December 21, 2008

What I'm reading: Josh Feldman, Chief executive, Tori Richards
By Christine Thomas
Special to the Honolulu Advertiser

Q. What are you reading?

A. I just finished reading "The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing" by Conor O'Clery. Another friend also gave me "Richistan" by Robert Frank, which I finished about the same time. And I also just read Ben Mezrich's "Rigged" about the creation of the NYMEX oil exchange in Dubai. They're interesting bookends on what might be considered the end of an era. Sitting on my nightstand to read next are Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven."

Q. What reflections of the era do they offer?

A. "Richistan" describes the creation of a new class in this country that should be treated as another country — people that populate Richistan are of another socio-economic background who have created their own subculture. But now, probably half of them have been wiped out in the recent financial cleansing. Then Feeney, who was an Island resident and should have been king of Richistan but elected not to -that's a fascinating story about someone who has lived a selfless life.

Q. Does Richistan's fate or Feeney's decisions ignite ideas about how to be smart in business while also helping the community, like Tori Richards' new solar-array project?

A. I think things work best when those interests are aligned. If the economy and the environment can be somehow be synchronized, the problems will take care of themselves. I'm a believer in the efficacy of markets. Every business is different. But Feeney's book does make me look at how can I be a better person. Do I want to emulate everything he has done? No, except maybe the billionaire part. But I have tremendous admiration for the way he's gone about it, and being someone who can live in peace with the way he's conducted himself — I believe in that.

BIOGRAPHY/REAL LIFE

Belfast Telegraph

IN 1988, Forbes Magazine hailed Chuck Feeney as the 23rd richest American alive. Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to a blue-collar Irish American family during the Depression, Feeney had served in the Korean War and made a fortune as the co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the world's largest duty-free retail chain. But secretly, Feeney had already transferred all his wealth to his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies. Only in 1997 was he outed as one of the greatest and most mysterious US philanthropists in modern times. Conor O'Clery's The Billionaire Who Wasn't (Short Books, £12.99) is the fascinating life story of what happens to a man and his family when they find wealth beyond their wildest dreams. Wonderfully uplifting, too.

Citywire

Building a fortune is one thing, but seeing it put to good use while you are alive is even more satisfying.

In 1988, Forbes magazine's annual list of America's most wealthy listed Charles F. Feeney as the 23rd richest American alive, with a personal worth of $1.3 billion but in fact, four years earlier Feeney had secretly given away almost his entire fortune to a philanthropic trust. He had retained enough to live on for the rest of his life, but no longer even owned a house or a car. He was, as Irish journalist Conor O'Clery phrases it in this powerful biography, 'the billionaire who wasn't'.

The Billionaire Who Wasn't is two books in one: the remarkable story of duty-free retailing and its leading company, DFS, whose extraordinary growth and profits paralleled the rise of jet travel; and that of Feeney himself, businessman, linguist, and traveller, who took the needs of the world on his shoulders and became a model philanthropist.

Looking for opportunities Charles Feeney was born into an Irish-American family in blue-collar New Jersey in 1931. His father was an insurance underwriter and his mother a nurse who liked to perform secret acts of charity. The family was lucky enough to make ends meet even through the Great Depression.

Charles was a bright boy and had a talent for making money from odd jobs. After graduating from high school he signed up for the U.S. Air Force, first training as a radio operator in Texas before being stationed in Japan.

After the war, Franklin D Roosevelt's G.I. Bill gave Feeney the opportunity to go to university, and he chanced on an article on Cornell University's School of Hotel Management in upstate New York. It sounded interesting and he applied.

The hotel school was a breeding ground for entrepreneurs, and to help pay his way Feeney became a 'sandwich man', selling sandwiches around campus at night when there were no burger joints or other places to eat.

Graduating in 1956, to his mother's dismay he turned down offers to work for major hotel chains in favour of travelling. He sailed to France, and there met an Englishman selling duty-free liquor to American sailors. Feeney caught up with a fellow Cornell graduate, Bob Miller, who was then working at a Ritz hotel in Spain, and the pair set up their own duty-free business.

Their company, Duty-Free Shoppers or DFS, bid for and won the rights to run the first duty-free concessions at Honolulu and Hong Kong airports, followed by airport stores in Toronto, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s most companies' stock prices experienced huge falls, but DFS was becoming a cash bonanza to its four partners, Feeney, Miller, Alan Parker, and Tony Pilaro, who by 1977 were receiving combined annual dividends of over $30 million. Feeney pocketed $12 million one year, $18 million the next, and as the 1980s began his annual share of the dividend was over $23 million, all in cash and tax-free.

DFS revenues continued to grow at a rate of 19% through the decade and it became the largest liquor retailer in the world.

Ego-less giving However Feeney became increasingly uncomfortable with his wealth, and continued to fly economy-class and wear a $15 dollar watch. Casually and sometimes shabbily dressed, he was anything but the image of a wealthy businessman, and taught his kids to be self-reliant and unselfish, providing them with their own spending budgets to manage.

Feeney's lawyer and confidant, Harvey Dale, suggested he read Andrew Carnegie's famous essay on wealth and giving and also introduced him to Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher who wrote about tzedakah or giving, the highest level of which aimed to help people achieve self-sufficiency and was carried out anonymously. This sort of ego-less giving had a great effect on Feeney and so he resolved to become an anonymous donor.

Feeney's Atlantic Foundation was unusual for a charitable foundation in comprising not simply a large sum of money but actual ownership of companies and assets. Feeney made sure his wife and family had plenty to live on and kept the houses, but almost his entire fortune, including his 38.75% share in DFS, was transferred irrevocably to the foundation. He personally was left with less than $5 million. Though he would control the foundation's giving mainly for education, health, aging-related issues, and social justice ends he was no longer a rich man.

Emptying the coffers Feeney sold his stake in DFS in 1996 and all $1.62 billion of it was now to be spent by his foundation in his lifetime.

Overall, it has given 2,900 grants amounting to $4 billion. In the US this has included $600 million to Cornell University, $125 million to Stanford University, which Feeney's son attended, but also amounts to smaller institutions that Feeney has noticed needed upgrading and whose students were disadvantaged.

In keeping with the global outlook of its founder, Atlantic's tentacles of generosity spread around the world. Ashamed at what America did to Vietnam in its war there, Feeney's foundation has injected a lot of money into improving healthcare and hospitals in the country, and establishing or restoring libraries, schools and universities.

Atlantic has also given millions for healthcare in Cuba (a challenging task given Feeney is an American citizen), and to Aids-prevention work and several universities in South Africa.

