Frederick Lacey, the eldest son of a bourgeois Liverpool family, was commissioned as a midshipman in His Majesty’s naval service in 1916, three days after turning eighteen years old. His father, William Lacey, had arranged it. William Lacey’s comfort resulted from the splendid success of his company, a firm that specialized in railroad parts and supplies. Lacey’s, as the business was known, had a well-earned reputation for timely delivery, plus an ability to get parts that were otherwise in short supply, parts others seemed at a loss to deliver in any time frame. He charged more than the much larger London firms with which he competed. But, unlike them, he was always true to his word. A month’s wait meant a month’s wait, not two or three or even a year’s, as others would have it. Smart businessmen will always pay more for that kind of reputation. William Lacey knew that and regarded reliability as his most precious asset. Almost a century before computers and wire transfers made money fly around the world at the speed of light, Frederick Lacey’s father showed a mastery of modern economics. His carefully chosen accounts, in banks across the wide span of the European continent, allowed him to make displays of gratitude, when called for, immediately. Men of business whose national heritage often included—nay, required—the presentation of special favors, plus the legions of Customs Agents and other governmental overseers, greedy and quick to accept any bribe, were often satisfied on the spot. William Lacey could conclude negotiations and close the deal without the delay associated with most international financial arrangements. His son took notice.
The railroads, like all English industries, were controlled by the most powerful men of their time and it was through such contacts as these that William Lacey was able to secure his son’s position in the Royal Navy. Despite the manner of his commission, Frederick Lacey’s social status, or more precisely the absence of any, affected his career from day one. A combat sea assignment was out of the question. There were hardly enough of them for the sons of England’s truly important. None would be available for the boy of a Liverpool merchant. Instead Lacey’s participation in The Great War was spent entirely in Naval Logistics. This exclusionary policy, determined by the social mores of the nineteenth century, proved crucial to Frederick Lacey’s future and would have a tremendous impact on the affairs of powerful men and great nations throughout the twentieth century. It was clear for anyone to read—Lacey anticipated, expected and planned for great power for himself from the beginning. He didn’t hope for it, dream of it, yearn for it. He knew it awaited him.
In Lacey’s writings about The Great War, entries he made in the years after it ended, he eventually began calling it simply World War One. Apparently, once the “war to end all wars” didn’t, a handy digit was tacked on and History moved, inexorably, toward successively higher numbers. That didn’t seem to bother Frederick Lacey. By education, experience and intuition, he understood that hostilities among men, as individuals and within the context of the social institutions they created, were the normal state of things. Those who understood and expected it, dealt with it best.
As the war raced across Europe, from the Balkans to Belgium, ravaging France, it was the English Navy that was entrusted with the mission to supply the largest fighting force assembled in modern times. These were not the ancient armies of Caesar, Napoleon or Hannibal, living off the land, stopping for weeks, even months at a time, to re-supply before moving on to the next battle. No one would cross the Alps with elephants in the twentieth century. No longer necessary. In the new and modern war Lacey fought, millions of men needed to be fed and clothed daily. Munitions of all types and sizes, machines of all nature and kind plus the various technical necessities required for mass destruction had to move quickly from one end of the European continent to the other and sometimes back again. No more wagons. No more horses. No more sailing ships slowly riding the prevailing winds. This war was fought with tanks, motorized vehicles, heavy artillery and huge, metal warships plowing the seas with steel blades turned by turbine engines burning oil. The trains had to run. Airplanes, the newest of all weapons, had to fly. Fuel had to flow.
Since the reign of the first Richard, the English had traditionally left their military logistics in the hands of idiots. It was, after all, they reckoned, clerk’s work. Too often these clerks proved more adept at lining their own pockets than anything remotely connected with supplying the needs of a massive army. Now they found themselves unprepared for the demands they faced. They looked everywhere for help including outside the chain of command. Frederick Lacey, aided in no small measure by the experience and observation gained at his father’s side, and acting with no regard for his youth, stepped into the chaotic breach and quickly assumed a leadership role far beyond his rank. His stunning accomplishments precipitated his rapid ascent to power and influence. Not only did he demonstrate an exceptional talent for organization, a capacity sorely absent among his superiors, he was uniquely successful at getting things done when failure seemed already a foregone conclusion. What couldn’t be done, what senior officers wished would disappear from their plates, soon became tasks for the youngster, Lacey. Let it be him who shoulders the blame, they all figured. They were exceedingly public in the assignment of his duties, making it impossible to deny him the credit when he accomplished the impossible.
