The first dollar billionaire in history. The Story of the Kidnapping of Paul Getty III

Famous American billionaire, oil tycoon, considered in the 1960s. the richest man in the world. Philanthropist who has donated more than $200 million to charities. A mystic who all his life believed that the spirit of the Roman Caesar Adriana had moved into him. (b. 1892 - d. 1976)

On June 6, 1976, the richest man on the planet, Jean Paul Getty, died in a London clinic. The announcement of his will had the effect of a bomb exploding. Paul Getty's four sons and 14 grandchildren, as well as his devoted servants, received a pittance. For example, one of the sons, Ronaldo, inherited from his father only a diary with critical remarks about his abilities. Getty bequeathed all his billions to a museum in Malibu - so he wanted to gain immortality. It is now the richest museum in human history, its contents worth about $2.5 billion.

Getty's offspring, who had been at odds with each other for a long time, began visiting each other after the billionaire's death. There's only one place on earth that neither of them likes to visit: the old family estate in Malibu, California, near Hollywood.

In the main hall of the museum there is a marble bust of the late owner, made during his lifetime. By order of the old man, the sculptor especially emphasized the similarity of the original with the ancient statues of Caesar Hadrian, because Getty was sure all his life that the spirit of the Roman emperor lived in him. Obviously, some interesting statements of the eccentric billionaire will remain in history: “Unselfish friendship is possible only between people with the same income. If you don't have money, you think about money all the time. If you have money, you only think about money.”

Getty could go down in history as the richest man of his era - after all, he had more money than any of the Rockefellers. However, the world remembered him for another reason. Getty believed until his death that his body was possessed by a mysterious creature that forced him to wage oil wars, cold-bloodedly destroy competitors and hunt hundreds of women. He believed that the spirit of Caesar Hadrian had destroyed his life and turned him into the most unfortunate rich man on the planet.

Paul's parents - George Franklin Getty, an Irishman by birth, and Sarah Catherine McPherson, the daughter of Scottish emigrants, strictly followed the canons of the Methodist Church and believed that the Almighty rewards the observance of Christian commandments with wealth. Misfortune forced the devout head of the family to commit an act dangerous for a Christian: after the death of his ten-year-old daughter Gertrude, who died in 1890 from typhus, he began to seek solace in the occult sciences. George spent his evenings at seances, summoning spirits and begging them for the birth of an heir. One day, from the lips of a medium who had entered a trance, he heard the expected news. A certain spirit, who told about himself only that during his lifetime he was endowed with imperial power in Ancient Rome, promised that in two years a son would be born into the Getty family.

The prophecy came true; on December 15, 1892, a boy was born, to whom his parents gave the name Jean Paul. The future creator of the oil empire grew up small, weak and ugly. The mother loved her son very much, but tried to restrain her feelings so as not to spoil him, and forbade him to communicate with peers in order to avoid bad influence. Subsequently, Getty recalled that as a child he felt lonely and deprived of parental warmth. Strict upbringing and numerous prohibitions played a bad joke on Paul: in the end, his violent temper broke out.

Paul's father was rarely home. Starting out in the insurance business, he soon succumbed to the oil rush that had taken hold of Oklahoma and tirelessly increased his capital. In 1906, Getty Sr. became a millionaire. Having finally turned his attention to his grown-up son, he was surprised to find that he had completely gotten out of hand. On the day he turned 14, Paul proudly announced that he had long since lost his virginity. At the age of 17, he dropped out of school and plunged headlong into nightlife. At the same time, Paul began to stubbornly, even fanatically, make money from his father's oil fields.

The parents didn’t know what to think, but in fact everything was very simple. Paul saw a statue of Caesar Trajan Adrian Augustus in a school textbook - and immediately the boy was overcome by a strange, inexplicable feeling, the nature of which he was able to understand much later. Paul believed that the spirit of the Roman emperor, whom he really resembled in appearance, returned to Earth with him. Gradually, it began to seem to the young man that he was looking at the world through the eyes of a Roman dictator and hearing his menacing voice. This voice was terribly annoying, but it was impossible to resist his orders. Therefore, the young man decided to do everything to live like an emperor himself. To do this, it was necessary to become fabulously rich and increase the list of his mistresses to 400.

To get closer to his dream, Paul needed money. Only they could give the young man what the battle-hardened Roman emperor was accustomed to taking by force. And Paul Getty began to create his own empire.