The organisation supports 'civil society' organisations such as Amnesty and Human Rights First, has helped groups opposing the death penalty, and given donations to maintain non-profit public broadcasting. Driven by Feeney's left-of-centre politics (he opposed the Iraq war and George W Bush's election to the US presidency in 2004), the foundation is considered 'progressive'.

Feeney's intention is that Atlantic's coffers will be emptied in his lifetime, and a target has been set for 2016. Given that, as of 2007, its endowment is around $4 billion, this means spending $400 million a year.

Final comments As a business biography alone, O'Clery's book is valuable, showing that huge money can be made from very simple business models. Yet The Billionaire Who Wasn't is also peppered with Feeney's advice to others always to 'think big' (in both business and philanthropy), and in his restless desire to build a great business.

Today, Feeney travels the world constantly seeking out new and better uses for his foundation's money and visiting potential donors instead of making them come to him.

Many grants stem from things Feeney reads about in local newspapers on his travels, as much as formal proposals. He gains satisfaction from observing an eye operation to save someone's sight in a hospital he has funded, or anonymously watching students work in a library he helped establish.

Seamus Heaney, Ireland's Nobel Prize-winning poet, described Feeney as a modern-day St. Francis whose self-renunciation combined with Medici-like largesse has provided opportunities and happiness for millions.

Whereas Bob Miller, his former partner, lives in luxury homes and socialises with European royalty, Feeney stays in bolthole apartments rented by his foundation, takes buses and taxis instead of limousines, and prefers to mix with normal people. His children note that he is generally a happy man, who would probably have been less happy if he had tried to hold on to his pile of money.

In a similar vein:
Andrew Carnegie: The Gospel of Wealth
Joel T Fleishman: The Foundation
Howard Schultz: Put Your Heart Into It
Lynne Twist: The Soul of Money

Conor O'Clery
Born in Belfast, he worked for the Irish Times for 30 years in various reporting and editing roles, including stints as a foreign correspondent in London, Moscow, Washington, Beijing, and New York, and was twice awarded Journalist of the Year in Ireland. He has also written for The New Republic and Newsweek. Other books include Daring Diplomacy: Clinton's Secret Search for Peace in Ireland (1997) and Panic at the Bank: How John Rusnak Lost AIB $700 Million (with Siobahn Creaton, 2002).

Source
Extracted from 50 Prosperity Classics: Attract it, Create it, Manage It, Share It Wisdom from the best books on wealth creation and abundance by Tom Butler-Bowdon, published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

by Georgia Levenson Keohane
for the New Haven Review of Books

The Billionaire Who Wasn't
By Conor O’Clery (PublicAffairs, 2007)

On January 22, 1997, from a payphone in the San Francisco airport, Chuck Feeney gave The New York Times a story for the ages. Although he had appeared regularly on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, Feeney was not, he revealed, the billionaire everyone presumed. This kid-done-good from Elizabeth, New Jersey—a Horatio Alger boy on steroids—had indeed built a great fortune by mastering the duty-free trade. But the recent sale of his company, Duty Free Shoppers (DFS), had forced Feeney to confess his great secret: he had given this fortune away. In The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing, Irish journalist Conor O'Clery chronicles how Feeney quietly amassed astonishing wealth, and, with equal stealth, signed it all over to his philanthropic foundations.

O’Clery’s account reads like a spy novel. Feeney and his business partners succeed through cloak and dagger secrecy: closed bids for duty-free concessions (Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, Hong Kong), off-shore havens to shelter their cash profits from U.S. taxation. Feeney’s commercial savvy is also characterized by an uncanny intuition for profitable opportunities, a penchant for shop-floor management (well into his later years, Feeney is coaching the sales force), and remarkable care for employees and their families. These traits also underpin his philanthropy, which is characterized by fierce anonymity, opportunistic giving that seeks to amplify the power of his philanthropic buck (in places ranging from the U.S. to Ireland, South Africa to Australia, Vietnam to Cuba), and extensive vetting (“kicking the tires”) of potential grantees. Ultimately, Feeney says, he is driven by a basic desire to help others, learned at a young age from his parents.

Feeney’s is an extraordinary tale of entrepreneurial dynamism, no doubt—but even more of unusual beneficence. His “outing” presents a number of important challenges. First, Feeney embodies “inter vivos” charity—giving while living. This is significant in an era when, for many, wealth serves as a competitive “scorecard” (Feeney’s words) for success. In offering an equally competitive, alternative yardstick—charitable largesse—Feeney joins Gates, Buffett, and others in harnessing new resources for the disadvantaged. The second challenge Feeney poses is to the philanthropic sector, where foundations typically expend five percent of their assets each year. Feeney has called for a full spend-down of his Atlantic Philanthropies within the decade: inter vivos in extremis. Though to date his foundations have granted nearly $4 billion to “vulnerable” people around the world, nearly $4 billion in assets remain. This means trying to give away—efficiently, effectively, entirely—about one million dollars a day. “Spending it,” he says, “is not a big problem. Spending it meaningfully is.” Understatement, ambition and optimism: vintage Feeney.

Georgia Levenson Keohane is a writer and consultant in the fields of social policy, philanthropy, and non-profit management. She lives in New York City.

by Chris Nicholson

BOOK REPORT:
The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune By Conor O'Clery

PublicAffairs Books; 337 pages.

Almost everything worth doing is worth doing secretly. At least, that's Chuck Feeney's motto. So if you've never heard of him, don't feel embarrassed.

In 1965, Feeney, who graduated from hotel management school at Cornell on the G.I. Bill after serving in Korea, co-founded Duty Free Shoppers, or DFS, now the largest duty-free retail network in the world. For years, Feeney sold duty-free liquor and souvenirs to U.S. servicemen and tourists in Europe.

Over three decades running the company and receiving its dividends, he became superlatively rich. But because DFS was a private company, it was not required to report its financial results and hardly anyone knew what Feeney was worth. By some estimates, he was a billionaire in 1984 when, in utter secrecy, he signed most of his assets over to a charitable foundation - leaving some large houses and a small fortune for his children and first wife, less for himself - and began putting those assets to good use.

If not for a lawsuit prompted by the sale of his stake in DFS in 1997, this book might never have been written, and Feeney could have remained the ''anonymous donor'' cited by foundations and plaques across Ireland, Estonia, the United States and Vietnam. But litigation put just enough information in the public domain to raise eyebrows, and not enough to stifle speculation. So Feeney gave an exclusive interview to The New York Times, which outlined the altruistic conspiracy he had woven over many years.

The official biography of a recluse sounds about as promising as a triathlon for three-toed sloths, but here, as with The Times, Feeney has cooperated. And he picked the right man. Conor O'Clery, a former foreign correspondent for The Irish Times, writes well enough to stand out even in a nation of raconteurs. The book is a good read, and Feeney's wit makes regular appearances beside the author's.

