A quiet philanthropist

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.

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Chris Nicholson is an editor at the International Herald Tribune.