The Sheiks Who Shake Up Florida

By KURT ANDERSEN

Or, how $90 million can finance lives of noisy ostentation

Sheik Mohammad Al Fassi, 27, a Saudi Arabian princeling who has lived in the U.S. for four years, keeps stumbling into the limelight. When he Lived in Beverly Hills, Calif., he had the nude statuary outside his mansion painted in rather vivid flesh tones; the mansion was later gutted by fire. Then he dropped a few million here (some of it to shed two troublesome wives) and a few million there (to resettle in Florida). Last week the sheik's profligacy earned him a new bit of screwball notoriety. The Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Fla., claimed that Fassi and his 75-person retinue had not paid their room and board for more than two months. The tab: $1,475,516.34. The hotel called Hollywood police--most of the department once worked part-time for the sheik--who arrested him on a felony fraud charge. Sheik Fassi cooled his royal heels in jail for six hours, waiting for a bail bondsman to put up $1,000. "What is $1,000?" sneered Saud Al Rasheed, a family spokesman, who says the hotel bill will be paid promptly. "One thousand dollars we spend on tips for waiters."

Fassi is the most extravagant of five Saudi sheiks living in the Miami area, but not by much. His sister and brother-in-law stumbled upon south Florida a couple of years ago when they were en route to Disney World. Mohammad and three brothers followed, and all stayed, according to Princess Hend Al Fassi Aziz, 25, because they liked "the climate and the action." Since then they have squandered perhaps $90 million and become a center of the greedy, glitzy action. The blizzard of cash--a petroleum byproduct, of course--has businesses, philanthropies and local governments scrambling for a share.

The dimensions of the clan's royal style became clear in January 1981, when the new Miami house of the youngest Fassi brother, Tarek, then 17, was burglarized. Fourteen diamond wristwatches, 20 diamond rings, a dozen gold medallions and $480,000 in cash were stolen--and Tarek promptly bought a new house in a tiny, rich enclave called Golden Beach. At first Tarek's breaches of decorum were merely eccentric: he commuted to Florida International University, 20 miles away, in his helicopter, and draped his estate's palm trees with Christmas lights. But then, in violation of zoning laws, he built a guardhouse for his rifle-toting security force and gave his horses the run of the yard.

Prince Turki bin Abdul Aziz, 49, and his wife Princess Hend seemed decorous, at least at first. Indeed, he is still listed as Saudi Arabia's Deputy Minister of Defense and is a brother of Saudi King Fahd. But the couple, like Mohammad and Tarek, tended to party all night and sleep all day, and traveled in a convoy of three limousines, two security cars and a van. They also became chummy with Alvin Malnik, a Miami attorney said to have underworld connections. It was not until last February, however, that their image problem got serious. After a series of reports that they were mistreating their help, Dade County police raided the royal couple's condominium, searching for an "enslaved" servant. A melee ensued. Police say the princess screamed at them, shouting, "I'll break your nose!" She did not, but one policewoman charges that Hend bit her arm. "It was very much a bitch-and-bite match," says a U.S. State Department emissary who tried to conciliate afterward. No slave was discovered. But the Saudi government precluded any future hassles by persuading the State Department to grant Turki diplomatic immunity. Florida officials are fuming.

When Prince Turki and Princess Hend moved to wealthy Indian Creek, neighbors were soon taken aback. The prince's small herd of goats began to roam onto adjacent lawns. Last spring the royal couple threw a party for their three-year-old son that featured circus performers, an orchestra, fireworks, kosher hot dogs and a birthday cake on which live flamingos perched. The final straw came when the prince and princess renovated their house--once the staid Woolworth mansion--in dissonant contemporary style, including a discotheque and a device that simulates thunder. "It looks," a local arbiter says, "as if they just bought the entire lobby of the Ramada Inn."

Even more ostentatious is Mohammad's residential compound, now under construction on a chunk of Miami property he bought for $4 million. A contractor on the unfinished Xanadu is suing the sheik for $275,000, and one of the sheik's builders says it will be "the most expensive piece of crap ever put on this earth." It is to include a bowling alley, an aviary, computer-controlled fountains, five waterfalls, two swimming pools, moving sidewalks, a bomb shelter and a mosque.

Beginning this spring, the declasse clan tried to turn over a new leaf; typically, it was gold. They became philanthropists, giving away as much as $1 million in a few months, apparently to buy good will. Turki gave $300,000 to the University of Miami School of Medicine. Mohammad, among his other donations, doled out $50,000 to Washington and $30,000 to Opa-Locka, Fla. (pop. 14,600). At least one offer was refused: when Tarek volunteered to pay for a new $161 million Miami stadium, city officials said it was an attempt to undermine local support for Israel.

Last week's hotel bill brouhaha made Miamians wonder if the Saudi spending spree was over. The hoteliers say Mohammad recently bounced 37 checks, and on Thursday they got a judge to impound his jewelry and cars still at the Diplomat. Several indulgent creditors, including a taxi company with unpaid fares totaling $157,000, were fretful, and Mohammad's construction crew walked off the job. But Rasheed, the family spokesman, was reassuring. "Everybody will get his money. Everybody will be happy, kiss the hand and come to work again.'' --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by William McWhirter/Miami

With reporting by William McWhirter

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