But precisely because Feeney cooperated, this is also a very partial biography: partial in what it tells about Feeney and partial to him. Like someone marrying into a family, O'Clery has chosen his side and he's sticking to it.

From this book, Feeney is a hard man to know, but what is clear is his singular relationship to money: his skill in making it, his penchant for giving it away. Good entrepreneurs know what other people want; they have enough understanding to see what people like and need, and enough energy to supply it.

In Feeney's case, the intuition that inspired him in business was just one facet of a larger human empathy. In or out of the office, what happened to other people happened to Chuck Feeney. As his daughter, Leslie, put it, ''He was always taking things to heart.'' Or, as Feeney said, ''When it comes down to it, it's always people.''

That philosophy would lead him to invest in a wide range of enterprises, from chateaux to political movements to the University of Limerick, a pet project of Feeney's at a time when Ireland's economy was stagnant and unemployment high. Feeney, an Irish-American, was instrumental in financing a concert hall, library and sports arena for the school and bringing with him the ethic of alumni fund-raising.

Philanthropy can be a venue for ostentation, but Feeney seems to set another course: He asked himself what kind of world he would like to live in if he had been born a poor kid in a poor country, and he started to build it.

**
Chris Nicholson is an editor at the International Herald Tribune.

by Margot Roosevelt
Los Angeles Times

One by one, speakers rose to toast the elderly gent with baggy pants and a shy, gaptoothed smile.

“Of course, he didn’t wear a tie tonight,” teased one. Another called attention to the honoree’s cheap watch and the plastic bag that serves as his briefcase.

The joshing at a Manhattan gathering would have been nothing out of the ordinary except that the man pulling a worn blue blazer over his head in mock modesty was none other than the onetime billionaire, Chuck Feeney.

Never heard of him? No surprise there.

Over the years, the frugal 76-year-old has made a fetish out of anonymity. He declined to name his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, after himself, registering the $8-billion behemoth in Bermuda to avoid U.S. disclosure laws. He lavishes hundreds of millions of dollars on universities and hospitals but won’t allow even a small plaque identifying him as a donor.

“We just didn’t want to be blowing our horn,” he explains in a rare interview at his daughter’s Upper East Side apartment.

The party was to celebrate a biography of the elusive tycoon by Irish journalist Conor O’Clery, titled The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune, published last fall.

Feeney said he cooperated with the book and submitted to an interview because he is driven by a new public mission: nudging hedge fund heavies and silicon scions into “giving while living.”

It is the latest trend in philanthropy and one that he, more than anyone, jump-started several years before billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett followed suit.

Feeney, a founder of the conglomerate Duty Free Shoppers, said he wants to “set an example” to address “that layer up there of people,” the ones, as he puts it, who have “a jillion dollars… . I mean, honestly, if you ask them, ‘Tell me what you’re doing with your money this week?’ they couldn’t spend a fraction of what they’re accruing.”

Most foundations, set up after the donor’s death, dribble out barely more than 5% of their assets each year, the legal minimum.

But Feeney, raised in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family in New Jersey, quietly transferred the bulk of his fortune to his foundation when he was 53. Then, eight years ago, he instructed his board to pay out every last dollar by 2016.

So far: $4 billion down, $4 billion to go. Atlantic Philanthropies is spreading its wealth at the rate of more than $400 million a year, more than any U.S.-based family foundation apart from Bill & Melinda Gates and Ford.

As Feeney sees it, there is too much misery in the world to justify delay. “I’m not going to die until I can spend it,” he vows with a merry chuckle.

Feeney’s biggest beneficiary has been Cornell University, which he attended on the GI Bill, earning spending money by selling sandwiches to fraternities. Over four decades, he has donated an astonishing $588 million to the Ithaca, N.Y., campus, almost all of it anonymously.

Many of Feeney’s grants are still directed to traditional bricks and mortar – $60 million for a Stanford biomedical center and $125 million for a UC San Francisco cardiovascular complex.

But others are iconoclastic: Fighting homophobia among South African Muslims. Lobbying against the death penalty in New Jersey. Buying medical supplies for Cuban-trained doctors. Funding a Washington office for Sinn Fein during the Irish peace negotiations.

Feeney built his global enterprise through cutthroat competition and uncanny business intuition. He speaks fluent French and Japanese. And he still hop-scotches from Dublin to Da Nang seeding new projects.

But his demeanor is affable and unprepossessing and his conversational style is hesitant. He is allergic to introspection. Direct questions send him into vague digressions leavened with humorous asides.

In the tiny world of stratospheric wealth, Feeney is a man of yin and yang: extravagant charity coupled with personal penny-pinching. “It’s the intelligent thing to be frugal,” says the erstwhile billionaire, who jokingly refers to himself as “the shabby philanthropist.”

He once owned six luxurious homes from the French Riviera to Mayfair to Park Avenue. These days, he owns none, instead hunkering down in a cramped one-bedroom rental in San Francisco with his second wife, Helga, his former secretary.

He raked in billions selling duty-free cognac, perfume and designer labels. But you won’t catch Feeney in a Hermes tie or Gucci loafers. He once met the prime minister of Ireland with his drugstore glasses held together by a paper clip.

Feeney doesn’t own a car and prefers buses to taxis. Until he turned 75, he flew coach. Now, making excuses for wobbly knees, he upgrades with frequent flier miles.

Fine dining? “There are restaurants you can go in and pay $100 a person for a meal,” he muses. “I get as much satisfaction out of paying $25. I happen to enjoy grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches.”

Niall O’Dowd, a friend of Feeney and editor of Irish-America magazine, reflects: “The way he copes with his wealth is to never remove himself from his working-class persona. He keeps grounded by acting like it hasn’t happened to him – like basically he is still the same guy.”

At the book party, most of the guests were bused in from the Garden State: former classmates from St. Mary’s of the Assumption High School and an extended clan of Feeney-Fitzpatricks, including two of his five children.

Feeney joked about his “rent-a-crowd” but, amid the toasts and roasts, seemed moved: “Who was it who said, ‘My cup runneth over?’ ”

He planted a kiss on the head of his 21-year old great-nephew, Dennis Fitzpatrick, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. He autographed copies of the book while seated at a small table with Dennis by his side.

“He’d send my parents $50,000 for our college educations,” nephew Daniel Fitzpatrick, 50, recalled. “But if you went out to have a beer with him, he’d check the bar bill… . If I left the light on in a bedroom, he’d say, ‘By the way, you left a light on.’ And I knew I’d better go up and turn it off.”