When he turned 20, he borrowed $500 from his parents and became the owner of his first oil well. Two years later, having long since paid off his debt, he was able to proudly announce to his parents: “I just made my first million dollars, and believe me, it won’t be my last!” Indeed, this was only the beginning of a long chain of successes. Paul had an exceptional sense of smell that allowed him to recognize rich oil deposits. It should be noted that it was on his advice that George Getty made the best deal of his life: he acquired a concession in Santa Spring, which everyone refused.

Parents could calmly look at the future of their heir. But neither his abilities nor the brilliant results he achieved, combined with frugality, reassured them. They recognized that Paul was ambitious and hard-working, and did not throw money away. However, the son’s excessive passion for women and the so-called “ sweet life" went against their Puritan views. Therefore, fearing that their son’s excesses might affect the state of the family business, they decided to keep him away from the company’s affairs for as long as possible, despite the fact that sooner or later this would have to happen, since he was their only heir. Moreover, they convinced each other that Paul did not have real professional qualities, although he daily proved the opposite. His parents stubbornly insisted that he was simply lucky and that this would not last long. Therefore, before his death, George Getty in his will appointed his wife as the administrator of his entire estate, estimated at several tens of millions of dollars, placing his son under humiliating financial guardianship.

Paul did not have sufficient cash reserves to carry out his gigantic plans. Here he could count only on the capital obtained by his own labor, that is, on ten thousand shares of the Getty Oil Company. Having entered into inheritance rights, Sarah made it clear to her son that he would not receive a single cent from her. Paul was well aware that he could not break his mother’s firmness, especially since she, extremely dissatisfied with her dissolute lifestyle, told everyone that her son was good for nothing and simply could not be trusted with anything.

However, when the financial crisis of 1929 occurred, Paul was able to show what he was capable of. For a forward-thinking and daring player like him, there were plenty of opportunities for enrichment. Without hesitation and against the advice of his mother, he sold the shares of the family company, and invested the money in an enterprise in whose ability to survive the crisis, it seems, he was the only one who believed: the enterprise was called the Pacific Western Oil Company.

As risky as it was, it was a masterstroke. The operation was so successful that even Sarah wavered in the opinion she had about her son. Well, Paul’s ambitions, already huge, increased even more. In an instant, he made a decision that determined the purpose of his life: to collect the necessary funds for as long as necessary, but to gain control of the Tidewater Associated Oil Company, one of the largest companies in the United States.

He fanatically strived to achieve success, fighting for black gold with the rest of the world - and won, capturing more and more spheres of influence. At first, oil tycoons paid no attention to the young upstart. Getty approached his victims slowly and carefully, and his competitors did not immediately notice that they were in mortal danger.

In an office on the third floor of the George V Hotel in Paris, Paul worked for days, sometimes even forgetting about food. Over the course of twenty years, he absorbed half of his competitors, and each time the victim was several times larger than a predator. In business, Getty was distinguished by icy restraint and a fantastic memory. He built his empire with purpose and soon owned hundreds of oil rigs in America and the Middle East, an entire fleet of tankers and an army of subordinates.

In 1933, his mother finally transferred control of the Getty Oil Company to Paul and placed almost the entire capital of the family enterprise at his complete disposal, although she left him common use certain part, which could serve as a guarantee for both of them in the event, very possible, in her opinion, if they find themselves facing collapse. And finally, Sarah, although with considerable skepticism, gave her son her maternal blessing to carry out grandiose plans of conquest, which, he was convinced, would certainly be crowned with success.

Two years later, Paul had the opportunity to come close to fulfilling his cherished dream. Taking advantage of the fact that the capital under his control had grown sharply (due to his mother's decision), Getty seized control of one of Tidewater's subsidiaries. Under the very nose of John D. Rockefeller, the undisputed king of oil, he managed to eat a hole, a very tiny one, in this huge and so tempting piece of cheese. Several years of bitter struggle followed, but he still achieved his goal - in 1939, the merger of Tidewater and Getty Oil took place. Since then, Paul Getty's fortune began to grow at a breakneck pace. Initially considerable, it increased so rapidly and with such consistency that in the end Paul became one of the richest men in the world.

Another 25 years passed, and Getty defeated the once all-powerful Standard Oil, owned by the Rockefeller clan. Already by the mid-1960s. Getty Oil's profits reached fantastic proportions: the oil magnate increased his inherited fortune, which was $15 million, to an unprecedented amount of $700 million, and the total value of his company's assets significantly exceeded $3.5 billion. According to Fortune magazine's calculations, in those years Getty increased his capital by half a million dollars every day.

