the U. S.
Navy, and kept $7,000,000 for himself.

Harvey celebrated his thirty-sixth birthday
by buying at a cost of $4 million a small, ailing bank in Boston called The
Lincoln Trust. At the time it had an income of approximately $500,000 a year, a
prestigious building in the centre of Boston and an unblemished reputation.
Harvey enjoyed being the president of a bank, but it did nothing for his
honesty. Every strange deal in the Boston area seemed to go through The Lincoln
Trust, and although Harvey increased the profits to $2 million per annum in a
matter of five years, his personal reputation could not have fallen lower.

One of the share transactions The Lincoln
Trust had become involved in as a backer turned sour for all the small
investors. Several of the promoters, who had been holding out false prospects
for the stock they held, were arrested and tried for fraud. Harvey, knowing the
truth, had sold at the top of the market and cleared a million for himself, but
he had panicked when the case came to court and it took nearly the million in
bribes to prevent his being implicated in the case. When the trial was
concluded he came out without a charge being brought against him, but few
people in banking circles doubted his personal involvement.

The problem for Harvey was simple: he was
now worth more than $10 million, but he had been born a slippery customer, and
though he knew he ought to settle down and go straight, he could never resist a
quick killing. From the days of Jan Pelnik, Rose Rennick, John Bodie and Roger
Sharpley, he had never minded who got killed. Despite his reputation he tried
every way of acquiring society recognition. He bought a beautiful house and
estate in Lincoln, the fashionable area a few miles outside Boston. He donated
$1 million to Harvard University, and a further $1 million to other charities.
He was also a strong supporter of the Democratic Party, and of mayors of any
political complexion who captured power in Boston. However, reputation in
Boston comes much more from family background than from the ability to make
money. No less a man than Joseph Kennedy was finding that to be true.

The next turning point in Harvey’s life came
when he met Arlene Hunter in the spring of 1949. She was the only daughter of
the president of the First City Bank of Boston. Harvey had never taken any real
interest in women. His driving force had been making money, and although he
considered the opposite sex a useful relaxation in his free time, on balance he
found them an inconvenience. But having now reached middle age and having no
heir to leave his fortune to, he calculated that it was time to get married and
have a son. As with everything else he had done in his life, he studied the
problem very carefully.

Harvey met Arlene when she was thirty-one.
She could not have been a greater contrast to Harvey. She was nearly six foot,
slim and although not unattractive, she lacked confidence and was beginning to
feel marriage had passed her by. Most of her school friends were now on their
second divorce and felt rather sorry for her. Arlene fell for Harvey’s charm
and enjoyed his extravagant ways after her father’s prudish discipline; she
often thought that her father was to blame for her never feeling at ease with
men of her own age. She had only had one affair, and that had been a disastrous
failure because of her total innocence. Arlene’s father did not approve of
Harvey, which only made him more attractive to her. Not that her father had
approved of any of the men she had associated with, but on this occasion he was
right. Harvey, on the other hand, realised that to marry the First City Bank of
Boston with The Lincoln Trust could only benefit him, and with that in mind he
set out, as he always did, to win.

Arlene and Harvey were married in 1951. Mr.
and Mrs. Hunter could not hide their contempt, but went through the ceremony
with some degree of goodwill for Arlene’s sake. After the marriage came the
honeymoon in Europe. It was the first holiday Harvey had had for twenty-seven
years, and his first visit to Europe. On returning to America, they settled in
Harvey’s Lincoln home and very shortly afterwards Arlene became pregnant. She
gave Harvey a daughter almost a year to the day of their marriage.

They christened her Rosalie. She was the
apple of Harvey’s eye, and he was very disappointed when a prolapse closely
followed by a hysterectomy ensured that Arlene would not be able to bear him
any more children. He sent Rosalie to Bennetts, the best girls’ school in
Washington, and from there she won a place at Vassar to major in English. This
even pleased old man Hunter, who had grown to tolerate Harvey and adore his
granddaughter. After gaining her degree, Rosalie continued her education at the
Sorbonne because of a fierce disagreement with her father concerning the type
of friends she was keeping, particularly the ones with long hair who didn’t
want to go to Vietnam. The final crunch came when Rosalie suggested that morals
were not decided only by the length of one’s hair or one’s political views.

Harvey began to slow down and did not work
as many hours as he had done in the early years, interesting himself only in
the really large transactions and leaving his staff to take care of the
day-to-day running of the bank. He found he played almost as much tennis now as
he had when he first came to Boston, imagining it in those days to be a way of
breaking into society. He watched his health, although he was abundantly
overweight, making regular visits to his doctor. Having amassed all that money
he was going to make sure he lived long enough to enjoy it. He continued to
give generously to Harvard, partly because he enjoyed the recognition and
partly because it gave him a Robin Hood feeling: “Maybe I stole it, but I gave
it away again, or at least some of it.”

He filled his home with beautiful antiques
and paintings, becoming a connoisseur of the Impressionist period and finding a
genuine love of the style, a love that had developed over many years and had
been kindled in the strangest way. A client of Sharpley & Son was about to
go bankrupt while still owing a fairly large sum of money to the company.
Harvey got wind of it and went round to confront him, but the rot had set in
and there was no hope of securing any cash. Harvey had no intention of leaving
empty-handed and took with him the man’s only tangible asset, a Renoir valued
at $10,000.

