Mavericks and Moguls — Society Marbella

By Baron Axel von Schubert

In our politically correct and over-sensitized world, we all secretly long for the ‘good-old-days’ – the times when true Alpha Males, now branded as toxic, dared to risk life and limb to further their cause, displayed healthy greed, and actually spoke their minds without threat of prosecution.

Mavericks have shaped our lives and society since its inception. They have created outstanding, singular achievements, amazing inventions and built impressive empires, often shot down by spectacular failures in exotic, far-away corners of the world, which we all love to remember.

How times have changed!

Labeled today as too offensive and disrespectful to the delicate nature our new ‘Snowflake generation’, these feats by remarkable individuals are forced into oblivion. A great loss to our society and future generations.

Hence the passing of Peter de Savary this 30th of October, one of Britain’s greatest financiers and daredevils, who built and lost mega fortunes in his colorful career, is yet another painful reminder of this inexorable descent into the vapidity of our society.

De Savary, like the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, will be eventually banished from the history curricula of our children, who are increasingly conditioned to conform in politically correct schools. ‘Sic transit gloria mundi’.

Like all great punters, de Savary was a shrewd, ruthless, yet brilliant visionary: his claim to fame was the purchase of a haunted 1000 year old castle in Scotland, Skibo Castle, home to the infamous Carnegie Club. It made all the headlines as the venue for Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s wedding in 2003: a brilliant marketing coup for de Savary, who counted Skibo as only one of his many trophy properties, which included at one point in time the entire western tip of England: Lands’ End in Cornwall.

But de Savary had his eyes on far more tropical jewels, thousands of miles away from the freezing Scottish Highlands: the Caribbean.

After leading the British sailing team in its challenge for the America’s Cup in 1983, and spectacularly losing out against his opponent, this ego-crushing failure prompted him to seek refuge in the far less competitive and shallower azure waters of The Bahamas - of course no less than onboard Richard Burton’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s glorious motor yacht, Kalizma.

The Bahamas, a magnet for Mavericks and Moguls, ever since the brutal slaying of the richest man in the British Empire, gold mining tycoon Sir Harry Oakes in 1943, boasts a rich history of murky financial dealings and eccentric characters.

No exception to that rule, De Savary, upon his arrival on Bahamian shores, proceeded to promptly establish a bank in the nation’s capital of Nassau. With his cushy connections to politicians and celebrities, his mission was to raise Millions of Dollars to finance his exotic mining, oil and shipping adventures in South America.

The bank was not very successful and in 1980 lost $64 million. His subsequent partnership with the infamous Italian financier Roberto Calvi, dubbed the ‘God’s banker’ for his role in running Italy’s second largest bank for the Vatican, Banco Ambrosiano which collapsed in 1982, was a public embarrassment. Calvi was found hanged under a bridge in London in 1984 and de Savary decided to return to a quieter life on his yacht in The Bahamas. Banco Ambrosiano was later wound up by one of the world’s big audit advisory firms, BDO, in, you guessed it, Nassau Bahamas.

A convenient offshore tax haven, boasting banking secrecy and impenetrable offshore company structures since the early ‘70’s, it has always been home to the world’s ‘Rich and Famous’. A British colony until its independence in 1973, The Bahamas had gained global fame as a playground for the European ‘jet set’ through no other than Sean Connery, Ian Fleming’s fantasy spy character, who first appeared in the 1965 thriller ‘Thunderball’.

When driven back to his beachfront hotel in Nassau at breakneck speed in a powder blue Ford Mustang by ravishing secret agent Fiona Volpe, played by Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi, Connery’s unrivalled riposte to her comment, if he was a nervous passenger, was: ‘No, I don’t mind being driven; I just don’t like to be taken for a ride’. Classic.

3 more Bond movies followed with captivating underwater scenes filmed all across this stunning archipelago: ‘Thunderball Grotto’ today is a popular tourist hot spot in the Exumas, a chain of more than a hundred palm fringed Cays, or small islands, as they call them here, stretching southward only 40 miles from Nassau. An underwater paradise, which hosts dozens of dangerous hammerhead and bull sharks during mating season; a daring diving adventure for the more suicidally inclined.

Sipping a dark rum around an ageing massive wooden table on top of the rocky grotto, tourists gaze at pinned up fading black and white photographs of their movie heroes captured during the ‘Thunderball’ filming over half a decade ago: a stark contrast to the glitzy parties, private yachts, 5star hotels and gambling dens in vibrant Nassau, a mere 30 minute helicopter ride away .

A perfect setting for conspiring villains and their world domination fantasies not only in movies, but also in real life, The Bahamas had cast their spell on the world.