Kennedy’s Comrade: Hunting a KGB Mole in the Democratic Party

The Death of Dave Karr, and Other Mysteries Fortune December 3, 1979, Domestic Edition Copyright 1979 Time Inc. All Rights Reserved Fortune December 3, 1979, Domestic Edition SECTION: Pg. 94 LENGTH: 4823 words HEADLINE: The Death of Dave Karr, and Other Mysteries BYLINE: by ROY ROWAN; Research associate: Andrew Baird BODY: The funeral wreaths at Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris bore some intriguing names: Christina Onassis, Roone Arledge, the U.S.S.R. Committee for Science and Technology, and Lazard Freres, just to mention a few. A stranger among the two dozen mourners gathered for the ceremony might have wondered what secrets of the deceased could have linked the Greek shipowner's daughter with the American Broadcasting executive, the Soviet government, and eminent investment bankers. But there wasn't much time for that kind of conjecture, because an announcement was quickly made that the funeral was being canceled. So it was that the last rites for David Karr proved to be as mysterious, and as abruptly terminated, as his multi-faceted business career. Back home, the demise of the sixty-year-old Karr on July 7, 1979, did not even rate an obituary, though he had once served as chairman of a FORTUNE 500 company, and by the time of his death was very possibly America's biggest deal maker in the Soviet Union. There were other distinguishing marks to his career that merited some kind of posthumous mention. He had written articles for the Communist Daily Worker as well as a book on proxy fighting, produced a couple of Broad-way plays and Hollywood movies, and demonstrated an infatuation with the politically powerful, having traveled the campaign trail with such diverse presidential candidates as Henry Wallace, Sargent Shriver, and Jerry Brown. Brilliance and deviousness were his most widely acknowledged weapons. But his motives were variously interpreted. "He had a strong social conscience that made him an intense promoter of detente," claims his longtime friend, Senator Alan Cranston. "When I hear that David Karr was concerned about Russia's Jews, I smile," says his most recent boss, Sir Charles Forte, executive chairman of Trusthouse Forte Ltd., one of the world's largest hotel chains. "He was interested in only one thing -- money." Karr, whose name originally was Katz and whose mother was born in Russia, often bragged of privately coaching Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter on ways to gain concessions for Soviet dissidents, just as he frequently boasted of personally helping 300 Soviet Jews emigrate to Israel. But even on this claim there is violent disagreement. "He was no friend of Israel," snaps Samuel Flatto-Sharon, a member of the Knesset (Israel's parliament), who claims that a copy of a letter thanking Karr for arranging a $10-million Soviet arms shipment to Uganda was found in Idi Amin's captured files. But Flatto-Sharon's credibility must be questioned: he is standing trial for vote buying in Tel Aviv, after fleeing an embezzlement charge in Paris. A $175-million monument Whispers of a KGB connection followed Karr everywhere, once he started commuting to Moscow in 1972. However, in his bargaining with the Russians, just as in his wheeling-dealing with everyone else, it was always difficult to be sure whose side Karr was on. "He had a tendency to be involved with two sides of every equation," said Samuel Pisar, a prominent American attorney in Paris and authority on East-West trade. "Yet he was always able to supply the missing ingredient to make the deal." Dave Karr died less than twelve hours after returning to Paris from his greatest personal triumph in the Soviet Union: dedication of the glistening new 1,777-room Kosmos Hotel. That ceremony represented the culmination of a unique $175-million contract that enabled him -- an American entrepreneur, and in principle a complete outsider -- to organize the building of a socalled French turnkey hotel (outfitted with French equipment down to the last Armagnac glass), on Soviet soil, with Western capital, and 1,200 French and Yugoslav laborers. But then Karr had repeatedly told Vladimir Alkhimov, former deputy minister of foreign trade and now chairman of the State Bank of the U.S.S.R., "When you get a deal that's so complex it turns everybody else off, try me." Kathy Karr, the businessman's twenty-five-year-old daughter, had returned from Moscow with her father and was in his 60 Avenue Foch apartment when he died. She explains that while in the U.S.S.R. her father complained of severe stomach cramps, and was forced to leave the July 5 hotel dedication ceremony fifteen minutes after it began. That night he called her into his hotel room and said he thought he might be having a heart attack. He wrote down the telephone number of a Soviet official who would be able to summon an ambulance. The next morning Karr felt much better and went to the Kremlin for a meeting with First Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov to discuss other business ventures. There was a possibility of building additional hotels in Leningrad and Kiev. Among his many projects, Karr also was trying to help Mitsubishi Heavy Industries build a soybean-processing plant in the U.S.S.R., to help Blue Bell Inc. (the maker of Wrangler jeans) establish a denim factory, and to help Peugeot-Citroen obtain a contract to modernize the AZLK plant that builds Moskvich cars. Karr was accompanied to the Kremlin by two of his principal French associates: Jean Guyot, senior partner of Lazard Freres et Cie., and a director of Financial Engineers, the Swiss holding company owned jointly by Karr and Lazard; and Herve Alphand, former French Ambassador to the U.S., who is now chairman of Finatec S.A., the wholly owned French subsidiary of Financial Engineers. "David was in fine fettle," reports Guyot. "He was witty and gay." That same afternoon on the flight back to Paris, Alphand reports that Karr remained in high spirits, talking exuberantly of the billions that might be invested in Soviet projects. Kathy Karr, however, continued to worry about her father's health. "He couldn't sit still on the plane," she said. "He looked thin. I don't think he ate four meals during the week." "Nobody listens to a poor man" Once, during the flight, when Kathy suggested that he should consider taking some time off to write a book about his life, Karr touched his daughter's cheek and said, "You're my sense of eternity." Then he delivered her a lecture on how it wasn't just money he was chasing. He added, however, that money can buy credibility. "Nobody listens to a poor man," he explained. "I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't do my share for peace." His peacemaking efforts, or at least those for which he credited himself, included: supplying signals to the White House for communicating policy changes to the Kremlin, smoothing the way for last year's visit to the Soviet Union by Senator Edward Kennedy, and keeping his other Senate contacts -- namely Cranston, Ribicoff, Javits, and Jackson -- abreast of the Soviet response to negotiations on the strategic-arms limitation talks or other sensitive issues. When he landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport at 7:30 P.M. on July 6, Karr was furious to learn that his thirty-year-old German wife, Evia, had flown off to New York. Evia was Karr's fourth wife. Their eleven-month marriage was described by a friend as "an exercise in china throwing and tender reconciliations." Kathy reports that the sound