Lacey would later describe, in his personal journals, how he painstakingly developed what would become lifetime relationships with heretofore untapped, nontraditional connections able to assist the movement of supplies and materials across Europe’s war zones. The establishment of such an extraordinary, seamless process was no surprise to Lacey. On a much smaller scale, it was just what he had seen his father do. In Italy and Sicily and throughout the Mediterranean, into the Middle East, extending even to North Africa, and stretching eastward to the Muslim mountain states in Central Asia and Russia, it was Frederick Lacey who forged partnerships and created alliances previously unknown to Western powers. To assuage British sensibilities, Lacey, a mere twenty years old, wrote how he was able to take actual command by always acting in the name of his superiors, senior officers clever enough to take credit for Lacey’s successes and smart enough to know they didn’t deserve it. Unless someone worked for him or dealt directly with him, Lacey was no more than an inconspicuous junior officer. For those who did encounter him, especially those with whom he met face to face, Frederick Lacey was unforgettable. His reputation, within the circles crucial to his success, soon developed to legendary scale. He was so young it was hard to believe the power and influence he wielded.
His written entries kept a detailed record of his health. At twenty, he stood six feet three inches and weighed hardly a hundred and sixty pounds. He had sandy hair, which he wore shorter than most Englishmen of the time, and a pleasant, attractive, clean-shaven face. His posture was especially straight, lending him a proper appearance of authority and adding a few years and inches to his overall look. He wore power like a well-fitted coat. And he never, ever fidgeted. At times he was known to keep his hands and feet perfectly still for what some said was forever. He showed a warm and genuine smile when it seemed appropriate, but strangely, never displayed anger or revealed distress. Never. Lacey wrote about how easily those qualities came to him. Others envied his temperament, his self-control, his self-confidence.
When putting together complicated arrangements for transport of goods through dangerous territory, under trying circumstances, he always acted with calm tranquility and spoke with an attitude that left no allowance for any outcome but a good one. Lacey never asked for more than he knew he could get and never accepted less. He would not haggle in the sense that merchants do. His first offer was always his last. The offer might of course be repeated, rephrased in different language, language more suitable to his proposed partner. But Lacey never bargained to his disadvantage. Whenever his personal approval was required to close a deal, it was both immediate and final. This fearless single-mindedness made him a formidable negotiator. He often talked about whatever it was he wanted a bit longer than other men might have. He showed no rush to make a deal, to close the sale. For him, the sale was made before the discussion even began. When he did make a specific offer, it was rock solid. It may have annoyed some, but in spite of this approach, wrote Lacey, he was rarely perceived as either confrontational or overly adversarial. Men accustomed to the exercise of great power among their own people, men of wisdom, maturity and experience were said to have seen something terrifying in Lacey’s eyes, a confidence and demeanor frightening in its serenity.
Lacey wrote in his journal of a time in Turkey when he attempted to make an arrangement with bandits who had been particularly bothersome. Through men of influence, a meeting was arranged. The café that was their meeting place was nearly empty when Lacey arrived, alone. The warlord he was to deal with came accompanied by a contingent of warriors. They must have numbered fifteen or more and they were a sight to behold. Either they were in costume or, thought Lacey, they came directly from the mountains. Most were laden with furs and still wore heavy boots more suitable to dirt than city streets. They had long hair, very long hair, and most had heavy, thick mustaches. The smell of sweat, whiskey and animals filled the room. When they sat, the fighters gathered in a circle, a tight circle with Lacey and their leader in the middle. Lacey found himself surrounded. The two men talked a while and shared a drink. Lacey praised the skill of the thief’s efforts and readily admitted the inconvenience to his own needs.
“That is why I am here,” he said. “To show proper respect and prevent future inconvenience.” Then he offered the warlord gold, twenty thousand English pounds.