O’Clery, former international business editor of the Irish Times, spent two years traveling with Feeney and investigating a financial empire that had been sheathed for decades in obsessive secrecy. He unfolds a story of ferocious entrepreneurship that operated, he concluded, “on the edge of legality but was never corrupt.”

Shortly after graduating from college, Feeney, who had served in the U.S. Air Force in Japan during the Korean War, moved to Europe. With a partner he knew from Cornell, Robert Miller, he began peddling duty-free liquor to sailors.

The two went on to sell cars to American soldiers based in Europe and Asia. Eventually, profiting from a postwar boom in tourism, they built Duty Free Shoppers into the biggest retailer of liquor and cigarettes in the world and a global purveyor of luxury goods.

Their ingenious schemes stretched the limits of the duty-free concept.

As O’Clery explains, Duty Free Shoppers allowed a tourist in Mexico, for instance, to peruse a catalog and choose a cashmere sweater to be shipped from Amsterdam to his home in the U.S. Leaving Mexico, he could declare the faraway sweater as “unaccompanied baggage” and avoid paying duty. Feeney and Miller operated with Swiss bank accounts and offshore headquarters in Lichtenstein, Monaco and the Netherlands Antilles. They registered assets in the names of Danielle, Feeney’s French wife, and Miller’s Ecuadorean wife, Chantal, as a precaution against the long arm of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

Today, Feeney makes no apologies. “Most large companies structure their affairs so that they minimize their tax payments,” he says, rocking back on an armchair in his daughter’s apartment. “As long as you do it within the law, it’s OK.”

For Duty Free Shoppers, publicity was to be avoided at all cost, to ward off not just tax collectors but also competitors. “If you had a machine to make money, you wouldn’t blow your horn and say copy me, copy me,” says Feeney, whose annual share of dividends from the business reached $155 million in 1988, making him richer at the time than Rupert Murdoch, David Rockefeller or Donald Trump.

Why did he decide to give it away, leaving himself with a net worth then that dipped below $1 million? “I’m an easygoing guy,” he shrugs. “I like to eat my grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches quietly. I don’t like people to say, ‘Look over there; he’s eating a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich.’ ”

In 1990, Feeney had separated from Danielle. And, in the divorce, she retained their mansions and luxury apartments, along with $100 million.

“The wealth got to him,” recalls his nephew, Fitzpatrick. “He got disgusted by it, in my opinion. He said, ‘This expensive heavy-duty lifestyle doesn’t fit me.’ ”

Feeney gave his children, friends and colleagues copies of Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which the robber baron-turned-philanthropist admonishes rich men to use their fortunes to help others and “to set an example of modest unostentatious living, shunning display.”

In the realm of modesty, Feeney tended to extremes.

For years, Atlantic Philanthropies staff couldn’t tell their families where they worked.

Beneficiaries, few of whom knew the origin of their grants, signed agreements acknowledging that the funding would halt if its source were revealed.

It was only in 1997 that the existence of Atlantic Philanthropies became public during the sale of Duty Free Shoppers to French luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault.

Court papers revealed that Feeney’s share of the company had been transferred to a foundation. The news that a huge donor had surfaced – bigger than renowned charitable institutions founded by the Pew, Lilly, MacArthur, Rockefeller and Mellon families – rocked the philanthropic world, although many had long suspected something was afoot.

Today, though Atlantic Philanthropies lists its grants on its website, it still won’t issue news releases touting accomplishments. Black tie thank-you dinners, along with plaques, remain verboten.

Feeney’s practical reason for not plastering his moniker on buildings is to attract matching donors who would want naming rights – as was the case at Stanford with high-tech tycoon Jim Clark and at a UC San Francisco cancer facility with venture capitalist Arthur Rock.

Does Feeney have no ego, then? “It doesn’t matter who put the building up,” he says. “The important thing is that it happens.”

In Vietnam, he recounts with a chuckle, “the people at the Da Nang General Hospital felt so bad that we wouldn’t put our name on the hospital that they painted it green” – shamrock green. He pauses, adding, “Which used up a lot of paint.”

Although his parents were American-born, Feeney’s attachment to the land of his ancestors runs deep. The Republic of Ireland in the 1980s was plagued by high unemployment, a brain drain and the festering guerrilla war to the north. Anonymously, Feeney began pouring money into renovating Ireland’s seven universities, along with two in Northern Ireland.

He offered $125 million for postgraduate research if the Irish government would match the amount, nearly 20 times what the Republic was spending a year. Soon, Ireland’s best and brightest flocked to the new research institutes. In all, Atlantic Philanthropies has spent more than $1 billion in Ireland.

In 1993, O’Dowd, who had worked with Feeney to promote U.S. naturalization for Irish immigrants, asked him to join in what would become the Connolly House Group, named after the Belfast headquarters of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army.

The small, secret group of Irish Americans offered the newly elected Clinton administration a back-channel to negotiate a cease fire between Britain and the Irish Republican Army.

“At the time, it was risky business to be seen ‘talking to terrorists’–that was the label,” said former Rep. Bruce Morrison, one of the group.

Feeney was intensely involved in the negotiations that led Clinton to grant a visa to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, and he funded a Washington office for Sinn Fein to the tune of $750,000.

“It was New Jersey working class meets Belfast working class,” O’Dowd recalled of a secret meeting between Feeney and Adams in a Dublin safe house. “These two guys understood each other right away.”

The peace process was ultimately successful, and Feeney has since funneled millions into reconciliation programs in Northern Ireland.

“The only way you’re going to solve things with your friends or enemies is to sit down and talk to them,” he says today. “It didn’t seem right to me that Irish people were killing Irish people.”

On the coffee table in his daughter’s living room, Feeney opens Bill Clinton’s recent bestseller “Giving.”

He turns to the chapter “How Much Should You Give and Why?” and reads from statistics derived from U.S. income tax data showing that if the top 14,400 taxpayers gave a third of their income, the total would be about $61 billion.

Feeney shakes his head. “People who wouldn’t miss it,” he muses. “Sixty-one billion in one year!”

And why isn’t it happening? “People traditionally collect money. I guess there is an attraction to be known as a wealthy person,” he says. “It’s not my role in life to tell them what they should be doing… . I’m just convinced if people gave money to things they’ve identified as being in the public interest, they’d get great satisfaction out of it.”

Feeney mentions one of his favorite charities, Operation Smile, which sponsors surgeons to operate on children with cleft palates in developing countries.

He tells of watching a little girl in a waiting room sitting with her hands covering her mouth.