of Evia's voice shouting over the transatlantic telephone filled the apartment as soon as they arrived. "That woman is sick. I've got to get her out of New York," Karr told Kathy after he had hung up. He called his friend "Jack the Tiger," as the concierge at the Plaza Athenee hotel is known, and asked him to book a seat on the Concorde leaving the next day. Then, as was insomniac Karr's habit, he started calling friends and business associates in other time zones. The valet thought he'd fallen "I was with him until 2:00 A.M.," explains Kathy. "He had taken two Libriums and I could see that he was finally falling asleep. So I went to bed myself." But at 4:00 A.M. Karr called Evia again in New York. At 7:30 A.M. Karr's valet rushed into Kathy's room, exclaiming that his employer had apparently fallen. When Kathy glimpsed her father lying face down on the bedroom floor beside his unpacked suitcases, she knew he was dead. "He appeared to have toppled without having put his hands out to break his fall," she said. Karr's personal physician and a police surgeon were summoned to the apartment. Independently, the two doctors confirmed that he had died instantly of a cardiovascular attack. But the doctors' reports didn't satisfy Karr's emotional young widow. Flying back to Paris, she obtained a court order stopping the funeral service and cremation. Upon her request, the body was then delivered to the Institut Medico-Legal for an autopsy. The high drama of halting a funeral already in progress drew not only the attention of French authorities, but the concern of U.S. officials, who also questioned the widow. According to a series of confidential telexes sent to the Secretary of State by the American Embassy in Paris, Evia Karr alleged that her husband had either been poisoned by the Russians, since he felt sick on returning from each visit to the Soviet Union, or had been murdered by the KGB in their apartment, where she had seen bloodstained pillowcases and noticed that his spectacles were broken. Evia emphasized to her embassy interrogator that the Kennedy family was very interested in the case, and that she had spoken to Senator Kennedy several times about it. Also mentioned in these confidential State Department messages was the fact that Evia's French lawyer had informed the embassy death and estates officer that the Karrs had decided to divorce. The lawyer left as proof a copy of a handwritten agreement signed by David Karr on June 26, 1979, transferring to Evia Freiberg Karr more than $2 million in cash, property, and shares of stock in two of Karr's companies. While the results of the autopsy failed to bear out Evia's darkest suspicions, they did leave open a crack of doubt. No toxic substances were found present in the corpse. And in the words of the examining officer, "the cardiac lesions were sufficient to cause death." Nevertheless, a small fracture of the larynx was discovered. Although this probably occurred when Karr fell, and does not conflict with the heart-attack diagnosis, Evia pressed on with her charges of foul play, filing an action that resulted in the case being classified under French law as: "Homicide charged against persons unknown." On the question of the Karrs' intended divorce, Evia has her own version. "David and I had no intention of divorcing," she told FORTUNE. She maintains that the lawyer who had delivered the handwritten June 26 agreement to the embassy was not in her employ. Anyway, she indicated that the document was simply an affirmation of Karr's love for her. "I told David, 'I need some kind of control over you, because one day you love me and the next day you're in a bad mood.'" It was then, she said, that he agreed to give her the $2 million -- a small part of the personal fortune that, she estimates, had grown to $15 million or $20 million. Recently, Evia hired former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste to try to track down her husband's assets, which she believes are secreted away in many companies and countries. "You see," she said, "David had certain inhibitions until he met me. He thought it was obscene for a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn to have more than $5 million." Cultivating future connections The nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, who died a multimillionaire in Paris, possessed an I.Q. of 189 -- or so it was asserted by school authorities in San Antonio (where Karr lived briefly as a boy), who publicized him as a budding genius. He also had a knack for changing careers with chameleon-like quickness. By the time Karr was twenty-five, he had worked as a Fuller Brush man, New York Daily Mirror reporter, penny-a-line writer for the Communist Daily Worker, investigator for the Council against Nazi Propaganda, employee in the Office of War Information (where he was let go after being called before Martin Dies's House Un-American Activities Committee), and star legman for Washington columnist Drew Pearson. Digging up dirt for Pearson surely sharpened Karr's cloak-and-dagger instincts. But it was while cruising the capital in a telephone-equipped limousine that he also started cultivating political and business leaders. Never a man to let an introduction wither on the vine, he would later put those connections to good use. In 1948 Karr made another sudden career change -- to public relations. First, he worked for William H. Weintraub & Co., where he became the chief counselor and confidant of Lewis Rosenstiel, chairman of Schenley Industries. Then he started his own agency, Market Relations Network. During this incarnation he developed a specialty: managing proxy fights in corporate takeovers. In fact, he became an instant authority by cranking out a book in 1956 called Fight for Control. Much of the expertise that went into the book came from veteran proxy fighter Leopold Silberstein, president of Penn-Texas Corp., whom Karr had worked for and helped take over a company called Niles-Bement-Pond. It was a lesson the teacher would dearly regret giving, because in 1959 Karr joined with corporate raider Alfons Landa and engineered the takeover of Silberstein's company (which became Fairbanks Whitney, but was later renamed Colt Industries). Landa installed himself as chairman and Karr became president. (See "Dave Karr in the President's Chair," FORTUNE, June, 1961.) When Landa stepped aside, Karr became chairman. But in 1963, following charges of mismanagement, he was forced to resign. Shifting his base to Paris Dave Karr's next incarnation was in show business. With Fred Coe he produced the Broadway play Xmas in Las Vegas. Together with Max Youngstein, who remembers Karr as "incredibly imaginative," he made two movies: The Dangerous Days of Kiowa Jones, and E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, a title that seemed to foretell the deteriorating state of Karr's own fortunes. M.G.M. wanted to keep him on the movie lot because of an impending proxy battle. But Karr's own plans involved further big changes in his life: he married a well-to-do French lawyer (wife No. 3), shifted his operating base to Paris, and established himself as a financial consultant. Karr now traveled the Continent, dropping his accumulated store of names with reverberance. For a while he moved his offices in with Baron Edmund de Rothschild's, and was able to say, "I work for the Rothschilds." But no major deals materialized from that relationship. Then in 1968 he encountered Sir Charles Forte. Forte's hotel chain had already embarked on a vast expansion program, but had acquired no properties in Paris. It