The Billionaire Who Wasn't (30 page)

“At that stage we were deep into confidentiality,” explained Feeney. “We would say, ‘We want to do this thing but we don't want any credits for it—just give the impression that you raised the money.'” If beneficiaries wanted his attention, he said, all they had to do was to show him the completed building.

The success of his philanthropy at Limerick University inspired Feeney to look at the condition of the other half dozen universities in Ireland, which were all state-funded and lacking capital to expand and modernize. His ambitions for the then-struggling country were growing. Lifting one boat would make little difference to Ireland's higher-education sector as a whole. Helping a number would make a national impact. He set about arranging seemingly accidental meetings with other university presidents across the country, hoping to find the same drive and vision as in Limerick. His opportunistic philanthropy would be most successful if he found the right people to use the funds well. It was not the philanthropist that deserved praise, he believed, but those who had the position, the ability, and the vision to do good things with the funds. He could use the talents that had made him wealthy to identify and help develop worthwhile projects. But so much depended on the personality and drive of those involved to put the money to good use. “When it came down to it, it's always people,” he would often say.

His approach to Daniel O'Hare, head of the fledgling Dublin City University, was typically indirect. O'Hare was invited to the annual dinner in Dublin of the peace organization Cooperation North and found himself seated beside “this small American man.” Padraig Berry was there, shooing away a photographer. With glass of white wine in hand, Chuck asked O'Hare about university projects for which he needed funding. O'Hare mentioned that he needed IR£1 million for a research building. “If I had only known who I was talking to!” he recalled years later with a laugh. “Would you mind writing up a little piece, and giving it to Padraig Berry,” said Feeney, who explained that he might know some people who could help. Berry came to see the Dublin City University president at his office shortly afterward to get the proposal and emphasized the need for secrecy. O'Hare started to think, “Is this funny money? Is it honest money? Oh God,
this might be money laundered.” He called a friend in an Irish bank with U.S. branches and asked him, “Who is this Chuck Feeney?” The friend called back: “Blue chip!”

Harvey Dale, described only as a friend of Chuck's, then invited O'Hare to visit his New York home when on a trip to the United States. There Dale casually remarked, “We are pleased to help you with your project.” From this O'Hare surmised that Dale had a big role in Feeney's operation. O'Hare found the lawyer to be “a frighteningly bright guy who seemed to know everything about everything, very aggressive, very tough-minded, very strong on anonymity.” Later, when he asked Harvey Dale whether he would lose $10 million pledged by Atlantic if he didn't get government matching funds, “he looked me in the eye and said, ‘You will definitely lose the money,' and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.”

Feeney was taken with O'Hare and became a regular visitor to Dublin City University. The money started to flow in, just as in Limerick, for new buildings and facilities. “Chuck had a particular affection for the underdog, and we were the new kids on the block,” said O'Hare, who was extremely conscientious about concealing the source of funding as demanded by the Atlantic Foundation. He once asked his architect, Barry Kehoe, to show a “visiting American” his plans for a sports complex that Atlantic was funding. Feeney examined the blueprint and said, “You could move that from here to here. . . .” Kehoe interrupted, “Oh no, you couldn't.” O'Hare kicked him under the table, and the architect took the hint. Afterward, O'Hare told Kehoe in confidence who Chuck Feeney was. “Barry was a former priest, so he was used to the confessional and kept the secret,” he recalled gleefully.

Feeney was also impressed with Tom Mitchell, the provost (president) of Trinity College, the oldest university in Ireland, set in the heart of Dublin. John Healy brought Feeney to lunch with Mitchell in September 1991. “All I knew was that he was wealthy, but he was very, very different from any of the really rich American businesspeople I had met,” recalled Mitchell. “He was quite reserved and initially shy, and in appearance and the way he talked he bore little resemblance to the stereotype of an Irish American businessman.” Although Feeney had been funding Limerick University for four years at this time, the secret of his foundation hadn't leaked out, and Mitchell had no idea how important Feeney could be.

“The thing that stands out from that lunch,” recalled Mitchell, “was that he kept saying, ‘You have to think big! Don't be afraid to think big.' That
never left my mind because the task facing Trinity and Irish universities was very big and the resources to do it were small. You know how dark an era the 1980s was. There was no investment in anything that wasn't desperately needed. Trinity was bursting at the seams. The labs were inadequate and overcrowded. The library was outdated. Classrooms were overcrowded. As an institution we could not aspire to international caliber.”

Feeney became personally involved in modernizing the university. “All the things I wanted to do got a major start from Atlantic funding,” said Mitchell, but not of course before Harvey Dale appeared on the scene with his dire warnings about confidentiality. Trinity College Dublin got scores of millions of dollars in funding for a student village, a revamped library, and other capital projects and research programs.

Eventually all seven universities in the Republic of Ireland and the two in Northern Ireland received substantial funding from Atlantic, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. Feeney did not get what he called “good vibes” from all Irish university leaders, but he reached a point where it would have been invidious to discriminate. Universities in Ireland were elevated, in extraordinary secrecy, without even the top education department officials knowing who was behind it, from Second World to First World level over a period of a few years, primarily through Chuck Feeney's intervention. The Irish higher-education system was subsequently better placed to provide graduates and researchers for the emerging Celtic Tiger economy of the late 1990s.

