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 processwas 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 Billionare 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

By Anne W. Howard

Charles Feeney, the founder of the Atlantic Philanthropies, grew up in a working-class family in New Jersey. He amassed a fortune as the founder of Duty-Free Shoppers, a chain of retail stores, and one day in 1984 he signed nearly all his money over to the foundation. But he kept his generosity a secret for nearly two decades, forbidding grantees from ever disclosing where their money came from.

"Among history's notable businessmen and philanthropists, Chuck Feeney stands out," writes Conor O'Clery, an Irish journalist. "Starting from nothing, he built a vast fortune, and then in a single act, at the height of his powers, he transferred it irrevocably to his charitable foundation."

The author describes Mr. Feeney as an extremely frugal man who found having billions of dollars distasteful, and resolved to give it all away. Mr. Feeney and his foundation donated multimillion-dollar gifts anonymously to Cornell and Stanford Universities, the University of California at San Francisco, and other American groups, as well as organizations in Africa, Asia, Cuba, Ireland, and elsewhere around the world. In 2002, as the Atlantic Philanthropies prepared to spend all its money by 2016 at the earliest, the fund dropped its condition of anonymity.

The biography recounts Mr. Feeney's background, his business ventures, and his philanthropy, and includes interviews with Mr. Feeney, his family, friends, business partners and rivals, and recipients of his generosity.

"If you want to give it away, think about giving it away while you are alive because you'll get a lot more satisfaction than if you wait until you're dead," Mr. Feeney is quoted as saying. "Besides, it's a lot more fun."

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

By Marty Michaels

On an otherwise unremarkable day in November 1984, Charles F. (Chuck) Feeney arrived in Nassau, the Bahamas, as one of the wealthiest men in America, having quietly amassed a fortune based on a global empire of duty-free shops that sold liquor and luxury items. But when he boarded a flight back to New York that evening, Mr. Feeney was not nearly as wealthy, since he had just transferred the vast majority of his estate — estimated at between $500-million and $800-million — to his foundation.

The exact figure is unclear, because the transaction, like all Mr. Feeney's business and philanthropic dealings, was carried out in secret.

Now, however, Mr. Feeney's philosophies on life and philanthropy are emerging into public view, as told in The Billionaire Who Wasn't, a new book by Conor O'Clery, a former foreign correspondent for The Irish Times. The title of the book, published by PublicAffairs, refers to the fact that Forbes magazine listed Mr. Feeney as the 23rd-richest American in 1988, without a clue that he had given away most of his wealth four years earlier.

Mr. Feeney's foundation, which would ultimately become known as the Atlantic Philanthropies, is based in Hamilton, Bermuda, which has both allowed for secrecy and helped shelter his assets from American taxes and scrutiny. (As Mr. O'Clery says, "Chuck Feeney is a libertarian when it comes to tax, and certainly when it comes to tax on his enterprises and his businesses.")

Trusted Advisers

To help guide the intricacies of his giving over the years, Mr. Feeney, 76, has relied on the counsel of several close advisers, beginning with Harvey P. Dale, a professor of philanthropy and law at New York University School of Law, who remains on the fund's board as founding president.

Other leaders of the foundation have included John Healy, who took over from Mr. Dale in 2001, and Gara LaMarche, the former director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Institute, who succeeded Mr. Healy in April. It was during Mr. Healy's tenure that Mr. Feeney decided to spend all of the foundation's assets by 2020.

And because of the investment gains the foundation has achieved, spending the entire endowment on time may take some doing. Despite its uptick in grant making, the foundation's assets have not diminished appreciably since the end of 2004, when they totaled $4.2-billion: As of the end of 2006, they stood at $4.1-billion. "The investment vehicle Chuck Feeney set up," says Mr. O'Clery, "is probably one of the most successful in history."

