Billionaire chronicles: Toto’s Kingdom episode 3

Moneymaker Name: Salvatore “Toto” Bergamo

Age: 42 years

Nationality: Italian (half Greek by maternal descent)

Industry: Narcotics, fashion, hospitality and entertainment

Net worth: $16.8 billion

Chronicle:

Toto Bergamo grew up in the beautiful city of Madrid Spain, raised by his mother, the Grecian goddess Natasha under the protection of Don Vicente, the affable gangster boss who to the rest of the world was a big-time wine merchant taking the best products of Spanish vineyards to tables across Europe and all the world. To those in the know though, Don Vicente’s wine business had been taking hefty losses for years and had never been profitable, although in truth, it did not need to be. His real business was an international narcotics syndicate that made money for him faster and incomparably more reliably than his mechanized wine presses could churn out bottles of wine. It was from Don Vicente that Toto learnt the fine arts of subtlety and stealth. He used to go to great lengths to explain things to Toto; his favourite example being that when passing off gold as worthless iron, you must show no great apprehension if someone tries to cart away what all see and accept as iron, because you want that person to flee as one who has stolen iron not as one who has stolen gold. Pursuit in such a case of the ‘iron’ thief must be conducted with a façade of half-heartedness even if one’s heart beats frantically for every second gained by the thief. However, the Don would always say this part with a smile, “when the thief is caught; he must be dealt with as one who stole gold not as one who stole iron”. These were the sort of management lessons Toto was receiving from an early age from his godfather, Don Vicente.

Elumination: A crocodile with good manners is no less a crocodile.

Twitter: @eluminary1

magnus est enim Deus noster super omnes deos.