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At al-Dora, his farm across the Tigris from the Boat Club, Qusay would throw parties that were "like The Arabian Nights," says Salman Abdullah, who worked there as a gardener. The fetes featured as many as 50 belly dancers and ample whisky and caviar. Qusay enjoyed the sight of the belly dancers and other performers but refused to touch them for fear of disease, says Abdullah. Germs were an obsession of Qusay's, according to a family retainer who says Saddam's younger son did not like to be touched. If friends or colleagues kissed him in the typical Arab greeting, he would immediately go to the bathroom to wash his face. "If one of his kids touched him," says the source, "he would call a cleaner to brush it off."
Uday, according to a family friend, said he didn't want children. Automobiles were his babies, and he was particularly fond of European sports models. Cars were also currency for Uday: he demanded them as gifts from friends who owed him favors, and he took them from rivals who owed him nothing, according to a Baghdad businessman. One family friend says Uday had a staffer whose sole job was to surf the Internet and fill three-ring binders for him with pictures of new and rare vehicles, along with Arabic translations of their specifications. Uday reportedly used underground parking garages in his various businesses around Baghdad to store his hundreds and hundreds of cars. When the city was about to fall to U.S.-led forces, Uday instructed the Fedayeen Saddam to torch his cars rather than let anyone else take them.
Uday exhibited a vain streak. A family friend notes that he scouted for clothes in the Italian fashion magazine L'Oumo Vogue and on the Internet. "He went for anything odd, just to stand out," says the source. According to a friend, if someone appeared with the same kind of shoes as Uday's, he would tell them not to wear that pair again. The same was true of his favorite cologne, Angel, says a family friend. The source also says that for the sake of precision, Uday trimmed the outline of his beard with tweezers. That habit left him with black spots, so he was always looking for effective vanishing creams to cover them up.
Both princelings gobbled up property, each maintaining several houses. On the 10 acres at al-Dora, Qusay grew figs, oranges, limes, apricots, pomegranates and dates. He also kept ostriches. He had another farm in Arajdiyah, but his main residence was one of five 10,000-sq.-ft. mansions in a presidential complex on the bank of the Tigris in the Jadriyah area of Baghdad. Qusay commissioned a 10-ft.-high marble-inlaid family portrait to overlook the entrance. The swimming pool was embraced by sparkling white marble colonnades. Qusay had his own private procurement officer, who says he was dispatched abroad every couple of months, usually to Beirut or Amman but sometimes to Paris, with $100,000 and lists of goods the family wanted, including $120 bottles of Johnny Walker Blue Label, Qusay's favorite. He drank about a quarter of a bottle each night, says the officer.