The Billionaire Who Wasn't (40 page)

Feeney made one or two exceptions that showed his favoritism to the Irish. When he was recognized and approached in a San Francisco restaurant by Irishman Gerry Mullins, who wanted support for a documentary about photographs taken in Ireland by famed photographer Dorothea Lange, he responded enthusiastically, and the result was an award-winning documentary
Photos to Send
, coproduced by Mullins and Irish American Deirdre Lynch.

Then he stunned his friend Niall O'Dowd by agreeing to accept in person the 1997 award of Irish American of the Year, presented by
Irish America
magazine. Feeney abhorred self-congratulatory events, but he liked O'Dowd and promised to turn up for the lunchtime presentation at the 21 Club on West Fifty-second Street. O'Dowd tipped off two national media friends,
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd, and Jim Dwyer of the
Daily News
. At the event, Feeney told the two columnists that when he was a student at Cornell University, he filled in a questionnaire on money and banking and got a note from the professor saying: “You have a flair for writing, but no knowledge of the subject matter. Try journalism.” Maureen Dowd asked Feeney if he was nervous at making his first public appearance. “Well, they promised me $20 to make the speech,” he quipped. “Chuck Feeney's desire for anonymity is startling in an age when people stamp their names on every available surface,” she wrote in her
New York Times
column. “Here was the real-life John Beresford Tipton on the old television show
The Millionaire,
whose face was never seen as he instructed his personal secretary to give some unsuspecting person a check for $1 million, on the condition that the Samaritan never be revealed.”

Jim Dwyer recalled that his speech was like a toast given by an unprepared uncle at a wedding and that Feeney concluded his talk in style, saying, “That's it, I'm not doing this again.”

One of Feeney's concerns about exposure was that his life would never be the same. But after the lunch, Maureen Dowd noticed him tramping off on foot in an old gray raincoat and tweed cap, unnoticed by passers-by, as other corporate figures climbed into their limousines. Feeney was in fact able to retreat back into semi-anonymity after his unveiling, unrecognized while hailing a taxi in New York or dining at a back table at P. J. Clarke's, where the waiters pretended they didn't know who he was. His wide range of friends and acquaintances around the world—academics, architects, medical professionals, writers, artists, and lawyers—protected his privacy out of loyalty and gratitude.

“Harvey Dale had scared Chuck into believing his life would change enormously if he went public, so Harvey ran it like the CIA,” said Feeney's former legal counsel Paul Hannon. “But I think Chuck found out that it didn't change his life at all. He didn't get better service at P. J. Clarke's.”

CHAPTER 27

Golden Heart

On April 27, 1997, four months after the sale of DFS, Chuck Feeney spotted a single-column story on an inside page of the
San Francisco Examiner
as he waited for a flight at the San Francisco airport. It was headed “U.S. Foundation Last Hope for Many of Vietnam's Poor.” The writer, Sandra Ann Harris, told the story of a mother of seven children who lived in a one-room hut in Vietnam without doors or windows. She did not have the means to feed her children and was relying on a humanitarian organization called East Meets West Foundation, based in Los Angeles, for subsistence. But the organization's Vietnam director, Mark Conroy, was quoted as saying that they likely could not continue helping people like that if the foundation didn't get new funding when their five-year $400,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development ran out in five months.

Feeney tore out the article. When he returned to San Francisco, he asked Gail Vincenzi Bianchi, the administration manager of the InterPacific office, to find out what she could about East Meets West.

Although he had turned sixty-six, Chuck Feeney was not contemplating retirement. Far from it. Not for him the three Gs—golf, grandchildren, and gardening—he told his family. His days of investing in new businesses were behind him, but he was determined to devote all his time to philanthropy. He was becoming more fixated on the merits of giving while living. “The world changed when we sold DFS,” recalled Feeney. “Our coffers were full from the $1.6 billion transaction. I sort of felt we could do more good by
taking that money and putting it into things, but the challenge was, where do you put it?” His philanthropy was opportunistic, but he didn't give randomly. He investigated and scrutinized, and sometimes tested the people involved with small initial grants. And it always came down to his instincts about the quality of the people involved.