Over time, the American upstart began to be hated not only by businessmen, but also by the British nobility - because he bought up the estates of impoverished aristocrats on the cheap. Paul Getty bought his English estate Sutton Place from the bankrupt Duke of Sutherland for only 600 thousand pounds. In those years, he earned that kind of money in two days.

Once, in one of Getty's occult books, he read that sexual activity is one of the nine causes of reincarnation. From then on, he perceived sex as a cure for old age. It is known that he made love until his old age, carefully selecting his partners. On the personal “front” his trophies were the most beautiful women. Getty considered his affair with Marie Tessier, the grandniece of one of the Russian Grand Dukes, to be a great victory in his life, although he forgot her as quickly as he forgot everyone else. None of his five wives managed to stay close to Paul for more than three years. As soon as his next wife announced to him that she was pregnant, Paul immediately ended all relations with her. Even to those who knew Getty well, this seemed strange. They did not know that Emperor Hadrian hated everyone in whom he saw his successors to the throne, and died childless. And Paul Getty tried to imitate his life in everything.

To relieve the stress caused by constant nervous stress, Getty became interested in drugs. They carried him into the world of fantasy, reconciling his two “I”s with each other. However, he was able to stop in time and get rid of drug addiction. Later, to take his mind off business, Paul became involved in philanthropic activities. Imitating his idol, the businessman invested a fortune in works of art. Although Getty could not distinguish the work of one artist from another, his first purchase was a precious van Goyen landscape. The businessman simply liked the rural house in the picture and reminded him of his childhood. The next acquisition in 1940 was “Portrait of the Merchant Martin Luten” by the great Rembrandt. Here he was attracted by the cheapness: the owner of the painting, a Dutch Jew, gave it up for only 65 thousand dollars, as he was frightened by the approach of the Nazis. In general, while collecting art, Getty remained primarily a businessman, most often buying what was sold at a bargain price.

The only thing that really interested him was marble sculptures. Mr. Getty acquired ancient Roman sculptures from various owners. At the end of the 1960s. he bought from Lord Lansdowne part of the Roman statue of Hercules. When the ancient fragment was delivered to Getty, it made an inexplicable, almost mystical impression on the collector. The billionaire immediately called Lord Lansdowne back and asked where the sculpture was found. As it turned out, the statue was discovered during excavations of the ancient palace of Villa dei Papiri, buried under a layer of volcanic ash after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. e. It was there, according to historians, that the great Roman emperor Trajan Adrian Augustus lived for several years.

The businessman abandoned all his business and went to Italy. "I've already been here in past life", he later wrote in his diary. Getty ordered detailed drawings of the building to be made and decided to build it in Malibu exact copy Villa dei Papiri. By his order, 16 tons of golden travertine stone were brought from Tivoli, from which Trajan's Villa was built. Thanks to oil millions, time turned back: the gardens of the luxurious ancient palace turned green under the sun, the splashes of fountains and waterfalls sparkled.

It was a desperate attempt by a billionaire to break into immortality. Like Emperor Hadrian, who immortalized his name by building a renovated Roman Pantheon, old Getty tried to put all the energy of his dollars into one giant leap to eternal glory. With time a private house The Getty in Malibu became a unique museum housing hundreds of precious paintings, sculptures and antiques. But the owner of this luxurious estate never saw it with his own eyes. Paul Getty supervised the construction from London and, due to his old age, could no longer endure transatlantic sea travel, and he was terrified of flying on airplanes.

At the end of his life, Adrian’s spirit completely subjugated the old man’s psyche, and fears and inexplicable manias began to haunt him. First, the businessman got himself a live lion named Nero, because inner voice told Paul that only lions could protect him from danger. His love for predators was accompanied by attacks of anger towards the people around him. When the grandson of oil magnate Jean Paul Getty III was kidnapped by Calabrian mafiosi, the old man refused to pay them a $2 million ransom. It was only when he was sent the boy’s severed ear by mail that he agreed to hand over the money. Until the end of his life, he was convinced that the kidnapping of his grandson was arranged by the 16-year-old boy himself and his mother in order to force old Paul to fork out money. And when the billionaire’s granddaughter died of AIDS, he didn’t even have a few sympathetic words for a telegram. The fate of his children and grandchildren worried the businessman much less than the future of the noble spirit that lived in his body. The old man was very afraid that after his death the spirit would turn into an unworthy shell.