It had been Harvey’s intention to sell the
picture before it could be proved that he was not a preferred creditor, but he
became entranced with the delicate pastel shades and from this newly acquired
prize came a desire to own more. When he realised that pictures were not only a
good investment, but he actually liked them as well, his collection and his
love grew hand in hand. By the early 1970s Harvey had a Manet, two Monets, a
Renoir, two Picassos, a Pissaro,
a
Utrillo, a Cezanne
and most of the recognised lesser names. His desire was to own a Van Gogh, and
only recently he had failed to acquire “L’Hôpital de Saint-Paul a Saint-Rémy”
at the Sotheby Parke-Bernet Gallery in New York, when Dr. Armand Hammer of
Occidental Petroleum had outbid him–$1,200,000 had been just a little too much.
Earlier, in 1966, he had failed to acquire Lot 49, “Mademoiselle Ravoux” by Van
Gogh, from Christie Manson & Woods, the London art dealers; the Reverend
Theodore Pitcairn, representing The Lord’s New Church in Bryn Athyn,
Pennsylvania, had pushed him over the top and whetted his appetite further. The
Lord giveth and on that occasion the Lord had taken away. Although it was not
fully appreciated in Boston, it was recognised elsewhere that Harvey had one of
the finest Impressionist collections in the world, almost as good as that of
Walter Annenberg, President Nixon’s ambassador to London, who like Harvey had
been one of the few people to build up a major collection since the Second
World War. Harvey’s other love was a prize collection of orchids, and he had
three times been winner at the New England Spring Flower Show in Boston.

Harvey now travelled to Europe once a year.
He had established a successful stud in Kentucky and liked to see his horses
run at Longchamp and Ascot. He also enjoyed watching Wimbledon, which he felt
was still the outstanding tennis tournament in the world. It amused him to do a
little business in Europe, where he still had the opportunity to make money for
his Swiss bank account in Zurich. He did not need a Swiss bank account, but
somehow he got a kick out of doing Uncle Sam.

Although Harvey had mellowed over the years
and cut down on his more dubious deals, he could never resist taking a risk if
he thought the reward was likely to be high enough. Such a golden opportunity
presented itself in 1964, when the British Government invited applications for
exploration and production licences in the North Sea. The then Minister of
Power in Her Majesty’s Government was Fred Erroll, who had vast experience in
engineering and construction, and a career in politics which encompassed
everything from the Board of Trade to the Treasury. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the
British Prime Minister, who had taken over from Harold Macmillan after his
sudden illness, gave Erroll the job of allocating the new licences. At that
time neither the British Government nor the civil servants involved had any
idea of the future significance of North Sea oil, or the role it would
eventually play in British politics. If the government had known that in 1974
the Arabs would be holding a pistol to the heads of the rest of the world, and
the British House of Commons would have eleven Scottish Nationalist Members of
Parliament, they surely would have acted in a totally different way.

On May 13, 1964, the Secretary of State for
Power laid before Parliament “Statutory Instrument–No. 708–Continental Shelf–Petroleum.”
Harvey read this particular document with great interest as he thought it might
well be a means of making an exceptional killing. He was particularly
fascinated by Paragraph 4 of the statutory instrument:

“Persons who are citizens of the United
Kingdom and Colonies are resident in the United Kingdom or who are bodies
corporate incorporated in the United Kingdom may apply in accordance with these
Regulations for:

(a)
a
production
licence; or

(b)
an
exploration
licence.

When he had studied the regulations in their
entirety, he had sat back and thought hard. Only a small amount of money was
required to secure a production and exploration licence. As Paragraph 6 had it:

“(1) With every application for a production
licence there shall be paid a fee of two hundred pounds with an additional fee
of five pounds for every block after the first ten in respect whereof that
application is made.

(2) With every application for an
exploration licence there shall be paid a fee of twenty pounds.”

How easily the possession of such a licence
might, in Harvey’s hands, be used to create the impression of a vast
enterprise. He could be alongside such names as Shell, BP, Total, Gulf,
Occidental, and all the other major oil campanies.

He went over the regulations again and
again, hardly believing that the British Government would release such
potential for so small an investment. Only Schedule I of the statutory
instrument seemed to stand in his way:

SCHEDULE I

FORM OF APPLICATION

FOR A PRODUCTION LICENCE

OR AN EXPLORATION LICENCE

Name
of the applicant in full.

If application is by an
individual– Usual residential address Evidence of nationality accompanying the
application.

If the application is by a
body corporate– Place of incorporation Principal place of business Place of
central management and control Particulars of the members of the board if
directors or other governing body of the body corporate, as follows– Full names
Usual Residential Address Nationalities.

If the application is by a
body corporate for a production licence– Particulars of capital authorised and
issued as follows– Class of Capital Amount authorized Amount issued Voting
rights on each class. Particulars of all holdings of not less than 5 per cent
in number or value if any class of capital which has been issued by the body
corporate as follows– Name of holder, or names of joint holders in full Class
of Holding Amount Nationality of Holder(s) Particulars if all capital issued to
bearer, as follows– Class of Capital Total amount issued Amount issued to
bearer.

Type of licence applied for,
and if a production licence, reference number(s) of the block(s) is respect whereof
the application is made.