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Fayed has a personal security staff of 38-two teams that alternate, one week on, one week off, at his residence at 60 Park Lane, at his country house in Oxted, where his family lives, and at his castle in Scotland. His "close-protection team" consists of 8 or 10. One assumes that the millions of dollars this security costs and the level of his apparent paranoia, which extends to wearing only clip-on ties so that he cannot be strangled, must mean that Fayed's life is under constant threat. Not so, according to a half-dozen former guards I interviewed, who say that his security is mainly for show.
"He modeled himself after whatever the prime minister of the day used," says Bill Dunt, a guard for three and a half years, who says he was
fired after being accused of speaking to a female guest and who accepted an out-of-court settlement of his unfair-dismissal suit. "If the prime minister used a Rover fastback, he would. If they changed to a Ford Scorpio, he'd change. It's part of trying to get into the Establishment." Like the U.S. president, who has a military aide to carry nuclear-launch codes in a soft black leather bag, Fayed had guards travel back and forth between Switzerland and England with his hard silver box, which contained unspecified floppy disks.
The guards point out that real protection was impossible, because they were rarely armed,
they were not allowed to ride in his car with him, and he refused to tell the guards riding in the backup car where he was going. Anyway, nobody was going to take a bullet for "the fat bastard," the guards' cruel code name for their boss. "Compared to other people I worked for, he treated the team like second-class citizens," says former guard Terry Steans. For example, guards were not allowed to touch Fayed's children, who, they say, delighted in taunting them. Bill Dunt says various children "spit at the guards," hit them with sticks, and called them "donkeys." Steans adds, "Because Fayed's English is not sound, everything is the f-word. And when he goes, he's got a very short fuse, and it doesn't take much to set him off."
Fayed's building at 60 Park Lane contains 50 apartments, which he uses for his family, staff, and guests. He also owns the adjoining No.55, consisting of apartments for rent, as well as a building around the corner on South Street. All three buildings are connected to the Dorchester Hotel-which Fayed purchased for the Sultan of Brunei-by a series of secret passageways and an elaborate alarm system. One man who was being interviewed for a job at Park Lane was ushered into a waiting room and heard the click of a lock as the secretary left the room and closed the door. After about 20 minutes, the man looked up to see some bookcases which he had thought were built into the wall suddenly swing open and Fayed walk through them, hand outstretched.
Guards say that bugging equipment is kept in a basement room on the corner of South Street and Park Lane. In addition, says Dunt, "everybody who calls Fayed at 60 Park Lane is recorded, and all telephone calls in and out of the building are logged on a computer." Harrods' management offices are regularly swept for bugs and wiretaps. Another former guard, Russ Conway, told me that he personally bugged meetings at Harrods. Employees' phones there were also tapped. A former Harrods executive, newly hired, watched a guard come into his office every afternoon, open a panel in the wall, and take out what looked like a videotape and replace it with another one. Curious, he discovered a tiny video camera trained on his desk.
In 1990, Christoph Bettermann became Fayed's number two, the deputy chairman of Harrods. He had worked for Fayed in Dubai since 1984. In April 1991, Bettermann was approached by an American headhunter to work in the Arab emirate of Sharjah, and almost immediately, he says, Fayed told him, "I hear you are leaving me." In June, says Bettermann, "he showed me a written transcript of a phone conversation between the headhunter and me. He accused me of breaking our trust by talking to these people. I told him, 'If you don't trust me, I resign. I cannot trust you if you bugged my phone.' " Bettermann quit Harrods and took an oil-company job in Sharjah.
Fayed promptly wrote the ruler of Sharjah, accusing Bettermann of stealing large sums of money. In a meeting with John Macnamara, an ex-Scotland Yard detective who is Fayed's security director, Bettermann asked if he was being taped, and Macnamara said no. A tape of that meeting later surfaced. Bettermann was cleared by three courts in which Fayed had pressed charges, but Bettermann's defense cost him $160.000. "Fayed has every law firm in London sewed up. It was intimidating," Bettermann says. "Fayed charms you at first. Once you do not turn out the way he wants, you're the bad guy, and he tries to get rid of you, sometimes in appalling ways."
Bettermann's wife, Francesca, who was Harrods' legal counsel, resigned when her husband did. "The most common thing at Harrods was unfair dismissal," she says. "We had a huge amount." Last year Harrods was facing 32 such cases, compared with 2 at Selfridge's department store, which has a similar number of employees. "The law says you can't fire people without cause. Mohamed says, 'I can, as long as I pay for it.' " Francesca Bettermann adds, "He settles them all. He has never gotten into the witness-box. I think he'd be very frightened to go to court." Yet even when his lawyers told him that he couldn't win, she claims, he'd say, "Sue. Sue anyway."
When Francesca Bettermann was hired, she had to take an H.I.V. test-women working close to the chairman had to undergo full internal exams and be grilled on their entire gynaecological histories-and her handwriting was analyzed. (In 1994, three former Harrods employees claimed that they were given H.I.V. tests although they had specifically withheld permission to be screened. Michael Cole says it was the doctor's fault. The doctor had blamed the medical lab.) Fayed has a strong phobia about germs. He does not eat out except on rare occasions, and eats only what his personal cook prepares for him. Each plate he eats from must be boiled and rimmed with a cut lime to disinfect it. When he helicopters from his country house to London, he wears a gas mask so that he won't inhale fumes.
Whenever Fayed suffers a spate of bad publicity, the press seems to be flooded with stories and pictures of him helping needy children. In fiscal 1994, Fayed had House of Fraser donate £800.000 ($1.2 million) to charity. Yet Fayed's fear of germs is such, say ex-employees, that he can, barely stand to touch the children who get him so much positive press. He does not allow his own children to attend the annual Harrods Christmas party, they say, for fear of contamination, and he keeps Wet-wipes in his pockets so that after shaking every little hand he can wipe his own.
He does not abide smoking. Revlon chairman Ronald Perelman showed up to meet Fayed in his office several years ago with his trademark cigar stuck between his teeth. According to an observer, before Fayed shook hands or said a word to Perelman, he yanked the cigar out of his mouth and threw it against the wall.
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