He categorically did not want to die, until last days tried to maintain youth through plastic surgery and entertainment with women. When Getty learned that Caesar Hadrian had died in his own bed, he ordered the bed to be removed from his room and spent his nights sitting in an easy chair, wrapped in a blanket. IN last years In his lifetime, his face, disfigured by unsuccessful plastic surgery, resembled the death mask of a Roman emperor. He sat motionless in a chair with his eyes closed for hours. On his lap, the stuffed lion cub Nero was “napping.”

Paul Getty died in his sleep at the age of 84. “The richest, loneliest and most selfish man in the world has died. Never in his life had he donated a single dollar to any charitable organization“This is how one of the news presenters described the event on the day of his death, June 6, 1976. According to doctors, death was due to a respiratory tract infection, although the main cause was prostate cancer. The coffin was flown from England to California. And immediately after his death, the shadow of this strange man, who laid down his life on the altar of serving his own mania, fell on his heirs.

Paul Getty's eldest son, George, was quickly destroyed by alcoholism and committed suicide. The life of the second son, Ronald, also did not work out. After the announcement of the will, he became a poor resident of South Africa. The third son of the oil emperor, Paul Getty Jr., went down in history as the “golden hippie from Morocco.” For a long time he caroused and debauched himself in his African villa with a strange name - “Palace of Passion”, trying to “outdo” his dad in entertainment and debauchery. However, it all ended in a clinic, where he was diagnosed with diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver and a whole bunch of chronic venereal diseases. The youngest of the old Getty's descendants, Gordon, suffered the least from family problems. Perhaps only because during his father’s lifetime he communicated with him extremely rarely. However, his dreams were not destined to come true: Gordon’s hopes of opening his own opera house with the money owed to him after the death of his parent were dashed.

By the mid-1990s. the heavens seem to have taken pity on the descendants of the oil emperor. Paul Getty Jr. finally recovered from drug addiction and even became interested in cricket. Gordon Getty became rich, bought himself a Boeing and a mansion in California. Ronald Getty lives with new hopes - both of his daughters married millionaires. Who knows, maybe the world will hear about a new millionaire named Getty.

Elena Vasilyeva, Yuri Pernatyev

From the book “50 famous businessmen XIX - early XX centuries."

As stated in one famous television series, the rich cry too. At the same time, the most serious troubles, as a rule, happen not to the billionaires themselves, but to their offspring. This misfortune also affected the family clan of oil magnate Jean Paul Getty. The grandson of a billionaire recognized as the richest man in the world, John Paul Getty III first became addicted to drugs, and then he was kidnapped by criminals. The release of the hostage has turned into an exciting crime story.

John Paul Getty III was born in 1956 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But he spent most of his childhood in Italy - in Rome, where his father, also John Paul, represented the interests of the family oil corporation. In 1964, Paul's father divorced and married a little-known Dutch actress. Apparently, tired of the harsh everyday life of big business, after the divorce, John Paul Getty II hit the hardest. He completely abandoned all his affairs and, together with his new wife, began to live with a colony of hippies in Morocco, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes the former businessman came to England to relax, where a luxurious house was purchased for this purpose.

Young Paul was sent by his father and stepmother to study at the elite English school St. George in Rome. Having completed it with difficulty, Paul did not go to university. He remained in Italy and led a bohemian life, since the available family capital allowed it. Among his close acquaintances were hippies, rock musicians, drug addicts, prostitutes, tramps and other dubious personalities. Therefore, when at 3 a.m. on July 10, 1973, Paul Getty was kidnapped in a square in Rome and taken to an unknown location, no one was particularly surprised.

Only the motives for the kidnapping of the billionaire's grandson remained a mystery. At first, many thought that this was all a talented staging, organized by Paul himself, in order to extract more money from his tight-fisted relatives. Then the police put forward a version that terrorists from the famous “Red Brigades” were involved in the kidnapping. However, no political statements were made by the brigadiers, and this version had to be abandoned.

Some journalists claimed that the kidnapping was organized by rivals of the family clan in order to force Paul Getty's grandfather to make secret concessions in the oil business. After all, he was successfully developing oil fields V Saudi Arabia and back in 1957 he was declared the richest man on Earth.

Kidnapping of a rich man's grandson

Soon, the kidnappers sent a note to Paul Getty's father and grandfather demanding a ransom of $17 million. Only in this case did they guarantee the safe return of the hostage. The father of the kidnapped person did not have that kind of money. And the head of the clan, Jean Paul Getty, who lived in England, responded to the proposal of the unknown bandits with a categorical refusal.