“Twenty thousand pounds of gold—in weight? I will take that,” roared the Turk, with a lusty laugh. All those surrounding Lacey laughed too.
“No,” said Lacey. “You misunderstand my language. I apologize. Not in weight. Twenty thousand pounds in value of the British pound Sterling, in gold of course.”
“Not in weight?” the warlord laughed. “Yes, in weight! Then you can be sure your worries are over.”
Lacey waited for the raucous laughter to run its course, for the fighters to quiet. He had been sitting perfectly still all the while. When the café was silent, he spoke. “You do not worry me, sir. You only inconvenience me.”
“I inconvenience you!” the Turk shouted, jumping to his feet. “I can kill you here, right now as you sit at my feet. Is that not an inconvenience to make you worry? Why should I not do that?”
“Because,” said Lacey in a measured tone, displaying a calm demeanor so different from that of everyone around him that he could see it rattled some of the fighters closest to him, “then you would not have twenty thousand English pounds, in gold. You would have nothing. If you need time, I fully understand. My offer is good for an hour. I shall be returning to London in the morning. I’m confident we shall have reached an understanding gratifying to each of us.” If there was fear in the room, it was the Turk’s. Lacey rose and walked out the door, the band of warriors separating to let him through.
On a cold evening, at the end of the winter of 1917, Frederick Lacey wrote that he first saw the girl who would be his wife, the mother of his only child. He was in Lisbon confirming final agreements for certain items which were to travel by sea from Italy to France. The turmoil of war had significantly undermined the credibility of some European governments requiring the cooperation of special interests. Lacey found access to them in Portugal. He was dining with these new friends and business associates when she arrived at the same restaurant in the company of her father, Djemmal-Eddin Messadou, a leader of the anti-Bolshevik Transcaucasian Federation. It was said he was a direct descendant of Shamyl, the third and final Imam of Dagestan.
She was remarkably beautiful, standing every inch of six feet with slender limbs, long and perfectly shaped to her body. Her black hair flowed in waves all the way to the small of her back, thick and curly, stunning. It accented her neck, making her appear even taller than she was. When she passed by the table where Lacey sat, her smell sent shivers up his back, across his shoulders and deep into the cheeks of his face. He breathed slowly, feeling his heart pound quickly. He couldn’t keep his eyes off her. He watched her every movement. Lacey’s journal described in great detail how she placed the napkin on her lap, how she took the wine glass and switched its place from her right to her left hand, how she gently pushed her hair back letting it slide across her bare shoulder. Despite the dim light, Lacey saw her smooth, dark complexion; the graceful lines of her face; her long and high, sharply pointed nose; wide mouth; full lips; and coal black, oval-shaped eyes set beneath heavy brows, eyes that seemed to slant upward, just slightly, giving them a unique appearance, at once penetrating and vulnerable.
“She is quite lovely, is she not?” asked Lacey’s host with what Lacey described as a fatherly smile.
“Yes, she is,” Lacey replied. “Yes, she certainly is. Tell me, do you know her? Is she Turkish? Kurdish perhaps? Or maybe from the Caucuses. Georgia or Azerbaijan?”
“You’re quite amazing,” said the older man. “She is Georgian. Aminette Messadou is her name. She is the youngest daughter of Djemmal-Eddin. He’s the man with her, and to be sure, one to be reckoned with. A man of Muslim nobility, two generations a Christian, adored by his people, of both great faiths. You are a most remarkable young man, Mr. Lacey. By the way, just what is your actual rank? What should we know you by now that we’ve concluded our business with a true and honorable sense of mutual satisfaction? I’ve heard everything from Commander to Midshipman.” He laughed a friendly, respectful laugh. “Who can know about a man so young with so much . . . ability.”
“My rank is servant to my King,” said Lacey. “I would like to meet her. Can you help?”
“Of course,” the older man answered with a big smile, a generous chuckle and real admiration. “Your King is most fortunate.”