“I kept an eye on her,” he recalls. “After she had the operation and she was smiling [like], ‘It’s not the ugly me you knew before. It’s the new me.’ ”

On another occasion, he says, a man in a restaurant called him over and said, “Do you realize you educated me in this business? I had one of your scholarships … and here I am now, the general manager of this chain. ”

O’Clery, who hung out with Feeney for several years at P.J. Clarke’s, the Manhattan pub, before broaching the topic of a book, attributes Feeney’s generosity to growing up with charitable parents and in a neighborhood where people helped one another.

He calls his subject an “enigma… . He likes to make money, but he doesn’t like to have it. He travels all over the world, but in a way, he’s never left Elizabeth, N.J.”

Feeney suggests with a cryptic smile, “There’s a thin line between sanity and the other side. Some people might even say the idea of giving money away is crazy.”

For those folks, Feeney has a Gaelic proverb: “There are no pockets in a shroud.”

By Scott Walter

Chuck Feeney is clearly a grand man, and he deserves a grander book than this. Feeney is the leading mind behind the multibillion-dollar success of Duty Free Shoppers (DFS); he has since plowed nearly all his money into The Atlantic Philanthropies. Feeney's authorized biographer, Conor O'Clery, obviously admires him, but the Irish journalist has written a book that is little more than a long newspaper article. Its blow-by-blow account of Feeney's business and philanthropic doings does not bring its idiosyncratic hero to life (nor, for that matter, his business partners, five children, or two wives). Strangely, although nearly all Feeney's associates cooperated with O'Clery, he often quotes one person's account of an incident without telling us whether the other person involved concurs.

Still, O'Clery has quite a story to tell, and donors especially should ponder it. Feeney was born in 1931 "into a struggling Irish-American family in the blue-collar neighborhood of Elmora, New Jersey," the only son among his hardworking parents' six children. His father, a daily Mass-goer and Knight of Columbus, and his mother, a Red Cross volunteer who worked as a nurse and cared for the family, exercised impressive charity toward others but would have considered themselves perfectly ordinary citizens--and, in their neighborhood, they probably were.

In 1948, fresh out of high school, Feeney joined the Air Force and was assigned to an intelligence unit based in Japan. He learned how to keep secrets, and taught himself Japanese: two lessons that would prove enormously consequential in later years. Even with the Korean War raging, he was planning for the future, thinking about the GI scholarship to which he was now entitled. He settled on Cornell's School of Hotel Management, which appealed to his love of travel and entrepreneurial bent. It was a real stretch. Only one other student from his Catholic high school had gone on to university. Nobody in his family had ever been to college. He "was already showing a trait that would assert itself throughout his life: thinking big and aiming to achieve the best result, even if it seemed unattainable," writes O'Clery.

The Hotel School was indeed a good fit. Though its students had Cornell's lowest SAT scores, it outperformed the rest of the university at incubating entrepreneurs, turning out men like James McLamore and David Edgerton, co-founders of Burger King, and Michael Egan, who brought success to Alamo car rentals. Feeney got by financially by starting niche businesses and working odd jobs.

After graduation he headed to France on whose southern coast he started a business: a summer camp for the children of American naval personnel. While there, he discovered the business of selling duty-free liquor to sailors stationed in the Mediterranean. He recruited some Cornell friends, and the rest is history. In the coming years, he and a handful of colleagues would vastly expand their product line, narrowly escape numerous government agents and tax collectors, and occasionally make strategic mistakes. He eventually shifted his base of operations to the Pacific, where a swelling Japanese economy brought bargain-hungry tourists to foreign ports of call. With its duty-free line of products, DFS offered astonishingly low prices to shoppers from the protectionist Home Islands.

Amazingly, the tight-lipped business went unnoticed by the world for years. Few people had any idea how much Feeney and his three partners were earning. Some numbers give perspective: The Hong Kong DFS store generated sales 50 times higher per square foot than Harrod's in London. Wall Street stocks averaged declines of 70 percent from 1968-74, while cash dividends to the DFS partners rose by several hundred percent a year. By 1982, DFS had $400 million in sales at its premier store in Waikiki, which was the size of an aircraft hangar and earned $20,000 per square foot, compared to Bloomingdale's $800 in Manhattan. It took in so many dollars and yen that "a special department of currency traders was set up inside DFS to trade [the cash] on the overnight money markets."
In 1984, Feeney secretly transferred nearly all his personal wealth to a Bermuda-based foundation. The transfer was estimated at between $500 million and $1 billion, and it formed only the beginning of the foundation's wealth. Feeney's investments continued to generate tremendous sums of money--$155 million in 1988 from DFS alone. As his attention turned to philanthropy and his personal net worth dropped below $5 million, Feeney kept racking up business successes, so much so that today his foundation struggles to ensure its investments don't hit "extraordinary pay dirt" and ruin its effort to donate over $1 million per day in order to close its doors in the next decade.

Despite its flaws, the book does allow a reader to glimpse the qualities of an extraordinary entrepreneur. This breed delights in risk-taking, is restless, forward-looking, highly flexible, and full of energy. It is motivated not so much by money as by challenges, which are to be faced and overcome. Perhaps most interestingly, as Feeney's life makes clear, this type is not coolly "professional."

In fact, throughout the story nearly all brushes with the polished professional world show that their glossier world's denizens are vastly inferior businessmen to the rougher, humbler sorts like Feeney and his partners. For example, consultants from McKinsey are hired to study DFS; when they arrogantly ignore the partners' 63 years of experience and provide a worthless report, the mild-mannered Feeney walks out of the meeting. Later, white-shoe law firms make a bad situation worse. And, during a storm early in the business's life, every executive with a professional credential abandons ship--only to see the partner with a mere 2 percent stake later join the Forbes 400 list.

Other important lessons in entrepreneurship the book provides are the need to treat colleagues with respect--Feeney excelled at this, and O'Clery finds him fondly remembered by employees around the world--and the value of being what many scoff at as a "middleman." DFS never manufactured products but repeatedly found ways to serve customers through more cost-efficient means of distribution.

The highest entrepreneurial virtue, clearly evident in Feeney, is a mysterious sort of second sight. It's related to ambition in that it dreams big, and is akin to what is typically called "intelligence," but not the kind of number-crunching that many who sneer at businessmen imagine to be their secret. Rather, it's a kind of intuition that senses opportunities where others do not, that recognizes a sea change coming from only the slightest shifts of current.

For example, in the 1970s, Feeney decided Saipan was a perfect place to expand his Asian operations, even though it was reachable only by "island-hopper" planes that "taxied up a dirt runway to a Quonset hut." It had no resorts, no restaurants, no attractions--no tourism of any sort. DFS risked $5 million on developing the island, building the airport, setting up stores, cafés, and hotels. Soon, Saipan had 100,000 visitors a year.