happened that three of the finest hotels there -- the Plaza Athenee, George V, and La Tremoille -- were owned by Mme Francois Dupre, who had steadfastly refused to sell. Karr had been introduced to Mme Dupre by his French wife and was determined to get a deal for Forte. But those particular hotels were practically part of France's patrimony, Charles de Gaulle having once declared that they must never be permitted to fall into foreign hands. They were also beset by labor problems. None of these problems stopped Karr. He brought Mme Dupre and Forte together, helped work out the terms of the sale ($25 million cash), personally ironed out the labor disputes, then took over for Sir Charles as chairman of the holding company established to operate the hotels. Later, Karr also arranged the purchase of the Hotel Pierre in New York for Forte, and explored the possibility of building Trusthouse Forte hotels in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. "If David Karr thought you had an interest in the Taj Mahal," explained Sir Charles, "he would have no hesitation about going to the Indian government and saying, 'Look, I've got this deal . . .'" Like most of Karr's business relation-ships (and marriages), his close association with Forte finally ruptured. They split in 1976, but as Sir Charles said, "Karr never quite abandoned a connection, because eventually it might produce a plum." About a year ago, Forte explained, Karr came limping into his office, "with some such ridiculous complaint as having banged his knee on Brezhnev's desk." But Forte was no longer taking Karr seriously. "He had become a little swollen-headed and was talking in terms of making billions in the Soviet Union." Sir Charles's suspicions Forte does not entirely dismiss the possibility that Karr was murdered, though his speculations differ from Evia's. He thinks that if foul play did occur, it could have resulted from Karr's connection with the three Paris hotels, rather than from his Soviet dealings. Forte explained how, last summer, the hotel chain was in the process of transferring Henri Manassero, manager of the Pierre in New York, to Paris to supervise the running of the Plaza Athenee, George V, and La Tremoille. On July 7, during a stopover in London, the telephone rang in Manassero's room and a voice said: "Karr is dead. Come to Paris and you're next." Forte ordered Manassero back to New York, where he still is, though he refuses to discuss with FORTUNE the question of what a possible murderer might have been trying to accomplish. The close and intriguing connection between Dave Karr and the Russians evolved out of his business association with Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum. (See "Occidental's Odd Couple," FORTUNE, November 16.) Hammer hired Karr as a consultant in 1972 because of Oxy's vulnerability to a takeover, stemming from costly tanker contracts, which were draining the company's finances. The two men flew around the world together renegotiating the contracts, after which Karr said to Hammer: "You're always talking about your old friend Lenin. Let's go to the Soviet Union and make a deal." Hammer, whose father, Julius, had been one of the founders of the U.S. Communist party in New York, had met Lenin in 1921. Dragging Armand along Hammer and Karr's first foray into the Soviet Union in 1972 almost aborted over the Oxy chairman's insistence on taking his company plane. Sargent Shriver, who had become a legal counsel and associate of Karr's after serving as ambassador to France, recalls that it was really he and Karr who arranged that expedition. "Hammer knew who to see to make the trip worth-while," explained Shriver. "But we organized it." Karr always referred to that initial trip as, "dragging Armand kicking and screaming to the U.S.S.R." The seemingly impossible problem of obtaining landing rights in Moscow for Hammer's Gulfstream was finally solved when Karr and Shriver had lunch in Paris with Dzherman Gvishiani, deputy chairman of the State Committee for Science and Technology. Gvishiani is an expert on American management techniques, and has a powerful voice on all contracts signed with U.S. firms. He also happens to be Premier Alexei Kosygin's son-in-law. Karr made some thirty trips to Moscow for Hammer, while the Occidental chief negotiated a $20-billion fertilizer contract with the Soviet government. However, after about a year, he broke bitterly with Hammer and went into competition with him for Soviet business. "The show wasn't big enough for those two egos," commented a mutual friend. The New York Times reported recently that Karr secretly testified before the Securities and Exchange Commission that Hammer had made payoffs in the Soviet Union. The SEC refuses to comment. However, Karr's wife, Evia, says: "David felt he had been used by Hammer." So it would not be surprising if he sought revenge. Operating on his own, Karr proved remarkably adept at ingratiating himself with the Russians. He brought them the latest political gossip, business rumors -- and, some say, intelligence information -- together with an endless store of jokes and stories. "Dave Karr became the George Jessel of the Soviet circuit," said an American businessman watching him perform. He even told jokes at the expense of the Soviets themselves. Requested once to address a seminar of 500 Intourist officials in Moscow, Karr asked them: "How do you deal with Russians? Just like you eat an elephant. Bite by bite." While it was Kosygin's son-in-law, Gvishiani, who had invited him back to the Soviet Union after his break with Hammer, Karr's coterie of Soviet officials grew to include Vladimir Alkhimov, chairman of the State Bank; Yuri Ivanov, chairman of the Foreign Trade Bank; Leonid Kostandov, minister of Chemical Industries; and Ignaty Novikov, Deputy Premier, chairman of the State Committee for Construction Affairs, and president of the Olympic Organizing Committee. These were powerful friends and -- as some of the people who believe that Karr was murdered point out -- potential enemies as well. Sometimes back in Western Europe or the U.S., Karr would boast indiscreetly that he had a few of these high-up Russians in his hip pocket. It was through his contacts, he claimed, that the way was paved for Christina Onassis to marry a Soviet shipping official and move to Moscow. The linkup with Lazard However, Sargent Shriver, who made more than a dozen trips to Moscow with Karr, detected a basic flaw in his operation. "Karr was chiaroscuric," says Shriver. "He sketched out the most imaginative proposals. What he needed was to be part of an entity that could also offer solid financial backing." It was Shriver who encouraged the linkup with Lazard Freres et Cie. and who coined the name Financial Engineers -- of which Lazard partner Augustin Herve-Gruyer became chairman. Shriver also became a member of the firm, though he later "agreed to disagree" with Karr and resigned. This curious Karr-Lazard entity signed the Kosmos Hotel contract and arranged the first large syndicated loan to the Soviet Union by private banks: $250 million in 1975. But the most highly complicated, hotly-competed-for Soviet deal in which Karr and Lazard ended up with a big piece of the action was on another front. It involved the marketing rights to the silver, gold, and platinum coins commemorating the 1980 Olympics. The fierce Olympic bidding actually began with the competition for television rights. Here Karr had the inside track, working on behalf of his good friend Roone Arledge of ABC. But Arledge was not as aggressive as Karr