Aristotle Onassis, the refugee with $250 who built the largest private fleet
In 1923 a teenage refugee named Aristotle Onassis landed in Buenos Aires with about $250 and took a job as a telephone operator. Within a few decades he owned more than seventy freighters and tankers, the biggest privately held shipping fleet on the planet, and had tried to buy control of Monaco.
Onassis was born on 20 January 1906 in Karataş, a suburb of the Ottoman port of Smyrna, now İzmir. His father, Socrates, ran a thriving shipping business and paid for good schools; by 16 Aristotle spoke Greek, Turkish, Spanish and English. When fire swept Smyrna in 1922, the family lost everything it owned and escaped to Greece as refugees. He reached Argentina on a Nansen passport, the document issued to stateless refugees, and studied commerce and port administration while working nights on the phones.
His first fortune came from importing English-Turkish tobacco into Argentina. Shipping followed during the Second World War. Like many owners, he flagged most vessels in Panama and Liberia, where rules were looser and taxes absent, keeping costs far below those of American-flagged ships. Critics tied his profits to cut corners: a 1970 inquiry into the grounding of his tanker Arrow in Nova Scotia's Chedabucto Bay, the worst oil spill off Canada's east coast, examined how the ship had been run.
In 1953 he quietly bought shares in Monaco's Société des bains de mer through Panamanian front companies and took control of it, which put the Monte Carlo Casino, the Hôtel de Paris and roughly one acre in three across the principality under his sway. He wanted an exclusive resort; Prince Rainier III wanted mass tourism and new hotels, and the two clashed. Around the same time a tanker deal with the Saudi king alarmed Washington, which worked to kill it. In 1954 he pleaded guilty to breaching rules requiring US-flagged ships to have American owners and paid $7 million.
He also ran whaling fleets off South America from 1950 to 1956, earning $4.5 million net on the first voyage, until Peru seized most of the ships in 1954; he sold the business to a Japanese firm for $8.5 million. Onassis married Athina Livanos, had a long affair with Maria Callas and finally wed Jacqueline Kennedy. He died on 15 March 1975.
Source: Aristotle Onassis