Yet Feeney's greatest intuition was sensing when DFS's glory days were coming to a close. His partners, though fractious at the time, look back and see his timing was right once again--as does Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, which bought the business for billions just as sales began to plummet.

Little wonder Feeney's philanthropy is marked by an entrepreneurial spirit, especially the entrepreneur's hunt for other entrepreneurs. Feeney stumbled into a friendship, for instance, with a college president in Limerick. The Irish academic impressed him; Feeney later poured millions into the school. But, at a deeper level, Feeney saw these grants as part of a larger plan, sprung from love of his family's homeland. He wanted to significantly improve the nation's well-being by raising the quality of its entire higher education system, which he did with years of aggressive philanthropic investment that eventually reached every college on the Emerald Isle. Now Ireland is known as a "tiger," and Ernst & Young's Irish Entrepreneur of the Year award merits a prime-time TV show.

Feeney's tale offers many other lessons for donors. Engage thoughtfully with grantees ("kick the tires," as he likes to say). Look especially for energetic, entrepreneurial men and women. Give them the credit when they succeed. Encourage collaboration between your grantees, as Feeney did with universities around the globe. Avoid self-aggrandizement. Consider anonymous giving, but know that anonymity is a two-edged sword. (For years Feeney kept his philanthropy as fiercely secretive as he had his company, but anonymity wasn't always helpful and eventually became impossible, especially at his scale.) When not acting anonymously, be as transparent as possible in your operations. Read Andrew Carnegie's and Maimonides's classic reflections on giving.

Feeney especially values the latter's teaching that the highest form of giving is to help others "become self-sufficient through training and education." Carnegie, too, urged donors to provide "the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise," and Feeney has heeded that advice, as well as Carnegie's call for "modest, unostentatious living." Above all, Feeney has followed Carnegie in resolving to give away his wealth before he dies--partly to avoid the sclerosis which afflicts foundations as they age, partly to forestall the eventual abandonment of donor intent, but mostly because he believes that "giving while living" maximizes both the quality of philanthropy and its satisfactions.

While O'Clery does little more than drop hints about Feeney's personality, we can hope some future biographer will give us deeper insights into the man's remarkable character--including some fascinating paradoxes that O'Clery doesn't even mention. I, for one, wonder how Feeney has moved leftward politically over his life, given that he seeks to spread self-reliance, has outfoxed taxmen the world over, and, according to an old friend, "believes people can do more with money than governments." Is the shift related to the guilt many say Feeney feels over amassing his fortune?
Answers to such questions won't likely be aided by Feeney, who avoids introspection and simply declares, "Fortune doesn't change a man, it only unmasks him. I guess under the mask is a kid from Elmora wearing a baseball cap."

Philanthropy Magazine

By Chung Ah-young

This is a worthwhile book to read particularly for many Korean chaebol and others not aware of the importance of giving back to society.
In 1988, Forbes Magazine hailed Chuck Feeney as the 23rd richest American alive. Feeney was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey to a blue-collar Irish-American family during the Great Depression. Not well known to the public until recently, Feeney made a big fortune as the founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the world's largest duty-free retail chain.
But Feeney decided in 2005 to cooperate in the writing of his biography to promote what he calls ``giving-while-living'' because he wants to promote his philosophy to many other rich people. Feeney believes that the wealthy have a moral duty to spend their money on good cause during their lifetime.
This book portrays Feeney as a frugal man who takes economy class flights, does not have a luxurious house or car, and has donated large sum of his wealth to charitable and philanthropic causes.
In his mid-seventies, he startled the world again by determining his foundation will spend the remaining $4 billion in his lifetime.

The Korea Times

By Martin Morse Wooster

Anyone who works in the nonprofit world swiftly learns that there is a legion of development officers and fundraisers whose daily task is to persuade donors to give--or to increase their checks next time. If you're a donor who can give seven-figure grants, there's an army of mendicants and courtiers ready to caress you with plaques, trophies, lavish tribute dinners, 50-yard line seats, and meals at five-star restaurants.

But all these prizes and flattery miss the point of charity. We should give our time and labor to help the less fortunate not because of the adulation, but because helping others is the right thing to do and the best way to live. It is the gift that is important, not the praise we receive for our donations.

This is why the story of Chuck Feeney is an inspiring one. Feeney made over a billion dollars through duty-free stores. He created a foundation that would be one of America's 10 largest if it were headquartered in the United States. This foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, has given away over $4 billion since its creation. Yet Feeney managed to keep his wealth and his foundation secret for nearly 20 years, until forced to divulge the information in a 1997 court case. No one else in foundation history has managed to stay anonymous for as long as Feeney did.

Conor O'Clery was, for years, a reporter for the Irish Times. He's a good writer and storyteller, and anyone who likes reading business books where heroes engage in savage battles about whether they should receive figures of 10 for chasing out their companies will find The Billionaire Who Wasn't enjoyable. But Feeney's biography--and the reasons why he chose to be an anonymous funder--provides valuable lessons for every donor.

Charles Feeney was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1931. Although he has always been an American, he has also become a dual citizen of Ireland. After serving as a radio operator in Japan during the Korean War, Feeney graduated from Cornell in 1956 with a degree in hotel management. He then went to Europe with not much money and a desire for adventure. He found that there was plenty of opportunity for people interested in the import-export business.
When Feeney started his career, American law allowed any tourist to bring back five bottles (totalling one gallon) of liquor duty-free. Moreover, back then, tourists didn't actually have to lug the booze through customs; they could simply declare it and have a third party ship the spirits to a customer's home.

Feeney discovered a second loophole: American servicemen could bring back cars without paying any tariffs, giving GIs Renaults and BMWs at a substantial discount. For nearly a decade, Feeney and his partners vigorously used these loopholes to make money selling cars and liquor to thrifty Americans. But in the mid-1960s Lyndon Johnson cut the liquor exemption from five bottles to one, and the Navy decided to sell cars to sailors rather than passing the profits to outsiders. Feeney and his partners had to find another line of work.

They found it in the duty-free store business. In 1962 Feeney and his three partners spent $78,000 to acquire a five-year duty-free concession at the Honolulu airport. At the time, airlines were converting cramped DC-8s into roomier Boeing 707s, and the duty-free shop made money. But Feeney's wealth was made in Japan. For the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Japanese government eased draconian travel restrictions and allowed many Japanese to travel abroad for the first time. Japan has a long tradition of elaborate gift-giving, and that Honolulu duty-free shop had the luxury goods Japanese tourists wanted at low prices.

Feeney's partnership, at first called Duty Free Shoppers, and later DFS, thrived as Japanese travelers became wealthier. Because top-tier producers of luxury goods at first refused to deal with DFS, the company made lucrative distribution deals with Camus cognac and Nina Ricci perfume that provided DFS with a second income stream. As O'Clery shows, DFS became a multi-billion-dollar company not just through its own expertise, but also by ruthlessly crushing any and all rivals.

