Or, how $90 million can finance lives of noisy ostentation
Sheik Mohammad Al Fassi, 27, a Saudi Arabian princeling who has lived in the U.S. for four years, keeps stumbling into the limelight. When he Lived in Beverly Hills, Calif., he had the nude statuary outside his mansion painted in rather vivid flesh tones; the mansion was later gutted by fire. Then he dropped a few million here (some of it to shed two troublesome wives) and a few million there (to resettle in Florida). Last week the sheik's profligacy earned him a new bit of screwball notoriety. The Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Fla., claimed that Fassi and his 75-person retinue had not paid their room and board for more than two months. The tab: $1,475,516.34. The hotel called Hollywood police—most of the department once worked part-time for the sheik—who arrested him on a felony fraud charge. Sheik Fassi cooled his royal heels in jail for six hours, waiting for a bail bondsman to put up $1,000. "What is $1,000?" sneered Saud Al Rasheed, a family spokesman, who says the hotel bill will be paid promptly. "One thousand dollars we spend on tips for waiters."
Fassi is the most extravagant of five Saudi sheiks living in the Miami area, but not by much. His sister and brother-in-law stumbled upon south Florida a couple of years ago when they were en route to Disney World. Mohammad and three brothers followed, and all stayed, according to Princess Hend Al Fassi Aziz, 25, because they liked "the climate and the action." Since then they have squandered perhaps $90 million and become a center of the greedy, glitzy action. The blizzard of cash—a petroleum byproduct, of course—has businesses, philanthropies and local governments scrambling for a share.
The dimensions of the clan's royal style became clear in January 1981, when the new Miami house of the youngest Fassi brother, Tarek, then 17, was burglarized. Fourteen diamond wristwatches, 20 diamond rings, a dozen gold medallions and $480,000 in cash were stolen—and Tarek promptly bought a new house in a tiny, rich enclave called Golden Beach. At first Tarek's breaches of decorum were merely eccentric: he commuted to Florida International University, 20 miles away, in his helicopter, and draped his estate's palm trees with Christmas lights. But then, in violation of zoning laws, he built a guardhouse for his rifle-toting security force and gave his horses the run of the yard.