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Baghdad, living in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace, he was Senior Adviser to the Proconsul for State Owned Enterprises and Business Development. Reluctantly, he turned his back on a mess of the reconstruction, he says, and instead buried his energies in the place where he started, in Eastern Europe, trading.
Traded in 60
countries
In his young life, he has traded, bv his own count, in 60 countries—steel, coal, timber, iron ore, electricity, natural gas, and on and on. Once in Morocco he was playing golf in a foursome with King Hassan II, and he impulsively bought 80 percent of the country’s annual crop of coriander seeds between the fourth and the seventh holes, and he did not know what corianders were, much less what they are used for. “I shook the king’s hand (on the deal) and I didn’t have a clue. But I made a couple of calls afterwards." And he made a profit.
Once in the Black Sea port of Constanza, he made demurrage legend with ships containing manganese ore. He paid the tug owners to keep out his competitor's ships out of port for long enough to get his own ships in and out of port with the cargo, and what made that great for Combs, he says, was not only the money. It was crushing his competition.
This kind of drive—with his red hair and beard that sometimes can make him look like he is on fire—is what you
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