By the late 1980s, Feeney and his partners were ready to sell what was now a giant multinational. They began a seven-year dance with Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey, or LVMH, the French luxury goods producer. After eight years of negotiations, in December 1996, LVMH bought out Feeney and one of his partners and assumed control of DFS. For his ownership of 38.7 percent of DFS, Feeney received a check for $1.67 billion--an amount so big that a New Jersey bank stayed open all night to clear it because tens of thousands of dollars would have been lost if clearing had been delayed.

Negotiations between DFS and LVMH took eight years, in part, because two of Feeney's partners didn't want to sell (one eventually did sell and the other became a minority investor in LVMH). The extensive court record showed that Feeney didn't actually own his share of DFS, but had transferred it to Atlantic Philanthropies, a mysterious Bermuda-based charity. Feeney was a very secretive entrepreneur: DFS, a privately owned partnership, was successful, in part, because its rivals had no idea how large the firm was and couldn't guess how much the company could spend on bids for airport concession contracts. So Feeney decided to apply the same privacy to his philanthropy.

His philanthropic adviser, New York University law professor Harvey Dale, gave his client a thick packet of materials about the importance of giving anonymously. He noted that the world's major religions all taught that the best way to give was privately. As St. Matthew tells us, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught, "When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what may be in secret, may reward you." Maimonides, the great medieval rabbi, agreed with Jesus, believing that there were 12 levels of tzedakah (giving), and that while the highest level was teaching other Jews to become self-reliant, the second highest was anonymous charity.

Finally, Feeney was persuaded by the timeless advice of Andrew Carnegie. In his 1889 essay "The Gospel of Wealth," Carnegie wrote that donors ought to use their fortunes on universities, libraries, and other organizations that provided "the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise." Carnegie also believed that donors, after providing for themselves and their families, should strive for "modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance." This advice suited the thrifty Feeney, who delights in inexpensive clothes, cheap watches, and flying coach.

But as O'Clery shows, anonymous giving is hard work. Feeney decided to base his charity in Bermuda to avoid American disclosure laws. He lived in Bermuda for a year to establish residency prior to the creation of his charity in 1982, and his lawyers successfully lobbied the Bermuda legislature to pass a law allowing him to run his charity in secret. In addition, all of Atlantic Philanthropies' grant recipients had to sign nondisclosure agreements saying they couldn't reveal where their money came from. Finally, public relations consultants offered advice about what should happen if anyone found out about what Feeney was doing.

In hindsight, Feeney could have achieved many of his goals in the United States if he had created a donor-advised fund rather than a foundation. If he had decided to create a private operating foundation, which has a severely limited list of grantees, he could have avoided the truckload of grant requests every medium-sized or large foundation must plow through. And given how poorly the American press covers philanthropy, simply not publicizing his foundation's activities would have given him a substantial amount of anonymity.
But the structure and nature of Atlantic Philanthropies has allowed Feeney to be a very hands-on donor. In O'Clery's account, Feeney's giving has often been impulsively based on articles he happened to be reading. In 1997, he picked up a copy of the San Francisco Examiner in the airport and read about the East Meets West Foundation, which helps improve health care for the poor in Vietnam. That led Atlantic Philanthropies to spend a great deal of money on hospitals in Vietnam. Feeney has also been a generous supporter of research at universities in Ireland and Australia.

In 2001, Feeney declared that Atlantic Philanthropies would spend itself out of existence by 2016. By doing this, Feeney's charity can give far more than other organizations with very large endowments and relatively limited giving. "The dollar you give today can be doing good tomorrow," Feeney said in an interview. "Giving five percent of it doesn't do as much good."

It should be noted that Chuck Feeney is a leftist who vigorously opposes the Iraq war and has given small amounts to the Democratic party and larger ones to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. But Feeney should have the right to spend his wealth for causes he prefers. Conservative and libertarian donors, by contrast, often have their fortunes subverted by left-wing staff, particularly if they create foundations that aren't term limited.

Moreover, hands-on donors can--and do--make major mistakes. For three years in the mid-1990s, Feeney personally donated $20,000 a month to Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army's political arm, for what Feeney said was a way of advancing the peace process in Northern Ireland. Although the Atlantic Philanthropies was technically not involved, the foundation's reputation was sullied for years by its founder's gifts to Sinn Fein.

What can donors learn from Chuck Feeney's experience? First, give to causes you believe in: People who make fortunes are smart enough to know how they should be used. Second, the most effective donors are those who avoid the limelight. What matters, in the long run, is not how many prizes a donor wins, but whether or not he gives wisely.

The Weekly Standard

By Tim Follos

YOU MAY NEVER read a book as uplifting as Conor O'Clery's "The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune" (PublicAffairs Books).

In vivid, unvarnished prose, "The Billionaire Who Wasn't" recounts Feeney's meteoric rise from blue-collar beginnings in Elizabeth, N.J., to a perch as one of America's titans of commerce, head of Duty Free Shoppers, the largest liquor retailer in the world.

O'Clery's inside portrait of an extreme business visionary who, from a very young age, incessantly perceived unfilled needs and opportunities, and consequently raked in fistfuls of cash, is very interesting, to be certain. But the most uplifting part of the biography is its second half, after Feeney, at the age 53, signed his fortune away in 1984 and devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy.

"The Billionaire Who Wasn't" estimates that Feeney has afforded his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, with an ever-growing sum that will likely reach $12 billion.

O'Clery recounts the manner in which the self-effacing Feeney, a Cornell grad, anonymously lavished hundreds of millions on his school (becoming the greatest donor to a single university in U.S. history), as well as to schools around the world, particularly in Ireland and Vietnam. Feeney poured money into the Irish peace process and even became the single greatest philanthropist in Australian history. And he did it all secretly, influenced by the belief that the highest form of giving is that which is unrecognized; Feeney desired no plaques, no buildings named after him, no gala dinners.

According to "The Billionaire Who Wasn't," an authorized biography, Feeney was finally outed as a philanthropist as a result of a business dispute in 1997. The book peers deeply into the possible motivations of all the principal actors in recounting Feeney's tumultuous, rancorous sale of Duty Free Shoppers, quoting all four shareholders in the business at length.

After signing the vast majority of his wealth away, Feeney maintained a tidy sum for himself and his immediate family, as well as an impressive collection of prime real estate around the globe. An inveterate globe-trotter since the 1950s, he continues to roam the world in search of opportunities for Atlantic Philanthropies to invest — applying the same extraordinary vision he used to make money to give it away.