Speaking to reporters, Getty Sr. said that he has fourteen more grandchildren. If he pays the required amount to the criminals, his grandchildren will be kidnapped one by one, and he will be completely ruined.

A week later, an envelope arrived in the mail at the editorial office of a provincial Italian newspaper. It contained a lock of hair and a severed human ear. In the cover letter, the unknown criminals threatened to brutally kill the stolen teenager if they did not receive $3.2 million within ten days. Only after this did Getty Sr. agree to pay the ransom, but not in full, but in parts.

First, $2.2 million was transferred to the bandits, and then the rest of the amount. In the end, through skillful bargaining, Getty Sr. reduced the ransom amount to $2.9 million. It is also curious that he lent all the money necessary to save his grandson to his own son at four percent per annum. Having received the money, the bandits released young Paul. He was discovered in southern Italy, in an abandoned house, on December 15, 1973.

When a joyful Paul III called his grandfather in England to thank him for his release, he refused to answer the phone. And then he refused to meet with his grandson at all. As they say, the rich have their own quirks.

Mafia on a regional scale

While the Getty family clan was bargaining with the kidnappers and seeking the release of the hostage, the Italian police wasted no time either. Using operational channels, Italian detectives managed to identify and then arrest the gang that committed the daring kidnapping of the billionaire’s grandson. To the great disappointment of the press, it was announced that the "kidnapping of the century" was organized by a small criminal group from the province of Calabria, located in southern Italy.

The police detained nine criminals, including one driver, one carpenter, one municipal hospital orderly and one salesman olive oil from Calabria. The gang was headed by two regional mafiosi, certain Girolamo Piromalli and Saverio Mammoliti. During the court hearings, all the circumstances of the daring abduction became clear. The Calabrian bandits were given a tip on a promising “client” by a drug addict who was hanging out with Paul Getty in Rome. The rest was a matter of technique.

John Paul Getty III - paralyzed and blind

A group of criminals arrived in Rome by car. Paul was tracked down, grabbed right on the street, injected with a heavy dose of sleeping pills and taken to a mountain village in Calabria, where he was kept in an abandoned house. Communication with the relatives of the kidnapped person and the receipt of ransom were carried out through dummies. However, at the trial it was possible to prove the guilt of only two criminals. The rest had to be released due to lack of evidence.

By the way, the police never found most of the ransom money. Two million dollars disappeared without a trace, and, some skeptics claimed, were used as attorney fees and as a bribe to the court. As for Paul Getty III himself, after his release from the hands of the bandits, he underwent long-term treatment, suffered plastic surgery to restore the ear that his kidnappers cut off. Then Paul got married and had a son, but the psychological trauma associated with the kidnapping never left the “billionaire’s granddaughter.” He continued to abuse alcohol and drugs, already in 1981 this led to a stroke, which made the 25-year-old guy paralyzed, deaf and almost blind. Getty III died at the age of 54.

He founded the Getty Oil Company and in 1957 became the richest American according to Fortune magazine. In 1966, the Guinness Book of Records estimated his net worth at $1.2 billion, making him the world's largest individual net worth. By the time of his death, Getty's fortune was already estimated at more than 2 billion. Despite his enormous wealth, Getty was known as an incredible miser.

He was also an avid collector of art and antiques, and his collection became the basis for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, to which Getty's will bequeathed $661 million upon his death. In 1953, he founded the J. Paul Getty Trust, the art world's wealthiest organization, which governs the Getty Museum, the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Getty Conservation Institute. .

Jean Paul Getty was born on December 15, 1892, the son of George Franklin Getty, who was in the oil business in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Getty studied at the University of Southern California, then at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1914 he graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, with a degree in economics and political science. During the summer holidays, Jean Paul worked for his father's oil company in Oklahoma.

Having founded his own fuel company in Tulsa, Getty made his first million by June 1916, but already in 1917 he announced that he was quitting and was going to settle in Los Angeles to lead the life of a rich playboy. Although Getty eventually returned to business, he lost his father's respect. Getty Sr. died in 1930 and before his death he was tormented by the thought that Jean Paul would destroy the family enterprise - and, of course, he told him about it.