As time passed, the individual university heads began to realize they were all benefiting from one big “anonymous donor” and that the man behind the philanthropy funding rival universities was most likely their own secret benefactor, Chuck Feeney. Danny O'Hare, however, never joined in chitchat in academic circles when talk turned to the “anonymous donor.” “I would look on, thinking—you are very naughty children, weren't you all told to keep quiet about these things,” he recalled. But it irked him to stay quiet. He read in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
that it was important for the person who received money to be able to talk about it, otherwise it does the person psychological damage. He sent the article to John Healy and Harvey Dale and said, “Look, you are doing psychological damage to me!” “That's OK,” they said, “we won't give you any more money!”

Ed Walsh also found the restrictions frustrating and once had a bit of fun at the expense of Atlantic Foundation staff. Chuck and Helga invited Ed
Walsh and his wife, Stephanie, to spend a holiday with them in Thailand. They were picked up by a courtesy Rolls Royce sent by InterPacific's Laguna Beach Resort, and Walsh took a snapshot. On returning home he made a mock-up of the front page of the weekly
Limerick Leader
newspaper on his computer, inserting the photograph and a fictitious article by reporter “Margaret Ryan.” Headlined “Feeney's Other Life,” it reported that Feeney was spotted in Thailand getting into a Rolls with two blondes and that in contrast to his frugal ways elsewhere, he led an extravagant lifestyle in Thailand in a 145-bedroom residence with 376 staff and a pet elephant. (The blondes were their wives and the “residence” was the hotel.) Walsh sent the mock-up page to the Atlantic Foundation office, where, he happily recalled, “They went totally bananas; they thought it was for real.”

Mark Patrick Hederman, a Benedictine monk at Glenstal Abbey in County Limerick, also had a bit of fun getting around the “no publicity” rules imposed by the Atlantic Foundation to acknowledge a $2-million donation for the monastery library. He prefaced his biography
³
with a poem entitled, “To the Unknown Donor.”

 

Only a very astute reader would notice that the first letter of each line spelled out the name Charles F. Feeney. “There was no way to thank Chuck
for his donation to our library,” said Hederman, “so I put in a coded dedication to him. It was my secret Da Vinci Code!”

Feeney had already experienced the monk's penchant for poetry. When inquiring about a delay in the funding, Hederman had sent him a long fax in doggerel verse that began:

 

When he started directing funds to Limerick University in Ireland, Feeney was surprised to find that there was no place for visitors to stay in the locality, except in the city of Limerick some miles away. He had seen the importance of the Statler Hotel on the campus at Cornell. He spotted a chance to do something similar for Limerick University when he had lunch there one day with Ed Walsh and Brendan O'Regan. Over the meal, Walsh complained that a seven-acre field right at the university entrance had been put up for sale and would likely become the site for “a glorified pub and some grotty development.”

Feeney suggested they go and take a look. The three tramped through high grass and peered through blackberry brambles at the piece of land. Feeney later showed the site to Padraig Berry. “That's an important field,” he said. “That was my cue to acquire the field, which I duly did,” recalled Berry. “That was how it worked. I would negotiate the price, ring Bermuda, say I needed a million or ten million, and in came the money, directly, in cash, no systems, no control, no nothing.” Once the sale was completed, Feeney donated the seven acres to the university.

About six weeks later, Feeney invited Walsh to breakfast at Ashford Castle. He moved aside the coffee cups and spread out an architectural drawing of a hotel and conference center for the field. It would be called Castletroy Park Hotel. He said his business would buy back two acres of the land on which to build the hotel.

“He gave us money to buy seven acres,” said the university's finance officer, John O'Connor, “and then bought back two acres to build the hotel
himself.” In other words, said O'Connor, he paid twice for the land to build the hotel. “And he would often accuse me, tongue-in-cheek, of profiteering!”

Feeney set up a management company under Padraig Berry to build the hotel and make it a showpiece for the hospitality industry in Ireland. The
Sunday Business Post
in Dublin tried to find out more about the hotel's financial backer but admitted in print that after three weeks of an “international search,” it had failed to find a photograph of the mysterious Mr. Feeney.

For all its reputation as a country of “a hundred thousand welcomes,” Ireland had a weak hospitality structure. Its biggest hotel chain, the state-owned Great Southern, had nine grand hotels in the south and west of Ireland but they were badly run and inefficient. Feeney had toured the Great Southern Hotels on his earlier visits to Ireland with a view to buying them and concluded everyone had a “fat job” and the management was incompetent. He met the then-minister for labor, Bertie Ahern, in Dublin's Mespil Hotel and told him he wanted to buy the chain and modernize the hotels. Ahern agreed with Feeney's assessment. The company suffered from low morale, the board was in tatters, and staff were leaving, he told the American. But there would be no sale because of SIPTU, the Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union, the biggest and most powerful Irish trade union, to which all the hotel workers belonged. SIPTU would never agree to private ownership, said Ahern. (The Great Southern Hotels continued to languish and were eventually sold off in 2006.)

Castletroy Park Hotel, the first modern hotel of its size to be built in Ireland since World War II, was opened to widespread acclaim by Irish president Mary Robinson on May 5, 1991. It had 108 rooms and a combined health and fitness center with a twenty-five-meter pool, a first in Ireland. Soon afterward, it won the Egon Ronay award for the best business hotel in the country and was given four stars. It soon acquired a reputation for paying decent wages compared to other Irish hotels.

“Castletroy was his baby,” said Aine McCarthy, junior manager at the time. Feeney would sit in the lobby and watch how people were greeted and checked in, and how luggage was carried. He fussed over the display of cereals, the supply of fresh juice, the softness of the butter, and the type of rashers in the buffet breakfast. Once when he saw a patron carrying a pint of Guinness into the conservatory, he asked McCarthy to go and tell him it was not the place for drinking.