Giving While Living: Billionaire Chuck Feeney

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