The East Meets West Foundation, he learned, was set up by Le Ly Hayslip, a Vietnamese woman whose life as a victim of the war was chronicled in Oliver Stone's 1993 movie
Heaven and Earth
. Born Phung Thi Le Ly, in the Buddhist village of Ky La near Da Nang in central Vietnam, Le Ly was recruited as a child by the Vietcong and at age fifteen was tortured by South Vietnamese forces, but then wrongfully condemned as a traitor by the Vietcong and forced to flee her home. She lived on her wits, and was for a time a prostitute at an American base, but in 1969 she married a U.S. citizen who arranged for her to come to the United States. He died four years later, and she married another American, Dennis Hayslip, who passed away in 1982, leaving Le Ly a trust fund that enabled her to invest and become wealthy. She wrote two books narrating her life.
⁶
In 1987, she founded the East Meets West Foundation as a charitable group dedicated to improving the health and welfare of the poorest Vietnamese and to promoting self-sufficiency by building schools and providing safe drinking water.

The story had a strong appeal for Feeney, who believed that helping people was all about helping them to help themselves. He also thought that the Vietnamese had gotten a raw deal from the United States. “I read a lot of books about the American war in Vietnam,” he said. “It was a war America was not going to win. One of the things that got to me about Vietnam was that it seemed to me the whole concept was wrong . . . going into a village and killing peasant families. After starting a war with people whom we were not going to defeat, General Curtis LeMay said, ‘We're going to bomb them into the Stone Age.' We then put an embargo on trade. Frankly, if you don't trade with the U.S. you don't trade with anybody. It was punitive. Now America is out there trading, and I think that is the right thing to do. We owe it to the Vietnamese after the way we treated them.”

Feeney asked the East Meets West executive director, Mark Stewart, an ex-marine who was severely wounded in Da Nang, to meet him in San Francisco
for a chat. “He may not have been pretty excited when he went in but he came out of there pretty excited, because Chuck said to him, ‘Here, I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars, and you go out and see what you can do with that,'” recalled Mark Conroy. Feeney in effect told Stewart, “Come back and tell me what you did with it. If I like it, well, I have some deep pockets, and maybe we will do some more.” East Meets West took the $100,000 to build and renovate some elementary schools and kindergartens and install some fresh-water systems. Stewart gave Feeney an account of what they did, and Feeney promptly made a second gift of $200,000. It was Feeney's style to see how an initial grant would be used before making a major commitment. Feeney also liked to get trusted friends from the past to check things out for him. He called up Bob Matousek, then living in Tiburon just outside San Francisco, and suggested that he take a trip to Vietnam to assess the quality of the people with the foundation and the type of work that they were doing and whether the Communist government interfered.

Matousek flew to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in early 1998—the first of a dozen trips he would make to Vietnam—and then on to Da Nang, where he introduced himself to Mark Conroy. The Vietnam director spent a week showing him different projects. Matousek was moved by the distress of rural parents unable to look after their children properly. Conroy, who regularly traveled around the rice paddies on a motorcycle to meet with peasants, showed him “compassion homes” they had built outside Da Nang: small, dry, brick structures with toilets that could be put up for a little over $1,000. Many homes in Vietnam were made from tarps: They leaked and had no toilet or cooking facilities.

Matousek reported back to Feeney that he was impressed with the people and the work they were doing, and that there was no sign of interference from the government or of officials looking for kickbacks. There would also be no restrictions on money transfers from Bermuda into Vietnam.

In October 1998, Chuck Feeney flew to Vietnam, taking with him Sandra Harris, the author of the
San Francisco Examiner
article. He flew from Ho Chi Minh City to Da Nang on the east coast to see East Meets West operations for himself.

“Chuck came in and sat down in my old office, which people used to call the cave,” recalled Conroy. “We had snakes and rats and everything you could think of in there. He came back into the kitchen. He talked for about two hours. Looking back today, I'm a bit embarrassed about it because I was
grilling Chuck about what his intentions were, and about his interests in the organization. By then the directors of East Meets West had found out who Chuck was and were asking, ‘What's going on? Who's this very rich guy? What's his interest in our little tiny organization?' There was concern that Chuck was going to come in and take the organization over and do what he wanted to do with it. I caught wind of that. I asked him, ‘Chuck, why are you coming to Vietnam? What is it that you want to do here?' He said, ‘I just thought Vietnam got a bad deal, and I'd like to help out.' He didn't really have to say much more.”

