partake of our hospitality (New York apartment, dinners, etc.) made it
particularly bitter to me that they would not ask for advice. Essentially
the message was, ‘I’ll drink your wine but I won’t ask you for advice in
the very field that paid for the wine.’ ”
—
FUISZ HAD A HISTORY of taking slights personally and bearing grudges.
The lengths he was willing to go to get even with people he perceived
to have crossed him is best illustrated by his long and protracted feud
with Vernon Loucks, the CEO of hospital supplies maker Baxter
International.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Fuisz traveled a lot to the
Middle East, which had become the biggest market for Medcom, his
medical film business. On his way back, he usually spent a night in
Paris or London and from there took the Concorde, the supersonic
passenger jet operated by British Airways and Air France, back to New
York. During one of these stopovers in 1982, he ran into Loucks at the
Plaza Athénée hotel in Paris. At the time, Baxter was eager to expand
into the Middle East. Over dinner, Loucks offered to buy Medcom for
$53 million and Fuisz accepted.
Fuisz was supposed to stay on to head the new Baxter subsidiary for
three years, but Loucks dismissed him shortly after the acquisition
closed. Fuisz sued Baxter for wrongful termination, alleging that
Loucks had fired him for refusing to pay a $2.2 million bribe to a
Saudi firm to get Baxter off an Arab blacklist of companies that did
business with Israel.
The two sides reached a settlement in 1986, under which Baxter
agreed to pay Fuisz $800,000. That wasn’t the end of it, however.
When Fuisz flew to Baxter’s Deerfield, Illinois, headquarters to sign
the settlement, Loucks refused to shake his hand, angering Fuisz and
putting him back on the warpath.
In 1989, Baxter was taken off the Arab boycott list, giving Fuisz an
opening to seek his revenge. He was leading a double life as an
undercover CIA agent by then, having volunteered his services to the