wanted him to be (even though Lazard Freres et Cie. had agreed to finance the deal for ABC), and ignored Karr's pleas to return to Moscow. Arledge finally rushed back, but only after NBC already had the contract sewn up. Karr was furious. To pacify him, Gvishiani suggested that he get into the bidding for the lucrative Olympic-coin contract. Shriver had already signed a contract whereby Financial Engineers gained exclusive rights to the Olympic symbol.A subsidiary called Sports Licensing was established to handle the symbol's franchising, and it embarked on a joint venture with Image Factory Sports, Inc. (headed by former California Senator John Tunney) to make sub-licensing agreements for the sale of T-shirts, jewelry, and other Olympic merchandise. Competing for the much richer coin deal (which had an estimated retail value of $250 million to $300 million) was an imposing array of business muscle. There were more than thirty bidders, including American Express, Engelhard Minerals, the Dresdner Bank, and an American syndicate composed of Occidental Petroleum, Loeb Rhoades, the New York Times Co., MCA, Summa Corp., and an entertainment company called United Euram. The shuttle to Moscow Herve-Gruyer reports that he, often with Karr, shuttled from Paris to Moscow some seventeen times in 1977 chasing the coin contract. "We were building a close relationship with the commercial department of the Foreign Trade Bank," he said, which handles the sale abroad of all of Russia's precious metals, including the Olympic coins. At the same time, Leo Henzel of United Euram, the organizer of the American syndicate, together with Dudley Cates, executive vice president of Loeb Rhoades, was similarly winging back and forth between New York and Moscow, trying to clinch the contract for the rival group. In the end, the Russians found a solution: merge the competitors. Reluctantly, Karr and Hammer found themselves reunited in the coin deal. Immediately, however, infighting within the American syndicate caused rever-berations all the way to the top at the Kremlin. The New York Times Co., MCA, and Summa had previously dropped out, but Loeb Rhoades and organizer Henzel's United Euram were still part of the syndicate. Hammer offered to buy Henzel out, and when the offer was turned down, forced him out. Henzel retaliated by telling the small New York newspaper Jewish Week that he had been "cut out" of the coin deal "just to make room" for Karr's good friend Gvishiani. Interviewed by telephone, Karr furiously denied the story, but Loeb Rhoades Vice President Cates, who was also interviewed, corroborated Henzel's charge. Cates resigned a month later, and Henzel is presently suing both Occidental and Loeb Rhoades. But Jewish Week's front-page story (headlined OLYMPIC PROMOTERS NAME KOSYGIN KIN AS SHARING IN DEAL) may have already destroyed trust in Karr at the Kremlin. Splitting up the coin deal The Olympic-coin contract ended up being split six ways. Financial Engineers got the biggest piece -- 40 percent -- half of that going to Karr personally. Occidental received 33 percent. Paramount Coin Co. of Columbus, Ohio, which had been brought in to assist in the marketing, was given a 10 percent interest, and Loeb Rhoades got 7 percent. In addition, Lazard Brothers of London and Banque Nationale de Paris, both of which helped finance the deal, received 5 percent each. A company called Numinter B.V. was created to handle worldwide (excluding Communist-bloc countries) sales, and Charles Simonelli, formerly executive vice president of Technicolor, and an old friend of Karr's from his movie-making days, was hired to run it. "David always called me Kid," says Simonelli. "This is going to be your biggest hit, Kid," he told me. "You'll be a superstar." Apparently Simonelli, who resigned on September 30, did, indeed, perform well, as three-quarters of the coins have already been sold -- and at a substantial profit to all of the investors. But according to Evia Karr, it was Eliezer Preminger, a confidant and silent partner of Karr's, who was his behind-the-scenes adviser on the coin deal. Preminger (once head of the Hebrew Communist party) was Israel's deputy director of the Ministry of Development when Karr, then president of Fairbanks Whitney, contracted with him to produce water-desalinization machinery for Israel. Now living in Amsterdam, he refuses to discuss his close business relationship with Karr. However, Evia asserts that Preminger devised a system to inflate expenses and conceal profits on the coin contract, so that Soviet authorities would not be able to determine precisely how much Karr was making. The Israeli explanation Israeli security officials, who have never subscribed to the notion that Karr died a natural death (and who add that Preminger has good reason for fearing to talk to FORTUNE), hint that the Russians discovered Karr was cheating them on the coin contract. Evia Karr made many trips to the Soviet Union with her husband, and she confirms that the Russians were growing suspicious of the deal. But the Russians had better reasons for getting rid of Karr, say the Israelis, who claim also to have evidence that Karr was involved in Soviet arms sales to Libya and the P.L.O. as well as to Uganda. The implication of this charge is that Karr was cheating in that business, too, by charging the Russians and their customers "double commissions." Obviously, it will take a long time for Dave Karr's partners and heirs, and perhaps the police, to sort out all his secrets. A master at screening one corporate entity with another, he had in his final years spun an intricate web of Swiss, Lichtenstein, and island of Jersey holding companies, with a dozen or more subsidiaries and joint ventures, which made it terribly difficult to trace the proceeds from such a complex deal as the Olympic-coin program. It will take a long time, too, for the controversy surrounding both his life and his death to subside, because even after so many careers, his motives never became clear. Was he merely a shrewd fixer who depended on cultivating friends in high places? Or was he a more sinister figure, capable of betraying his colleagues and his country?Or then again, was he, as his son Andrew contends: "Simply a surfer in the rough world of business, searching for the perfect wave"? GRAPHIC: Picture 1, David Karr always said he was happiest aboard his yacht, Ottellia, on which he used to cruise the Mediterranean. He hoped to leave on a vacation aboard the Ottellia on July 8, the day after he died in Paris. A yacht he had owned previously caught fire, exploded, and sank at her dock in Cannes in 1971, Dominique; Picture 2, Evia Karr, who believes that her husband was murdered, leaves the Palais de Justice in Paris after filing charges of homicide "against persons unknown." A German model, she was Karr's fourth wife, and had been close to him for seven years before they were married, Raymond Delalande-L'Aurore; Picture 3, Karr and a Soviet official, Dzherman Gvishiani, signed the contract in 1974 to build Moscow's Kosmos Hotel. Between them is Paul Bougenaux, then Director General of the Plaza Athenee hotel in Paris. He and Karr later had a falling out, and shortly before he died, Karr told friends that he had "fixed Bougenaux's clock." Six days after Karr's death, Bougenaux and the Plaza Athenee parted ways; Picture 4, Olympic coins, minted in silver, gold, and platinum, are being sold all over the world by a company called Numinter. They are redeemable only in the Soviet Union and in rubles. Courtesy Moswow 1980 Olympic Coin Programme SBD