Ninety years later, these words, written in Frederick Lacey’s own hand, would so overcome Harry Levine as he read them, he would have no choice but to put the page down and stare at it. “My rank is servant to my King,” Lacey had written. Who could read that and not shake their head in wonder, in awe. What a man. What a man.
Lacey married Aminette Messadou in 1919 and, when his wife got pregnant in 1920, he resigned from the Navy. He started the first of his shipping companies, a legitimate, highly successful and never questioned cover for serious smuggling, the source of his real money. When he was only twenty-three years old, he was able to furnish things and move them in a way no one else on earth could duplicate. No longer a servant to his King, he served himself and those he loved.
Later that year, Aminette died giving birth to Audrey. Lacey was disconsolate, heartbroken. Page after page of his journal was filled with little more than Frederick Lacey’s misery written all over them. He raised his daughter by himself. Audrey was the light of his life, until she committed suicide in 1940. He was devastated by her loss as well as the unanswered questions she left behind. Thereafter, Frederick Lacey lived alone. He did not marry again until well into his sixties. His second wife, a mature and wealthy Englishwoman, widow of a close friend, died of natural causes after fourteen years of marriage. There were, of course, no children from this union. Clearly, he was fond of his second wife, but Aminette and Audrey were the women he loved. Lacey’s sense of personal despair, at the loss, first of his wife, then of his daughter was so great, reading about it seemed to Harry an unwarranted imposition on the man’s privacy.
During the 1920s Lacey met and allied himself with Joe Kennedy in a lucrative liquor-smuggling chain. Lacey was the European end. His ships delivered the stuff, mainly Irish whiskey, English gin and French wines, to Cuba, where Kennedy’s special friends picked them up. Lacey’s partners included what he referred to as “men of exalted position” in Sicily. Their counterparts in the United States participated also, not as his associates but as Kennedy’s. Taking a cue from his father, Lacey had money everywhere, in a multitude of currencies. Sometimes huge amounts. In London dinner party conversation, it was said, by more than a few who claimed to know, that Frederick Lacey could be stranded in any country of the world, cut off from his funds elsewhere, and still be a very wealthy man. Some stories had him with secret stashes of cash in Asia, Latin America and other faraway places. And of course, there were always the rumors about the Czar’s gold.
Joe Kennedy opened the United States to him. Millions of Lacey’s dollars went to Wall Street and when the market crashed in ’29, he bought while others sold. Impressed with Roosevelt’s New Deal, he continued buying. The war in Europe curtailed his taste for American equities, but when the war was over, Lacey doubled his Wall Street holdings and then doubled them again in the 1950s.
In the early years, his friendship with Joe Kennedy was especially close and enduring. Lacey was unattached and Kennedy lived as if he were too. They were young, rich and eager to cut a wide swath through European nightlife. A weekend in Paris, wrote Lacey, ended up being close to a month, with a side trip to Rome. Lacey was not a workaholic. He prized good work over hard work, quality over quantity. He never let work interfere with enjoyment, or enjoyment interfere with work. Joe Kennedy had an eye—more of a need, Lacey wrote—for beautiful women. The more of them the better. Lacey and Kennedy made a great pair. Together, the two of them raised more than their share of hell in London and on the continent.
In 1930, at age 32, Lacey met Anthony Wells—a fresh, young, ruling-class lawyer who was to be, in later years, knighted by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. Anthony Wells became his friend and personal attorney. He handled all of Lacey’s private and family legal affairs, but never touched his business concerns in any way. Wells never inquired and Lacey never offered any information about the source of his fortune. Each man found the arrangement comfortable.
During the summer of 1940, while Joseph P. Kennedy was the American Ambassador to England, most of the Kennedy family visited London. Audrey Lacey spent much of her time that summer partying with the Kennedy boys—Joe Jr., the oldest of the four, and his brother Jack, two years younger. To her father’s keen eye, she seemed to be mostly with Joe Jr. When the summer ended, and the Kennedys returned to America, Audrey became depressed and withdrawn. Her father thought it would pass. It didn’t. On a chilly afternoon in September, three days before German planes dropped their first bombs on England, a brokenhearted and pregnant Audrey Lacey committed suicide. She left a note disclosing her condition, mentioning “J. J.” Her grieving father came to understand that to mean Joe Jr. With Audrey’s death, the friendship between Lacey and Joseph P. Kennedy was over. The two men never spoke or saw each other ever again. For Kennedy, who resigned his post and returned to America in disgrace two months later, there was some embarrassment. For Lacey there was only a burning need for revenge.