Feeney's arrival could not have come at a more propitious time for Conroy, who did not have the funds to do more than manage an orphanage and a primary health care center in Da Nang and do a little irrigation and microcredit. Money was so tight he was reduced to meeting tour boats coming into Da Nang and soliciting money by making presentations to groups of Western tourists.

As they talked in the “cave,” Conroy became aware that Feeney was interested in larger projects that could make a big improvement in people's lives and would absorb a lot more money. “He didn't seem as interested in the grass-roots stuff. He could do so much more at the level he is at. He wanted to make a bigger impact. He was convinced that if you educate people, they would develop their own country. We were looking at it from the bottom up as a small organization, trying to keep kids alive, get them educated, while Chuck was thinking top down. It was a pretty good fit.”

He took the American visitor to the hospital in Da Nang, where he knew they badly needed a new burns center. At the hospital Feeney asked the directors what their next-most-urgent need was. They said they would really love to renovate the pediatric center, which was in pretty bad shape. Feeney said, “Why don't we do both?”

As they left the hospital, Feeney asked, “What do you think that's going to cost, Mark?” Conroy replied, “Maybe around $300,000.” Back in the cave, Feeney gave him contact details for “a Mr. Harvey Dale,” and asked him to write a proposal for the two projects. “I wrote a bunch of stuff up on three quarters of a sheet of paper,” said Conroy. “Chuck says, ‘That looks good,' and signs it and faxes it off to Harvey. The money came a month later.”

From then on Chuck Feeney became a regular visitor to Vietnam. In Da Nang, Vietnam's fourth-largest city, he stayed in a $25-a-night hotel, making expeditions to hospitals and schools through streets filled with cyclos,
motorbike taxis, and schoolgirls in flowing white dresses riding bicycles. He made sure that the East Meets West Foundation got the money to continue work on water purification, schools, kindergartens, and compassion homes, but “he did not take over the organization in any way,” said Conroy. Said Feeney, “They would say, ‘OK, this month we're going to make a push on elementary schools, or kindergartens,' and we would support it.” In the second half of the 1990s, East Meets West could build only two dozen schools, but with their new patron, they were able to build forty-eight schools in 2001 alone.

Feeney began serious investigation of the education and health needs in Vietnam. He studied surveys and analyses. He got Sandra Harris to work with Conroy for six months to produce a paper on schooling in Vietnam, “Education Under Siege.” He got back copies of Vietnam's English-language newspapers to see what he could glean about the state of the country.

Just as he had done in practically every university in Ireland, Feeney dropped by the director's office at Da Nang University to ask him about his plans for the future. The most urgent need was a new library, but the university couldn't afford to build one. Feeney organized the required funding of $700,000 and channeled it through East Meets West. Conroy got a call one day to meet Feeney at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. “He told me, ‘That library needs a good elevator. I have spent two days looking at elevators. Otis here are not making good ones, just wrapping parts together, the only good one I can find is Schindler.'” He brought Conroy to the Schindler people and said to them, “This is the guy I want you to work with.” A thought struck Conroy. Feeney was planning to buy a lot of elevators. The library was only a first.

“He had a proclivity for construction projects, working with good institutions and good leaders, and building facilities to support their programs: He liked creating tangible assets and institutions to use like major tools,” said Chris Oechsli. “I remember Chuck showing me the article from the
Examiner
. He wasn't showing it as a way of saying anything. It's Chuck's indirect style. You only realize this afterwards. He gives people papers, out of the blue, without any background, sometimes totally unrelated to anything you are aware of. You can't tell if this is a precursor to something he wants you to do or this is just something he wants to get off his desk. There's a lot of ambiguity. These kinds of things happen.” Feeney also for a brief period got John Joyce, an Irish student in Vietnam, and Steve Reynolds, who had retired
from General Atlantic Partners, to act as his representatives in Vietnam, and he started bringing members of the Atlantic Philanthropies board to see for themselves the opportunities there.