And he often flew members of the family to Las Vegas to gamble and drink while staying at Caesar's Palace, tipping dealers with thousands of dollars of chips. The ultimate extrovert, he once paid a bandleader at an Oscar party in Los Angeles to let him sing "House of the Rising Sun" in seven languages. He used to ship home dozens of Cadillacs and Lincoln Continentals, five thousand cases of Tabasco sauce and vast quantities of the kids' drink Mello Yello. For one party, he bought up all the Dom Perignon in Panama City but ran out so he sent a pilot to Columbus, Ga., to pick up a few cases and fly it back. He paid stores at his local shopping mall in Florida to stay open late to accommodate his impulses. Hours later, Salem sauntered back in to the hotel with two new African-American friends, telling him "Bob, you do have a sense of humor."Īmerica was a shopper's paradise for Salem. The American got his revenge by dropping Salem off in the middle of Harlem one night with no money in his pocket. When the hospital refused, a friend brought a Polariod camera and Salem later created a multimedia show of photos set to music which he showed off at parties.Īnd he loved pranks, once dumping his American business partner and a colleague out of a Jeep in the middle of the night in the middle of the Saudi desert. Lacking any sense of modesty, Salem wanted to videotape his hemorrhoid surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Salem, on the other hand, embraced the freedoms, luxuries and attitude of the West.Ī show-off who wore blue jeans, T-shirts and a leather jacket, Salem was proud of his farting skills, once passing gas in front of the governor of Riyadh, telling him, "I just farted, Prince. The experience reportedly was not pleasant - sitting in an airport lounge, waiting for their connecting flight with his fully-covered wife Najwa, other passengers stared at them and took pictures. He would not let his own children drink from a straw because they did not exist during the time of Mohammed, refused to let them put ice in their drinks because it would soften them, and banned Tabasco sauce because it was an American product.Ĭoll writes that Osama may have once traveled to America to get medical attention for one of his sons. Osama bought fancy cars, including a Lincoln and a Mercedes sedan, wrecking one of them when he drove too fast.īut after falling under the influence of Islamic scholar-teachers and becoming religious, Osama rejected Americana and Western influences. Later, he took his half-brothers to cowboy and karate movies while he attended boarding school in Beirut. Osama later became passionate about horses, owning as many as 20 on his own ranch south of Jeddah.
#Pocket cash salem oregon tv
Osama's favorite TV shows included "Bonanza" and "Fury," which appealed to him since it featured a troubled orphan boy who goes to live on a ranch and tamed wild horses, especially a black stallion named Fury. While Salem and other brothers and sisters became avid consumers, Osama was eventually repelled and retreated into a more austere existence.įrom the beginning, America cast a spell on Mohamed's brood of children. Indeed, what is striking about the family is the degree to which America exerted an intense fascination and temptation. He had that confidence of the eldest son… And he was American in his outlook on life, drawn to open spaces, to sense of play and possibility." "None of his brothers had that experience, the privilege. "Salem went to boarding school in England, where he played in a rock band and he had this great adventure," says Coll.
"Salem would not have abided it and if it meant bundling him up in a burlap sack and taking him back to Saudi Arabia, he would have done that." While Osama's own mother and his uncle and other brothers failed to coax him back to Saudi Arabia from his exile in the Sudan in the mid-1990s, Coll believes that Salem would have succeeded.
Any friend of Salem's he had to treat with deference and respect." "He had a strong relationship with Osama and sold him weapons. "A lot of people who knew Salem believed that he would have prevented Osama for becoming so radicalized and so isolated that he would not have pulled off 9/11," Coll tells. After their father's death in the 1960s, Salem became the patriarch of the family and was like a father to Osama, according to his mother. The two brothers, the zealot and the libertine, dominate Coll's epic account of the wealthy Saudi Arabian family whose construction industry fortune was amassed by their father, Mohamed.
0 kommentar(er)
