The Price of Fortune by Damon Kitney

Author:Damon Kitney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

The Israeli Affair

JAMES PACKER FIRST MET Israeli billionaire and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan at the upmarket Botanical hotel in the swish inner-city Melbourne suburb of South Yarra in early December 1993. The occasion was Milchan’s forty-ninth birthday, for which his good friend and Village Roadshow co-chief executive Graham Burke had organised a private kickboxing event starring then Australian cruiserweight champion Tosca Petridis. At one point in the evening the bespectacled Milchan even got into the ring and started mock-sparring with Petridis. ‘When he left the ring Arnon told me, “I knew he wouldn’t hit me because I had my glasses on,”’ Burke now recalls of the evening.

Burke had also invited along another Hollywood film producer who was in town, Meir Teper, known for the films From Dusk till Dawn, Everybody’s Fine and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. That night Teper met Packer for the first time, and Crown Resorts later became a partner in the Nobu Japanese restaurant chain with Teper, actor Robert De Niro and Japanese celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa.

But for Packer, that night became all about Milchan. ‘Arnon is maybe the most charming and deadly person I have ever met. By the end of dinner I was totally captivated and I thought Dad should meet Arnon,’ Packer now recalls. James suggested he, Burke and Milchan fly to the Packer family’s Ellerston property in the NSW Hunter Valley the next day, where his father would be waiting.

It was blowing a gale in Melbourne when dawn broke. Kerry’s beloved DC-8 jet was unserviceable, so he sent a smaller private jet to fly his son and friends to Scone, from where they would take one of his helicopters to Ellerston. But Milchan, a nervous flyer, initially refused to get on the plane. Eventually, he agreed to fly on one condition – that Burke bought him a bottle of wine for the journey. ‘I had to go to a local grocery shop to get Arnon his wine. It was the roughest flight I have ever had in my entire life, but we made it,’ Burke says. Packer couldn’t believe what he witnessed on the flight that morning. ‘Said with love, on the plane on the way to Ellerston at 10am Arnon drank a bottle of wine,’ he now says. ‘When we arrived, Arnon charmed Dad.’

Born in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, into an Israeli family that had lived in the region for more than 500 years, Milchan started out in business transforming his family’s bankrupt Israeli fertiliser company after taking it over at the age of just twenty-one in 1962. A star professional soccer player for Maccabi Tel Aviv and Israel’s national team, Milchan’s biggest claim to fame for many years in Israel – although he did not confirm it for decades – was working as a liaison for Israel’s secretive Bureau of Scientific Relations, known as Lekem.

As a weapons procurer through the 1970s and ’80s, he ensured the Israel Defense Forces received the very best from the big American defence contractors, including prized weapons such as the Hawk and Patriot missiles.

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