Mr. Feeney is very much a hands-on philanthropist, according to the book, one who likes to get out and "kick the tires," seeking out and visiting beneficiaries of his generosity. While Cornell University, his alma mater, was an early beneficiary of his money (the university has received an estimated $600-million from Mr. Feeney), his foundation's giving now encompasses other American institutions, as well as groups in Australia, Bermuda, Ireland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Vietnam.

Some locales hold both a strategic and a personal attraction for him: For example, he believes that his dollars go far in Vietnam, providing "the greatest bang for the buck," but he also told Mr. O'Clery that he was appalled by the atrocities of the American war in Vietnam and feels a sense of restitution is in order. From 1998 to 2006, Atlantic Philanthropies provided $220-million for libraries, higher education, and public-health programs in the country.

As described by Mr. O'Clery, Mr. Feeney is a product of his generation: He doesn't splurge on himself, but wears sweaters until the elbows are threadbare, and flies economy class even on long-haul flights to Asia. And while he pays personal tax in the United States, he maintains a peripatetic way of life with his second wife, Helga, living in small rented apartments in Dublin, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

Mr. Feeney is thrifty — an attribute honed as a practical business skill — but Mr. O'Clery says that he is generous with others. When he sold his share in the duty-free shops to Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton in 1996, Mr. Feeney set aside $26-million from the proceeds to be given to 2,400 long-term employees.

Mr. Feeney has shared that spirit of giving both formally and informally with his five grown children, including his daughter Diane Feeney, a philanthropist in her own right who leads the French American Charitable Trust. She and her siblings on that organization's board have decided to follow their father's example, also pledging to spend all of the trust's assets by 2020.

In an interview, Mr. O'Clery spoke about Mr. Feeney's life and philanthropic legacy:

Why is secrecy so important to Mr. Feeney?

His secrecy was grounded in his desire to not "blow his own horn," an expression he likes to use. And that is grounded in his continuing, lifelong identification with the community he came from — Elizabeth, N.J. — a tight-knit Irish-American community of people who helped each other, who enjoyed wit and a certain lifestyle of reunions and so forth. Chuck Feeney didn't want to use his wealth to separate himself from that community.

Secrecy has marked almost every aspect and phase of his life. When he was in the service in Korea, he was involved in intelligence. When he began to sell duty-free goods to the American sailors in the fleet in the Mediterranean, having intelligence about where the ships were — before his competitors did — was essential to his business.

Was there a watershed moment that led to Mr. Feeney's decision to give virtually all his assets to charity?

I've pressed him on this, and he's told me there was no "going over the cliff" moment. He became uncomfortable with money in the 1970s, when he was becoming very wealthy, and he didn't like the company of the rich set that he and his wife began to socialize with in the south of France. He began to give his money away in a rather piecemeal fashion, not structured at all, as an individual, beginning with Cornell, with which he has a very special affinity.

But he began to think seriously about what he should do with this wealth and he was guided by conversations with Harvey Dale, his lawyer, who had become his confidante and, in many ways, his consigliere in business and in personal matters. And Harvey remembers telling him the words of the Rev. Frederick Gates to John D. Rockefeller Sr. — which is that your fortune is rolling up like an avalanche and will crush you and your children and your children's children — and Chuck began to worry about the effect of wealth on his children and he desperately did not want them to become children with a sense of entitlement.

He mulled over it a long time, and when he did give it away, it was a unique act in the world of philanthropy: that someone on the cusp of becoming a billionaire would give away everything to his foundation, in its totality and all at once, irrevocably and at middle age.

You write that Mr. Feeney often "found the countries, the institutions, and the people to support."

The key to Chuck Feeney is that he became a citizen of the world through his businesses, and he didn't really have any home in any country for most of his life — and still doesn't. When he devoted his energies to philanthropy, he had a good idea of other cultures and the needs of other countries, so he was able to identify other people's needs quite quickly. So he could go to a university campus and quickly grasp two things: whether the president had vision and whether the university could make good use of his funds.

One of the things that impressed me most about Chuck Feeney was his respect for his beneficiaries. He would go to a hospital in Da Nang, Vietnam, and he would speak to the directors there; he would never summon them to him, to his hotel.