For a couple of years, young Getty spent the money he earned on women and pleasures, but in 1919 he returned to Oklahoma and in the 1920s added $3 million to his already considerable fortune. A long series of marriages and divorces (Getty was married 5 times) upset his father so much that George left him only $500,000 of the $10 million upon his death. The Great Depression spared Getty's capital because he was a very shrewd investor. On the contrary, it was during these years that he launched a series of mergers and acquisitions, ending only in 1967 with the creation of the giant oil corporation Getty Oil. Getty has paid out millions of dollars since 1949 Arab sheikhs for the concession of a piece of barren land on the border of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. No one found oil there, and in four years Getty spent what seemed like $30 million for nothing, but since 1953, Getty's oil rigs have produced 2.5 million cubic meters of oil a year, making him one of the richest men in the world. In addition, he learned to speak Arabic and enjoyed unprecedented influence in the Middle East.

In the 50s he moved to England (England) and became a famous Anglophile. He lived and worked in a 16th-century Tudor mansion called Sutton Place near Guildford, inviting his traditional English Vacation home British and Arab friends and business partners.

Getty remained in Great Britain (UK) for the rest of his life and died of heart failure on June 6, 1976, at the age of 83.

Getty married and divorced 5 times. The second marriage was childless, and the remaining four wives bore him five sons. He wrote a very successful autobiography called How to Be Rich. His stinginess was legendary. At Sutton Place, for example, Getty replaced telephones with payphones after noticing that his telephone bills were rising, and those of his guests and employees who wanted to use telephone services had to pay for it out of their own pockets.

The episode with the kidnapping of Getty’s grandson, John Paul Getty III, in Rome is widely known, when extortionists demanded a ransom of 17 million dollars for the life of a 16-year-old teenager and sent the boy’s severed ear to the relatives to intimidate him. In the end, the kidnappers had to reduce the amount to $3 million, but even then Getty agreed to pay no more than $2.2 million—the maximum tax-free amount. He lent the remaining 800,000 to his son at 4% per annum. Paul was found alive, but this incident broke him - addicted to alcohol and drugs, he spent most of his life as an invalid. Jean Paul Getty explained his refusal to comply with the kidnappers' demands by saying that if he had agreed to the ransom, his grandchildren (15 in total) would have been kidnapped one by one.

Jean Paul Getty was known throughout his life as one of the stingiest rich men in the world. By all accounts, the desire to show off one's own wealth was never the goal of an entrepreneur. He created his empire and billion-dollar capital practically from scratch and had no intention of sharing it with anyone.

His villas and mansions were works of art, but they were acquired at a time when their prices were greatly reduced. They say that even his move to separate houses from the luxury rooms that he preferred in his youth was due to the fact that the cost of a house seemed lower to him than paying for hotels. By the way, Getty washed his own clothes every day, saving money.

Other Getty eccentricities include savings when sending mail. He usually wrote replies to letters in the same margins and sent them in the same envelopes if there was an opportunity to use them again.

It is worth mentioning the entrepreneur’s numerous novels. What he truly loved, besides money, from adolescence to old age, was women. It would be more correct to say, not women, but sex, considering it the key to youth and even immortality of the soul. He could call paid priestesses of love from the Place Pigalle to his Paris office, and could arrange a real hunt for some social beauty, seducing her with his restraint and encyclopedic erudition. During his life, he was married five times and had, by all accounts, more than a hundred affairs - not counting fleeting interests and one-night stands.

Getty was cool about charity. He himself claimed that he would give 99.5% of his fortune if he was sure that it would solve the problem of poverty. In his opinion, the best charities simply teach people to passively receive money.

At 3 a.m. on July 10, 1973, Paul Getty received sad news: his grandson John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in Piazza Farnese in Rome. The grandson was blindfolded and taken to a mountain refuge in Calabria. The kidnappers sent a ransom note demanding $17 million in exchange for his safe return. After reading the note, some family members suspected that the kidnapping was staged by Paul himself and was the prank of a rebellious teenager, since he had often joked that the only way to extract money from his tight-fisted grandfather was by arranging his own kidnapping. The kidnappers soon sent a second ransom message, which was delayed due to a strike by Italian postal workers. Paul's father, who did not have that kind of money, asked his father, Jean Paul Getty, for it. For Getty, whose fortune at the time reached $4 billion, this was not much money, but he had no intention of paying. He was guided, in his opinion, by rational convictions. There is a widespread claim by an entrepreneur that he has fourteen grandchildren and if he pays a ransom for one, they will begin to kidnap the rest.

The daily newspaper then received an envelope containing a lock of hair and part of an ear, as well as written threats to permanently mutilate the grandson unless the extortionists received $3.2 million within ten days.

