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private life was taken as completing the enviable splendour of his image.
        In February 1970, Bernie Cornfeld seemed to stand on a high mountain. He owned more various chateaux, town houses, villas and apartments in the world's capitals than any Rothschild or Esterhazy in their high times: a few days before he flew to New York he had just bought his second castle. He owned horses, wild animals, boats, aeroplanes, cars, fashion houses and model agencies. He moved incessantly between these luxurious possessions surrounded by as numerous and pleasure-loving an entourage as a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. And there was something more nattering, and more interesting, about his famous 'lifestyle' than the ordinary spending power of great wealth. He had contrived to recruit, in the envious and egalitarian twentieth century, what amounted to a private army of vassals: his sales force. Many of them were fanatically loyal. And he knew how to keep them that way with a complicated system of lavish gifts, grants of profitable territory and elaborately structured financial rewards. It was even rumoured - and Cornfeld himself did little to scotch such rumours - that he lived in the middle of an adolescent's fantasy of a harem.
        But what impressed the hostesses and journalists of New York was not so much the picturesque surface of Cornfeld's life. It was that it seemed to be solidly built on a golden foundation of money. On one single day the previous summer, investors had poured $30 million into the IOS funds. 'The greatest single economic force in the free world?' The shrewd thing to say in February 1970, was that, by God, Cornfeld might just make it.
        As it turned out, that was almost the last moment when it would have been shrewd or even sensible to have said any such thing. And nobody would have been saying it then if they had realized the extent of the financial shambles the statesman of people's capitalism had left behind him in Geneva.
        On February 11, just eight days after Cornfeld's speech to the institutional investors, the financial controller of IOS, a young accountant called Melvin Lechner, finished the consolidation of the 1969 accounts for IOS’s many subsidiaries, and arrived at a tentative total for the company's profits.
        We shall see that the profit of IOS, as such, was by no means the all-important figure that it would be in more orthodox concerns. Profit, or no profit, the operations of IOS enriched the men who ran it in various ways. Nevertheless even the least sceptical of Cornfeld's hearers in New York might have been less willing to take him seriously as a prophet and teacher if they had realized the truth about his own business.
        The figure that emerged from Lechner's calculations was $17.9 million. That might sound like a lot of money. But Lechner knew that, in terms of IOS’s expectations, and of the way those expectations had been capitalized in the price of its shares, it was a catastrophe.
        Cornfeld had airily predicted profits as high as $30 million, In the end, as we shall see, even Lechner's first figure proved to be a mighty overestimate.
        When Lechner had reached and checked his alarming figure, he did not call Cornfeld. For more than a year, Cornfeld had delegated most of the day-to-day management of the business to Ed Cowett. Slim, cool, a trifle saturnine in appearance, Ed Cowett was now the master of detail.
        He was even further away than Mexico: he was in Tokyo. As soon as Lechner confided the profit figure to him, Cowett's assistant, Hal Vaughan called Tokyo and gave Cowett the news over the phone. Cowett cancelled his plans and was back in Geneva by the following weekend.
        Cowett knew perfectly well how serious the situation was. Already, in January, Lechner had been sufficiently worried by the financial trend to have written Cowett a confidential memorandum, describing in detail the alarm bells he could hear