Or, how $90 million can finance lives of noisy ostentationSheik 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 and a few million there . 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.