During WWII Lacey was given carte blanche by Winston Churchill. His “special help,” as Churchill used to call it, not only kept Allied supplies moving, it facilitated communication with underground movements across Nazi-occupied Europe. Many of the relationships Lacey developed in the First War were renewed. He worked tirelessly for a British victory over the Germans. He seemed to be everywhere at once. There were rumors again, and stories, fantastic stories. Churchill was not bothered. “I don’t care!” he shouted more than once at the mention of Frederick Lacey’s alleged excesses. “Even if it’s true, I do not care.” The official complaints stopped, but the talk never halted. It was said he used Allied shipping to move illegal cargo, even treasures of war, from place to place. Lacey’s name became attached to events, about which he later wrote he had nothing to do with. The old tales of Russian gold after World War One gave rise to new claims such as Lacey’s supposed involvement in the matter called the Quedlinburg Hoard. He was rarely asked, but when someone was rude enough to bring the subject up, Lacey calmly denied knowledge—of everything. Still people wondered. Did Lacey have anything to do with this or that? Did he?
All the while, Lacey never let Audrey slip too far back in his mind. He held Joe Kennedy Jr. responsible and secretly vowed not to rest until she was avenged. On August 8, 1944, Joe Kennedy Jr. left on a special, secret combat mission. Flying alone, over the English Channel, his aircraft exploded. In his journal, his confession, Lacey disclosed that it was he—Frederick Lacey—who used his position of influence to mastermind the sabotage of Joe Kennedy Jr.’s plane. Lacey wrote coldly of his satisfaction with young Kennedy’s death. “A debt has been paid,” he penned. “But no price can bring my Audrey back.”
By the end of the war, Lacey, not yet 50, was the wealthiest man in Europe. As reward for his wartime service he was given a peerage—Lord Frederick Lacey. It did not slow him one bit. The worldwide web of his connections continued to expand. His empire grew. Throughout the Cold War, he was the primary source of many items of Western luxury for the power elite of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc nations. Lacey could and did move anything, anywhere in the world. Lacey delivered almost anything someone wished, someone who could pay his price. Directly related to his shipments of arms, he became the only private individual in the world fully tied in to most of the world’s intelligence services. He knew things no one else did and never betrayed a client’s confidence.
In the prime of his life, he was utterly fearless in business. Totally cool, he never required time to cogitate. He acted, favorably or unfavorably, immediately, on the spot, with no apparent qualms of any sort. To those who did business with him, it appeared Lord Lacey never had regrets, never looked back, never second-guessed. He must have had his share of losses. Who hasn’t? And who hasn’t worried about it? Apparently, not Lord Frederick Lacey. And who hasn’t hesitated, wondering if only for a moment, if they were doing the right thing, making the correct decision? Apparently, not Lord Lacey. A major part of his great success was this singular ability to decide and act when others simply couldn’t. He became known as a man you only needed to see once. He inspired others to act as he did, or to try. Often times, those who thought themselves his equal, if not his superior, made or accepted offers they would have been best to consider more thoughtfully. There were those who wished to compete with Lacey, even in style, and they usually paid dearly for the indulgence.
In the spring of 1963 Audrey Lacey’s closest friend, Margaret Lansdowne, a young woman still in her forties, died of cancer. Kenneth Lansdowne, Margaret’s husband, sent Lord Lacey a collection of letters Audrey had sent to Margaret when they were teenagers. Margaret had saved them all as a treasure. Naturally, Lansdowne had not read them. He thought they would be comforting to Audrey’s father and felt Lord Lacey should have them. Among these letters was one clearly indicating that “J. J.” stood for John-John, not Joe Jr. The information inflamed Lacey. He made no mention in his journal of regret, nothing at all about Joe Jr. No indication of remorse. Lacey wrote only of how he immediately began planning to kill John F. Kennedy.