The Death of Dave Karr, and Other Mysteries Fortune December 3, 1979, Domestic Edition

December 3, 1979, Domestic Edition SECTION: Pg. 94 LENGTH: 4823 words HEADLINE: The Death of Dave Karr, and Other Mysteries BYLINE: by ROY ROWAN; Research associate: Andrew Baird

BODY: The funeral wreaths at Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris bore some intriguing names: Christina Onassis, Roone Arledge, the U.S.S.R. Committee for Science and Technology, and Lazard Freres, just to mention a few. A stranger among the two dozen mourners gathered for the ceremony might have wondered what secrets of the deceased could have linked the Greek shipowner's daughter with the American Broadcasting executive, the Soviet government, and eminent investment bankers. But there wasn't much time for that kind of conjecture, because an announcement was quickly made that the funeral was being canceled. So it was that the last rites for David Karr proved to be as mysterious, and as abruptly terminated, as his multi-faceted business career.

Back home, the demise of the sixty-year-old Karr on July 7, 1979, did not even rate an obituary, though he had once served as chairman of a FORTUNE 500 company, and by the time of his death was very possibly America's biggest deal maker in the Soviet Union. There were other distinguishing marks to his career that merited some kind of posthumous mention. He had written articles for the Communist Daily Worker as well as a book on proxy fighting, produced a couple of Broad-way plays and Hollywood movies, and demonstrated an infatuation with the politically powerful, having traveled the campaign trail with such diverse presidential candidates as Henry Wallace, Sargent Shriver, and Jerry Brown. Brilliance and deviousness were his most widely acknowledged weapons. But his motives were variously interpreted.

"He had a strong social conscience that made him an intense promoter of detente," claims his longtime friend, Senator Alan Cranston.

"When I hear that David Karr was concerned about Russia's Jews, I smile," says his most recent boss, Sir Charles Forte, executive chairman of Trusthouse Forte Ltd., one of the world's largest hotel chains. "He was interested in only one thing -- money."

Karr, whose name originally was Katz and whose mother was born in Russia, often bragged of privately coaching Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter on ways to gain concessions for Soviet dissidents, just as he frequently boasted of personally helping 300 Soviet Jews emigrate to Israel. But even on this claim there is violent disagreement. "He was no friend of Israel," snaps Samuel Flatto-Sharon, a member of the Knesset (Israel's parliament), who claims that a copy of a letter thanking Karr for arranging a $10-million Soviet arms shipment to Uganda was found in Idi Amin's captured files. But Flatto-Sharon's credibility must be questioned: he is standing trial for vote buying in Tel Aviv, after fleeing an embezzlement charge in Paris.

A $175-million monument

Whispers of a KGB connection followed Karr everywhere, once he started commuting to Moscow in 1972. However, in his bargaining with the Russians, just as in his wheeling-dealing with everyone else, it was always difficult to be sure whose side Karr was on. "He had a tendency to be involved with two sides of every equation," said Samuel Pisar, a prominent American attorney in Paris and authority on East-West trade. "Yet he was always able to supply the missing ingredient to make the deal."

Dave Karr died less than twelve hours after returning to Paris from his greatest personal triumph in the Soviet Union: dedication of the glistening new 1,777-room Kosmos Hotel. That ceremony represented the culmination of a unique $175-million contract that enabled him -- an American entrepreneur, and in principle a complete outsider -- to organize the building of a socalled French turnkey hotel (outfitted with French equipment down to the last Armagnac glass), on Soviet soil, with Western capital, and 1,200 French and Yugoslav laborers. But then Karr had repeatedly told Vladimir Alkhimov, former deputy minister of foreign trade and now chairman of the State Bank of the U.S.S.R., "When you get a deal that's so complex it turns everybody else off, try me."

Kathy Karr, the businessman's twenty-five-year-old daughter, had returned from Moscow with her father and was in his 60 Avenue Foch apartment when he died. She explains that while in the U.S.S.R. her father complained of severe stomach cramps, and was forced to leave the July 5 hotel dedication ceremony fifteen minutes after it began. That night he called her into his hotel room and said he thought he might be having a heart attack. He wrote down the telephone number of a Soviet official who would be able to summon an ambulance.

The next morning Karr felt much better and went to the Kremlin for a meeting with First Deputy Prime Minister Nikolai Tikhonov to discuss other business ventures. There was a possibility of building additional hotels in Leningrad and Kiev. Among his many projects, Karr also was trying to help Mitsubishi Heavy Industries build a soybean-processing plant in the U.S.S.R., to help Blue Bell Inc. (the maker of Wrangler jeans) establish a denim factory, and to help Peugeot-Citroen obtain a contract to modernize the AZLK plant that builds Moskvich cars.

Karr was accompanied to the Kremlin by two of his principal French associates: Jean Guyot, senior partner of Lazard Freres et Cie., and a director of Financial Engineers, the Swiss holding company owned jointly by Karr and Lazard; and Herve Alphand, former French Ambassador to the U.S., who is now chairman of Finatec S.A., the wholly owned French subsidiary of Financial Engineers. "David was in fine fettle," reports Guyot. "He was witty and gay." That same afternoon on the flight back to Paris, Alphand reports that Karr remained in high spirits, talking exuberantly of the billions that might be invested in Soviet projects.

Kathy Karr, however, continued to worry about her father's health. "He couldn't sit still on the plane," she said. "He looked thin. I don't think he ate four meals during the week."

"Nobody listens to a poor man"

Once, during the flight, when Kathy suggested that he should consider taking some time off to write a book about his life, Karr touched his daughter's cheek and said, "You're my sense of eternity." Then he delivered her a lecture on how it wasn't just money he was chasing. He added, however, that money can buy credibility.

"Nobody listens to a poor man," he explained. "I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't do my share for peace." His peacemaking efforts, or at least those for which he credited himself, included: supplying signals to the White House for communicating policy changes to the Kremlin, smoothing the way for last year's visit to the Soviet Union by Senator Edward Kennedy, and keeping his other Senate contacts -- namely Cranston, Ribicoff, Javits, and Jackson -- abreast of the Soviet response to negotiations on the strategic-arms limitation talks or other sensitive issues.

When he landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport at 7:30 P.M. on July 6, Karr was furious to learn that his thirty-year-old German wife, Evia, had flown off to New York. Evia was Karr's fourth wife. Their eleven-month marriage was described by a friend as "an exercise in china throwing and tender reconciliations." Kathy reports that the sound of Evia's voice shouting over the transatlantic telephone filled the apartment as soon as they arrived.

