Armand Hammer, Neil Lyndon "Hammer."
Crypto-communist, spy and millionaire. By trading with the criminal Soviet Union, he became as rich as Rockefeller. He was friends with Lenin and met Jaruzelski, an agent of the Soviet NKVD. During the day, he paid a fortune to create the image of a business genius, and at night he traded in fake Fabergé eggs.
Journeying to Soviet Russia in 1921 to give medical aid to that country’s famine victims, he was personally persuaded by Vladimir Lenin to turn his business talents to account there instead. In 1925 he obtained a concession from the Bolsheviks to manufacture pencils for the Soviet Union, and his firm soon became the largest supplier of cheap, reliable pencils in the country.
His business ventures were bought out by the Soviets in the late 1920s, and Hammer returned to the United States in 1930 laden with innumerable paintings, jewelry pieces, and other art objects formerly owned by the Romanov imperial family and sold to him by the cash-hungry Soviets. In the 1930s Hammer sold the majority of these valuables and embarked on such profitable post-Prohibition business ventures as whiskey making and the manufacture of whiskey barrels.
Traces Armand Hammer's extraordinary life and career as a statesman, envoy, industrialist, entrepreneur, physician, and philanthropist and reveals historic private meetings with soviet criminals such as Lenin and Khrushchev, as well as US presidents: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.
Perigee Trade; Reprint edition, 1988.
Paperback.
New book. Very slightly yellowing edges of pages. Very minor shelf wear from rubbing.