On the flight into Kinshasa, I sat next to an elderly Englishman who was pallid with fear. He revealed that he was a bankrupt who was determined to survive by smuggling gold dust out of the Congo. He was on the verge of tears at the prospect of returning to the African city where only a week before he had been robbed at gunpoint of his cash and gold. He cut a sad and lonely figure but flying over that ocean of unbroken forest I couldn’t help but envy him a little bit for his risk-taking.
I have never been interested in money but I did enjoy Moscow in the early 1990s, when I met young bankers who launched their business careers selling black-market Levi’s jeans on the pavement. One had become a commodity trader after hijacking a train laden with wheat. I met an American investor who back home had devised software to predict the outcome of dog races and baseball games — before piling into the 1,700 per cent Russian equities surge that predated Yeltsin’s first heart attack. Youthful high rollers invited me for dacha weekends outside Moscow, where I rode a bond trader’s stallion whose previous owner was the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Andrei Gromyko.
I never had any money either, though I did try to understand how to make it in the 1990s dotcom boom, when I attended conferences in London for entrepreneurs launching websites that made gazillions from selling anything from tampons to mail-order paperclips. The bubble burst but by then I had already moved on to studying Israeli military tech stocks – and what little cash I ever had was squandered in a Las Vegas casino.
I’ve always been attracted by risk.
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