"That woman is sick. I've got to get her out of New York," Karr told Kathy after he had hung up. He called his friend "Jack the Tiger," as the concierge at the Plaza Athenee hotel is known, and asked him to book a seat on the Concorde leaving the next day. Then, as was insomniac Karr's habit, he started calling friends and business associates in other time zones.

The valet thought he'd fallen

"I was with him until 2:00 A.M.," explains Kathy. "He had taken two Libriums and I could see that he was finally falling asleep. So I went to bed myself." But at 4:00 A.M. Karr called Evia again in New York. At 7:30 A.M. Karr's valet rushed into Kathy's room, exclaiming that his employer had apparently fallen. When Kathy glimpsed her father lying face down on the bedroom floor beside his unpacked suitcases, she knew he was dead. "He appeared to have toppled without having put his hands out to break his fall," she said. Karr's personal physician and a police surgeon were summoned to the apartment. Independently, the two doctors confirmed that he had died instantly of a cardiovascular attack.

But the doctors' reports didn't satisfy Karr's emotional young widow. Flying back to Paris, she obtained a court order stopping the funeral service and cremation. Upon her request, the body was then delivered to the Institut Medico-Legal for an autopsy.

The high drama of halting a funeral already in progress drew not only the attention of French authorities, but the concern of U.S. officials, who also questioned the widow. According to a series of confidential telexes sent to the Secretary of State by the American Embassy in Paris, Evia Karr alleged that her husband had either been poisoned by the Russians, since he felt sick on returning from each visit to the Soviet Union, or had been murdered by the KGB in their apartment, where she had seen bloodstained pillowcases and noticed that his spectacles were broken. Evia emphasized to her embassy interrogator that the Kennedy family was very interested in the case, and that she had spoken to Senator Kennedy several times about it.

Also mentioned in these confidential State Department messages was the fact that Evia's French lawyer had informed the embassy death and estates officer that the Karrs had decided to divorce. The lawyer left as proof a copy of a handwritten agreement signed by David Karr on June 26, 1979, transferring to Evia Freiberg Karr more than $2 million in cash, property, and shares of stock in two of Karr's companies.

While the results of the autopsy failed to bear out Evia's darkest suspicions, they did leave open a crack of doubt. No toxic substances were found present in the corpse. And in the words of the examining officer, "the cardiac lesions were sufficient to cause death." Nevertheless, a small fracture of the larynx was discovered. Although this probably occurred when Karr fell, and does not conflict with the heart-attack diagnosis, Evia pressed on with her charges of foul play, filing an action that resulted in the case being classified under French law as: "Homicide charged against persons unknown."

On the question of the Karrs' intended divorce, Evia has her own version. "David and I had no intention of divorcing," she told FORTUNE. She maintains that the lawyer who had delivered the handwritten June 26 agreement to the embassy was not in her employ. Anyway, she indicated that the document was simply an affirmation of Karr's love for her. "I told David, 'I need some kind of control over you, because one day you love me and the next day you're in a bad mood.'" It was then, she said, that he agreed to give her the $2 million -- a small part of the personal fortune that, she estimates, had grown to $15 million or $20 million.

Recently, Evia hired former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste to try to track down her husband's assets, which she believes are secreted away in many companies and countries. "You see," she said, "David had certain inhibitions until he met me. He thought it was obscene for a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn to have more than $5 million."

Cultivating future connections

The nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, who died a multimillionaire in Paris, possessed an I.Q. of 189 -- or so it was asserted by school authorities in San Antonio (where Karr lived briefly as a boy), who publicized him as a budding genius. He also had a knack for changing careers with chameleon-like quickness. By the time Karr was twenty-five, he had worked as a Fuller Brush man, New York Daily Mirror reporter, penny-a-line writer for the Communist Daily Worker, investigator for the Council against Nazi Propaganda, employee in the Office of War Information (where he was let go after being called before Martin Dies's House Un-American Activities Committee), and star legman for Washington columnist Drew Pearson.

Digging up dirt for Pearson surely sharpened Karr's cloak-and-dagger instincts. But it was while cruising the capital in a telephone-equipped limousine that he also started cultivating political and business leaders. Never a man to let an introduction wither on the vine, he would later put those connections to good use.

In 1948 Karr made another sudden career change -- to public relations. First, he worked for William H. Weintraub & Co., where he became the chief counselor and confidant of Lewis Rosenstiel, chairman of Schenley Industries. Then he started his own agency, Market Relations Network. During this incarnation he developed a specialty: managing proxy fights in corporate takeovers. In fact, he became an instant authority by cranking out a book in 1956 called Fight for Control.

Much of the expertise that went into the book came from veteran proxy fighter Leopold Silberstein, president of Penn-Texas Corp., whom Karr had worked for and helped take over a company called Niles-Bement-Pond. It was a lesson the teacher would dearly regret giving, because in 1959 Karr joined with corporate raider Alfons Landa and engineered the takeover of Silberstein's company (which became Fairbanks Whitney, but was later renamed Colt Industries). Landa installed himself as chairman and Karr became president. (See "Dave Karr in the President's Chair," FORTUNE, June, 1961.) When Landa stepped aside, Karr became chairman. But in 1963, following charges of mismanagement, he was forced to resign.

Shifting his base to Paris

Dave Karr's next incarnation was in show business. With Fred Coe he produced the Broadway play Xmas in Las Vegas. Together with Max Youngstein, who remembers Karr as "incredibly imaginative," he made two movies: The Dangerous Days of Kiowa Jones, and E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, a title that seemed to foretell the deteriorating state of Karr's own fortunes. M.G.M. wanted to keep him on the movie lot because of an impending proxy battle. But Karr's own plans involved further big changes in his life: he married a well-to-do French lawyer (wife No. 3), shifted his operating base to Paris, and established himself as a financial consultant.

Karr now traveled the Continent, dropping his accumulated store of names with reverberance. For a while he moved his offices in with Baron Edmund de Rothschild's, and was able to say, "I work for the Rothschilds." But no major deals materialized from that relationship. Then in 1968 he encountered Sir Charles Forte.

Forte's hotel chain had already embarked on a vast expansion program, but had acquired no properties in Paris. It happened that three of the finest hotels there -- the Plaza Athenee, George V, and La Tremoille -- were owned by Mme Francois Dupre, who had steadfastly refused to sell. Karr had been introduced to Mme Dupre by his French wife and was determined to get a deal for Forte. But those particular hotels were practically part of France's patrimony, Charles de Gaulle having once declared that they must never be permitted to fall into foreign hands. They were also beset by labor problems.