How have Mr. Feeney's views about anonymous giving changed over the years?

There has been a rethink at Atlantic Philanthropies, among Chuck and Harvey Dale and other members of the board. It's been said that "[they] became synonymous with anonymous, and were getting credit for every anonymous grant," and it was just too big. The "secret" was becoming too well known.

But a certain degree of anonymity continues to this day, at least as far Chuck is concerned, to the extent that his name does not appear on any project, any building. For example, Queens University, in Belfast, is building a new library. It's going to cost £44-million. It's going to be called the Sir Anthony O'Reilly Library, because he provided £4-million of that cost, for naming rights. Chuck Feeney anonymously provided £10-million. And it was his wish that it should not be announced. So he's still insisting that he get no public credit for his philanthropy.

How did the decision to spend all of the foundation's assets by 2020 come about?

The debate went on for a long time. But John Healy says Chuck was the very last to sign off on the idea, because as an entrepreneur he prized flexibility above all. But when he did, he became its most enthusiastic advocate because this was the logical outcome of his thinking, that wealth should be used now to tackle the problems of this generation.

Did the issue of preserving "donor intent" affect Mr. Feeney's decision?

Yes, very much. That was an important element in the debate he had with Harvey Dale and others about whether they should wind up the foundation. They feel very keenly that they want the money to go to the purposes they've identified as their priorities.

Why did Mr. Feeney agree to tell his story publicly now?

His idea was to show through his life story how a person can apply the energy that helped to make money to giving it away for good purposes. So really the book is the starting point, because no one has known enough about him yet to be inspired by him. He feels very strongly that there are lots of very wealthy people who still haven't found what he calls the "pleasure of giving."

How did Mr. Feeney react to your idea for the book?

When I was talking to him about doing this book, I could never get an answer out of him. We'd meet for lunch occasionally, and he said it would be a very difficult decision. And I said, Look, why don't I put something in writing and fax it to you?

So I faxed him a proposal, which essentially was that I would take no money from him or his foundation and I'd find my own agent and publisher, but he would have to let me travel with him, give me access, and also release all his beneficiaries and family from any remaining vows of secrecy.

After a couple of months, he rang me up and invited me for lunch at P.J. Clarke. And he never mentioned the proposal over lunch, never mentioned that he'd received the fax, nothing.

As far as I was concerned, I'd done everything I could do. I'd decided that I wasn't going to press him for a decision. But as we walked out of the restaurant, he was going one way up Third Avenue and I was going the other way, and I said, "Do you want some more time to think about that other thing [the book]?" And he said, "No, let's do it." And he turned and walked away.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Chuck Feeney jumped out of the shadows recently.

But hardly anyone knew who he was because he refused to have his identity disclosed. All that changed recently. Feeney's biography was released late last month. In it, he detailed the story of his life. By doing so, he lifted the veil that covered his philanthropic career. He founded Duty Free Shops in 1965, and it was there that he made his fortune. By 1984, he gave between $500 million and $800 million to the Atlantic Foundation, a charity he started in Bermuda two years earlier (and where it was free from government disclosure). By doing so, he reportedly reduced his own fortune to $5 million. He believed charities could do the work better than government and set out improve the world by doing it. By all accounts, he did.

Feeney gave money for programs in Vietnam, South Africa and Northern Ireland. His Cornell connection comes in that he gave money for all sorts of buildings and projects through Atlantic Philanthropies but always made the university abide by the restriction that it couldn't name him as the donor. He did that for his other projects, too.

There is much to be learned from a man like Feeney, who had the means to improve the lives of people all across the world. He sought not publicity but to help the public, and that is something everyone can take to heart. It is Feeney's hope that others with great wealth will hear his story and contribute in ways to society that are unfathomable to the average person. Whether others decide to give on that level or not, Feeney deserves great credit for his life's works.

The Ithaca Journal