Getty then agreed to pay the ransom, but only $2.2 million because that was the maximum tax-free amount. He lent the missing money to save his grandson to his son at 4 percent per annum. As a result, the kidnappers received approximately $2.9 million, and Paul was found alive in southern Italy after a ransom was paid.

Police later detained nine kidnappers: a carpenter, an orderly, a former criminal and an olive oil salesman from Calabria, as well as several high-ranking members of the local mafia group. Two of the gang were convicted and sent to prison, the rest - including mafiosi - were released due to lack of evidence. Most of the ransom money has disappeared.

The grandson never came to his senses and subsequently suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction. Eight years after his abduction, he became blind, speechless, and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

The kidnapping and subsequent ransom of John Paul Getty III became one of the most notorious and famous kidnappings in history, along with the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

In 2004, LUKOIL bought Getty Petroleum Marketing, which owns a network of 1,300 gas stations in the northeastern United States. And that was, as they say, “the end of the story,” because Getty Petroleum Marketing is virtually all that remains of the once powerful Getty Oil concern, which included more than 200 companies.

The founder of Getty Oil and its long-time president was oil magnate, financial genius and once the richest man on the planet, Jean-Paul Getty. The future billionaire was born in 1892 in Minneapolis (USA, Minnesota), into a wealthy Puritan family. His father, George Getty, having started in the insurance business, succumbed to the oil rush that took hold of Oklahoma and reoriented himself to the oil business, steadily increasing his capital. In 1906, George Getty became a millionaire. Having reached the cherished milestone, the father turned his attention to his grown-up son and discovered with horror that he had long ceased to follow the Puritan principles accepted in the family: at the age of seventeen, Jean-Paul dropped out of school and began “wasting his life.”

At the same time, the resourceful, cunning and merciless Jean-Paul had an iron business acumen and great ambitions. The young Getty dreamed of creating an oil empire and, starting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, boldly moved to new regions, capturing new companies and spheres of influence. In 1916, Getty earned his first million dollars, and that same year his company moved to California.

Getty approached his victims slowly and carefully. Competitors did not immediately notice mortal danger emanating from a tiny office located on the third floor of the George V Hotel in Paris. In this office, Jean-Paul spent 24 hours a day, sometimes forgetting about food and sleep. Getty did not leave his office for months - he bought concessions over the phone, and negotiated tax breaks with sultans and kings over the phone. He meticulously directed his army of sales agents, brokers, geologists and a fleet of tankers around the clock. Getty's approach to competitors was simple: he absorbed them. And it is curious that each time the prey was several times larger than the predator.

When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, Jean-Paul decided that he could truly get rich by abandoning exploration and focusing on buying mature oil assets. So when oil stocks plummeted, Getty turned into a stockbroker. He looked for companies that were trading below book value but had valuable assets. His first investments in other oil companies, however, resulted in million-dollar losses.
The stakes were extremely high. “I financed stock purchases with every dollar I had,” Getty said, “and every cent of credit I could get. If I had lost this campaign... I would have been left personally penniless and deeply in debt.” Most big goal Getty was Tide Water, an oil company controlled by Standard Oil. After several years of struggle, Getty finally achieved his goal - he absorbed the giant concern with the help of a behind-the-scenes maneuver. Moreover, the former owners of Tide Water for a long time did not even know about the existence of Jean-Paul Getty and his small company Getty Oil with a capital of only one and a half million dollars.

A quarter of a century later, Getty defeated the once all-powerful Standard Oil, owned by the Rockefeller clan. One of Getty's most profitable undertakings was the purchase of an oil concession in Saudi Arabia in 1949, which began to generate billions in profits in the 1950s. In 1957, Jean-Paul Getty was declared the richest man on Earth. By the mid-1960s, Getty Oil's profits were reaching fantastic levels. According to Fortune magazine, in those years Getty increased his capital by half a million dollars every day. In 1968, Jean-Paul Getty became a billionaire. He retained the high-profile title of the richest man until his death.

Touches to the portrait of a billionaire
World oil and political elite hated Getty - primarily because he bought up the estates of bankrupt aristocrats on the cheap. “Paul Getty devours the corpses of bankrupts and unfortunate people,” Lord Beaverbrook once remarked. Jean-Paul Getty bought his English estate Sutton Place in Surrey shortly after the end of World War II from the impoverished Duke of Sutherland at a predatory price - only 600 thousand pounds. In those years, the oil tycoon earned that kind of money in two days. After the purchase of the estate and Getty moving there, the house was surrounded by a fortress wall. The territory was guarded an entire army security and twenty specially trained dogs.