None of these problems stopped Karr. He brought Mme Dupre and Forte together, helped work out the terms of the sale ($25 million cash), personally ironed out the labor disputes, then took over for Sir Charles as chairman of the holding company established to operate the hotels. Later, Karr also arranged the purchase of the Hotel Pierre in New York for Forte, and explored the possibility of building Trusthouse Forte hotels in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. "If David Karr thought you had an interest in the Taj Mahal," explained Sir Charles, "he would have no hesitation about going to the Indian government and saying, 'Look, I've got this deal . . .'"

Like most of Karr's business relation-ships (and marriages), his close association with Forte finally ruptured. They split in 1976, but as Sir Charles said, "Karr never quite abandoned a connection, because eventually it might produce a plum." About a year ago, Forte explained, Karr came limping into his office, "with some such ridiculous complaint as having banged his knee on Brezhnev's desk." But Forte was no longer taking Karr seriously. "He had become a little swollen-headed and was talking in terms of making billions in the Soviet Union."

Sir Charles's suspicions

Forte does not entirely dismiss the possibility that Karr was murdered, though his speculations differ from Evia's. He thinks that if foul play did occur, it could have resulted from Karr's connection with the three Paris hotels, rather than from his Soviet dealings. Forte explained how, last summer, the hotel chain was in the process of transferring Henri Manassero, manager of the Pierre in New York, to Paris to supervise the running of the Plaza Athenee, George V, and La Tremoille. On July 7, during a stopover in London, the telephone rang in Manassero's room and a voice said: "Karr is dead. Come to Paris and you're next." Forte ordered Manassero back to New York, where he still is, though he refuses to discuss with FORTUNE the question of what a possible murderer might have been trying to accomplish.

The close and intriguing connection between Dave Karr and the Russians evolved out of his business association with Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum. (See "Occidental's Odd Couple," FORTUNE, November 16.) Hammer hired Karr as a consultant in 1972 because of Oxy's vulnerability to a takeover, stemming from costly tanker contracts, which were draining the company's finances. The two men flew around the world together renegotiating the contracts, after which Karr said to Hammer: "You're always talking about your old friend Lenin. Let's go to the Soviet Union and make a deal." Hammer, whose father, Julius, had been one of the founders of the U.S. Communist party in New York, had met Lenin in 1921.

Dragging Armand along

Hammer and Karr's first foray into the Soviet Union in 1972 almost aborted over the Oxy chairman's insistence on taking his company plane. Sargent Shriver, who had become a legal counsel and associate of Karr's after serving as ambassador to France, recalls that it was really he and Karr who arranged that expedition. "Hammer knew who to see to make the trip worth-while," explained Shriver. "But we organized it." Karr always referred to that initial trip as, "dragging Armand kicking and screaming to the U.S.S.R."

The seemingly impossible problem of obtaining landing rights in Moscow for Hammer's Gulfstream was finally solved when Karr and Shriver had lunch in Paris with Dzherman Gvishiani, deputy chairman of the State Committee for Science and Technology. Gvishiani is an expert on American management techniques, and has a powerful voice on all contracts signed with U.S. firms. He also happens to be Premier Alexei Kosygin's son-in-law.

Karr made some thirty trips to Moscow for Hammer, while the Occidental chief negotiated a $20-billion fertilizer contract with the Soviet government. However, after about a year, he broke bitterly with Hammer and went into competition with him for Soviet business. "The show wasn't big enough for those two egos," commented a mutual friend. The New York Times reported recently that Karr secretly testified before the Securities and Exchange Commission that Hammer had made payoffs in the Soviet Union. The SEC refuses to comment. However, Karr's wife, Evia, says: "David felt he had been used by Hammer." So it would not be surprising if he sought revenge.

Operating on his own, Karr proved remarkably adept at ingratiating himself with the Russians. He brought them the latest political gossip, business rumors -- and, some say, intelligence information -- together with an endless store of jokes and stories. "Dave Karr became the George Jessel of the Soviet circuit," said an American businessman watching him perform. He even told jokes at the expense of the Soviets themselves. Requested once to address a seminar of 500 Intourist officials in Moscow, Karr asked them: "How do you deal with Russians? Just like you eat an elephant. Bite by bite."

While it was Kosygin's son-in-law, Gvishiani, who had invited him back to the Soviet Union after his break with Hammer, Karr's coterie of Soviet officials grew to include Vladimir Alkhimov, chairman of the State Bank; Yuri Ivanov, chairman of the Foreign Trade Bank; Leonid Kostandov, minister of Chemical Industries; and Ignaty Novikov, Deputy Premier, chairman of the State Committee for Construction Affairs, and president of the Olympic Organizing Committee. These were powerful friends and -- as some of the people who believe that Karr was murdered point out -- potential enemies as well. Sometimes back in Western Europe or the U.S., Karr would boast indiscreetly that he had a few of these high-up Russians in his hip pocket. It was through his contacts, he claimed, that the way was paved for Christina Onassis to marry a Soviet shipping official and move to Moscow.

The linkup with Lazard

However, Sargent Shriver, who made more than a dozen trips to Moscow with Karr, detected a basic flaw in his operation. "Karr was chiaroscuric," says Shriver. "He sketched out the most imaginative proposals. What he needed was to be part of an entity that could also offer solid financial backing." It was Shriver who encouraged the linkup with Lazard Freres et Cie. and who coined the name Financial Engineers -- of which Lazard partner Augustin Herve-Gruyer became chairman. Shriver also became a member of the firm, though he later "agreed to disagree" with Karr and resigned.

This curious Karr-Lazard entity signed the Kosmos Hotel contract and arranged the first large syndicated loan to the Soviet Union by private banks: $250 million in 1975. But the most highly complicated, hotly-competed-for Soviet deal in which Karr and Lazard ended up with a big piece of the action was on another front. It involved the marketing rights to the silver, gold, and platinum coins commemorating the 1980 Olympics.

The fierce Olympic bidding actually began with the competition for television rights. Here Karr had the inside track, working on behalf of his good friend Roone Arledge of ABC. But Arledge was not as aggressive as Karr wanted him to be (even though Lazard Freres et Cie. had agreed to finance the deal for ABC), and ignored Karr's pleas to return to Moscow. Arledge finally rushed back, but only after NBC already had the contract sewn up.