Express spoke with O'Clery about Feeney's philosophy of "giving while living," the philanthropist's spirituality and the enduring influence of Andrew Carnegie's "The Gospel of Wealth."

EXPRESS: Your book is unrelentingly positive about Chuck. Did you not discover anything negative about him in the course of your research?

O'CLERY: Well, it's not unrelentingly positive. He could be very stubborn, and his stubbornness caused him to make some bad business decisions — for example, the investment in Curan Co. Australia. And his stubbornness led him to stick with a retail venture in Hawaii which his partners regarded as unethical. Now, he would argue against that. But, again, it's the stubbornness. I think the mayor of Brisbane called him "a pigheaded Irishman." Nobody's perfect. ... He was once put off the board of his company, Duty Free Shoppers, because they regarded his retail activity separate from the company as unethical.

EXPRESS: Feeney's investments on the island of Saipan perhaps best demonstrate his extraordinary vision.

O'CLERY: Yes — he developed Saipan for the duty-free business. The idea of building an airport so tourists could come to a fairly isolated island in the Pacific shows the type of business-person he was.

Throughout his life, Chuck Feeney has thought big. When the duty-free business began to grow, Chuck Feeney, of all the partners, saw the potential for making money from Japanese tourists. He realized that the exodus of Japanese tourists after the mid-1960s was just going to grow and grow. ... I think it was Chuck Feeney who put in place a lot of the mechanisms to actually bring the tourists to the Duty Free shops. In Hawaii, for example, Japanese tour groups would be met by guides who'd bring them to the Duty Free store even before they'd checked into their hotel. And Feeney ensured that the guides and the tour bus drivers were well-looked-after, so that they weren't in a rush to get away.

He was a very smart retailer. The story of Chuck Feeney's life is one of the great untold retail stories of the 20th century.

EXPRESS: Did Feeney provide any money for his extended family?

O'CLERY: No, he didn't. Feeney was very careful not to engage in that sort of charity.

Chuck lives in two worlds. He lives in the world of big business and big philanthropy, but he has never left the world of Elizabeth, N.J., which is a blue-collar and white-collar community of Irish-Americans, who helped each other, who never "blew their horn," and with whom he remained friendly throughout his life.

He brought his old school friends from the 1940s to Ireland to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their high school graduation. He provided, I think, a $1,000 air ticket, which they had to pay themselves. But then in Ireland, of course, everything was provided by [his] hotel. He's very sensitive like that. He didn't go around doling out money to old friends, because that would be patronizing. He'd never do that. ... All these school pals of his, they just adore him. And I saw and met these people and they're just really nice, down-to-earth people. They respect Chuck Feeney as one of themselves who never separated himself from them because of his wealth.

When he would visit his family in Elizabeth, he came by bus or by train. I quoted one of his nephews as saying he'd get a telephone call from his uncle Charlie to go pick him up at the station and he'd be standing there with all the prostitutes and drug-dealers. But, of course, Chuck Feeney, because of his frugal lifestyle, wouldn't appear to be a rich person. He carried his papers in a plastic bag and wore a cheap watch and if you saw him in the street, he might be bending down to pick up some litter to put it in the litter-bin.

EXPRESS: How much of his frugality is done for effect?

O'CLERY: [ laughs] Sometimes he does wind people up, but traveling at the back of the plane for a 12-hour journey — you don't do that for effect. You do that because you believe deeply that it's right for you to travel in the back of the plane rather than in business-class. Chuck Feeney always argues that he travels in the back of the plane and he wears a cheap watch because it's cost effective. He says, "I'd travel in the front if it would get me there any faster."

EXPRESS: What has been Feeney's most successful philanthropic endeavor?

O'CLERY: At one point he offered 75 million pounds to Irish universities, to promote research, if the Irish government would also put up $75 million. At that time, the Irish government only provided $5 million for research at [upper]-level institutions. And here, Chuck Feeney came along with this very far-seeing philanthropic proposal that the Atlantic foundation would provide huge funding for research at [upper]-level institutions. ... And the effect in Ireland was to raise research to a new level and without Chuck Feeney's foresight — and, of course, he'd been pumping hundreds of millions into the universities already — the Celtic Tiger, the phenomenon of Ireland's economic growth, would not have taken place at the extent it did.

And I would put alongside that his philanthropy in Vietnam. I saw very dramatic effects of his philanthropy in Vietnam. ... The two of us went in and watched an operation. We watched a person getting his cataracts removed and his eyesight restored in 20 minutes. And to see clinics and learning centers being established in different cities in Vietnam — that makes a huge difference — and I think there you see the most dramatic effects of his philanthropy.

EXPRESS: He lives on $1.5 million now, right? That's all his assets are?

O'CLERY: I would say it's about that, yes. He doesn't own a house, car or private airplane. He lives in apartments that are rented by his foundation. His assets are probably less than anybody owning a house in the Northwest suburbs of Washington.

EXPRESS: How important was Andrew Carnegie's essay "The Gospel of Wealth" to Chuck Feeney's thinking?

O'CLERY: That's a very good question. It's hard to answer that. I think he was becoming uncomfortable with wealth — there's no doubt about that — and I think he probably would have become a philanthropist without reading Carnegie, but I think the importance of that essay on the discussions he had about how people of wealth should use their wealth — I think it informed his judgment and helped him explain to others what he was doing.

Feeney finds it very hard to talk about himself. He has no ego. So, when he wanted to explain to friends and family-members what he has doing, it was useful for him to be able to hand them Carnegie's essay on wealth and say, "Read that." He's always doing that: giving people bits of paper and saying, "read that," as a way of communicating what he's thinking. So, he was certainly affected by the essay on wealth and it certainly helped him to communicate what he was doing.

Chuck Feeney is a role model for "giving while living." This book plays into a growing debate throughout the world as to how wealthy people should put that wealth to use. The norm is that, when a lot of wealth is put into a foundation, the foundation spends only 5 percent of its assets a year and continues in perpetuity.

If you look at what Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett are doing, the three of them form the board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and they have decided that, 50 years after the death of the last of them, all that wealth should be spent. So, the "giving while living" philosophy is something that people are considering. It's almost unheard of for philanthropic foundations to wind-down within a specific period of time.

Chuck Feeney's philosophy of giving while living points the way forward to a new idea of spending money today to meet the problems of today, rather than giving it out little-by-little.

EXPRESS: What role does spirituality or faith play in Feeney's philanthropy?

O'CLERY: I'm not sure it plays any role. ... My personal feeling is: He's a spiritual person without any religious feature. He's not a church-goer, but he has qualities that far surpass many church-goers.

Express, A publication of The Washington Post