Getty's trophies included not only absorbed oil companies and mansions bought for next to nothing, but also beautiful women. After the billionaire's death, stunned descendants found in his famous black notebook several hundred women's names, written in a column in alphabetical order. And opposite each name is an address. Paul Getty conquered the most beautiful women on the planet - film actresses, millionaires, princesses and baronesses, and was keen on underage girls... Getty was married five times, and his relationship with almost all of his children was very bad.

At the same time, Getty was a fantastically stingy person. He installed pay phones in his guests' rooms and paid taxes only once in his entire business career. And when his grandson Jean-Paul Getty III was kidnapped by Italian mafiosi in 1973, the tycoon refused to pay them a $3.2 million ransom. Only after receiving the boy's severed ear in the mail did he agree to hand over the money, but the police discovered the child earlier. Until the end of his life, Getty was convinced that the kidnapping of his grandson was staged by his cunning mother in order to force Paul Getty to fork out money... When the mutilated boy was released from captivity, Getty refused to talk to him on the phone.
Here's another revealing fact. When Getty's granddaughter and daughter-in-law Elizabeth Taylor died of AIDS, he didn't even send her parents a sympathetic telegram. Indeed, the fate of his children and grandchildren worried Paul much less than building an oil empire and perpetuating his own name.

Getty invested fortunes in works of art. In 1953, he founded the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, where he displayed much of his own art collection. In 1974, the museum moved to new premises in Malibu, which was an exact replica of the Villa dei Papiri in Tivoli. For the construction of the pompous palace, several tens of tons of golden travertine stone were delivered from Tivoli to California. The luxurious remodeled palace was framed by shady gardens with cascades of fountains and artificial waterfalls. The Getty residence in Malibu was turned into a unique museum, a repository of precious paintings, sculptures and antiques.
The paradox was that the owner of this untold wealth never saw it with his own eyes. Paul Getty supervised construction from London. The tycoon could no longer cross the ocean: he could not stand transatlantic sea travel and was terrified of flying on airplanes.

Battle for inheritance
In 1976, 83-year-old Paul Getty died in his sleep. As Forbes magazine wrote, “the sin of self-interest and lust destroyed the life of Paul Getty and turned the vain American into the most unfortunate, lonely and selfish rich man on the planet.” Immediately after Getty's death, a protracted litigation began between his many heirs. The impetus was given by the announcement of the will, which produced the effect of a bomb exploding on the interested parties.
Paul Getty's four sons and fourteen grandchildren were completely demoralized and depressed: their father and grandfather practically disinherited them. Paul's sons received a humiliatingly pitiful pittance. Devoted servants - the head of security, a massage therapist, a doctor and a permanent secretary - little more. Getty bequeathed almost all of his billions to the Getty Trust, a charitable organization that owns the museum in Malibu, as well as the large Getty Center in Los Angeles, built in 1997.

Such a clear demonstration of love for art brought the children of the newly-minted philanthropist to the brink of bankruptcy. But this, as it turned out, was only the first act of the Getty family tragedy. He was followed by a second and a third.

The eldest son George, until recently a thriving businessman, owner of golf clubs and thoroughbred horses, was ruined by alcoholism. Growing up in constant fear of his almighty father, he committed suicide.

Getty's second son, Ronald, born from a marriage with a blond German woman, Fini Helmle, grew up away from his father and always believed that he hated him. “Even after his death, my father, like a ghost, invisibly participated in my fate,” Ronald admitted in an interview. From the wealthy owner of the Californian Radisson hotel chain, Ronald turned into a poor citizen of South Africa, wandering around the Bantustans in a mobile home on wheels. The late father almost finished him off by leaving Ronaldo in his will... his own diary with contemptuous remarks addressed to his son on almost every page.

The third son, Paul, went down in history as the “golden hippie from Morocco.” For a long time he lived in his African villa with the telling Arabic-French name Palais de Zahir - Palace of Passion. This villa on the outskirts of Marrakech became a hangout for dozens of wandering hippies: here in the late 1960s, hashish was added to cake cream and protracted drug orgies were held. However, the drug “idyll” in the Moroccan palace collapsed overnight: Getty Jr. became seriously ill and was placed in a closed clinic.

And Getty’s fourth son, who was just as passionate about money as his father, in 1984, without any hesitation, sold the elder Getty’s creation, Getty Oil, to Texaco for $10 billion. This was the actual end of the family oil business of Paul Getty’s “empire,” the remnants of which were absorbed by LUKOIL 20 years later.