Karr was furious. To pacify him, Gvishiani suggested that he get into the bidding for the lucrative Olympic-coin contract. Shriver had already signed a contract whereby Financial Engineers gained exclusive rights to the Olympic symbol.A subsidiary called Sports Licensing was established to handle the symbol's franchising, and it embarked on a joint venture with Image Factory Sports, Inc. (headed by former California Senator John Tunney) to make sub-licensing agreements for the sale of T-shirts, jewelry, and other Olympic merchandise.

Competing for the much richer coin deal (which had an estimated retail value of $250 million to $300 million) was an imposing array of business muscle. There were more than thirty bidders, including American Express, Engelhard Minerals, the Dresdner Bank, and an American syndicate composed of Occidental Petroleum, Loeb Rhoades, the New York Times Co., MCA, Summa Corp., and an entertainment company called United Euram.

The shuttle to Moscow

Herve-Gruyer reports that he, often with Karr, shuttled from Paris to Moscow some seventeen times in 1977 chasing the coin contract. "We were building a close relationship with the commercial department of the Foreign Trade Bank," he said, which handles the sale abroad of all of Russia's precious metals, including the Olympic coins. At the same time, Leo Henzel of United Euram, the organizer of the American syndicate, together with Dudley Cates, executive vice president of Loeb Rhoades, was similarly winging back and forth between New York and Moscow, trying to clinch the contract for the rival group. In the end, the Russians found a solution: merge the competitors. Reluctantly, Karr and Hammer found themselves reunited in the coin deal.

Immediately, however, infighting within the American syndicate caused rever-berations all the way to the top at the Kremlin. The New York Times Co., MCA, and Summa had previously dropped out, but Loeb Rhoades and organizer Henzel's United Euram were still part of the syndicate. Hammer offered to buy Henzel out, and when the offer was turned down, forced him out. Henzel retaliated by telling the small New York newspaper Jewish Week that he had been "cut out" of the coin deal "just to make room" for Karr's good friend Gvishiani. Interviewed by telephone, Karr furiously denied the story, but Loeb Rhoades Vice President Cates, who was also interviewed, corroborated Henzel's charge. Cates resigned a month later, and Henzel is presently suing both Occidental and Loeb Rhoades. But Jewish Week's front-page story (headlined OLYMPIC PROMOTERS NAME KOSYGIN KIN AS SHARING IN DEAL) may have already destroyed trust in Karr at the Kremlin.

Splitting up the coin deal

The Olympic-coin contract ended up being split six ways. Financial Engineers got the biggest piece -- 40 percent -- half of that going to Karr personally. Occidental received 33 percent. Paramount Coin Co. of Columbus, Ohio, which had been brought in to assist in the marketing, was given a 10 percent interest, and Loeb Rhoades got 7 percent. In addition, Lazard Brothers of London and Banque Nationale de Paris, both of which helped finance the deal, received 5 percent each.

A company called Numinter B.V. was created to handle worldwide (excluding Communist-bloc countries) sales, and Charles Simonelli, formerly executive vice president of Technicolor, and an old friend of Karr's from his movie-making days, was hired to run it. "David always called me Kid," says Simonelli. "This is going to be your biggest hit, Kid," he told me. "You'll be a superstar." Apparently Simonelli, who resigned on September 30, did, indeed, perform well, as three-quarters of the coins have already been sold -- and at a substantial profit to all of the investors.

But according to Evia Karr, it was Eliezer Preminger, a confidant and silent partner of Karr's, who was his behind-the-scenes adviser on the coin deal. Preminger (once head of the Hebrew Communist party) was Israel's deputy director of the Ministry of Development when Karr, then president of Fairbanks Whitney, contracted with him to produce water-desalinization machinery for Israel. Now living in Amsterdam, he refuses to discuss his close business relationship with Karr. However, Evia asserts that Preminger devised a system to inflate expenses and conceal profits on the coin contract, so that Soviet authorities would not be able to determine precisely how much Karr was making.

The Israeli explanation

Israeli security officials, who have never subscribed to the notion that Karr died a natural death (and who add that Preminger has good reason for fearing to talk to FORTUNE), hint that the Russians discovered Karr was cheating them on the coin contract. Evia Karr made many trips to the Soviet Union with her husband, and she confirms that the Russians were growing suspicious of the deal. But the Russians had better reasons for getting rid of Karr, say the Israelis, who claim also to have evidence that Karr was involved in Soviet arms sales to Libya and the P.L.O. as well as to Uganda. The implication of this charge is that Karr was cheating in that business, too, by charging the Russians and their customers "double commissions."

Obviously, it will take a long time for Dave Karr's partners and heirs, and perhaps the police, to sort out all his secrets. A master at screening one corporate entity with another, he had in his final years spun an intricate web of Swiss, Lichtenstein, and island of Jersey holding companies, with a dozen or more subsidiaries and joint ventures, which made it terribly difficult to trace the proceeds from such a complex deal as the Olympic-coin program.

It will take a long time, too, for the controversy surrounding both his life and his death to subside, because even after so many careers, his motives never became clear. Was he merely a shrewd fixer who depended on cultivating friends in high places? Or was he a more sinister figure, capable of betraying his colleagues and his country?Or then again, was he, as his son Andrew contends: "Simply a surfer in the rough world of business, searching for the perfect wave"?

GRAPHIC: Picture 1, David Karr always said he was happiest aboard his yacht, Ottellia, on which he used to cruise the Mediterranean. He hoped to leave on a vacation aboard the Ottellia on July 8, the day after he died in Paris. A yacht he had owned previously caught fire, exploded, and sank at her dock in Cannes in 1971, Dominique;

Picture 2, Evia Karr, who believes that her husband was murdered, leaves the Palais de Justice in Paris after filing charges of homicide "against persons unknown." A German model, she was Karr's fourth wife, and had been close to him for seven years before they were married, Raymond Delalande-L'Aurore;

Picture 3, Karr and a Soviet official, Dzherman Gvishiani, signed the contract in 1974 to build Moscow's Kosmos Hotel. Between them is Paul Bougenaux, then Director General of the Plaza Athenee hotel in Paris. He and Karr later had a falling out, and shortly before he died, Karr told friends that he had "fixed Bougenaux's clock." Six days after Karr's death, Bougenaux and the Plaza Athenee parted ways;

Picture 4, Olympic coins, minted in silver, gold, and platinum, are being sold all over the world by a company called Numinter. They are redeemable only in the Soviet Union and in rubles. Courtesy Moswow 1980 Olympic Coin Programme

SBD

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