World's Greatest Swindler

THE INCREDIBLE IVAR KREUGER (301 pp.) -- Allen Churchill -- Rinehart ($3.95).

March 12, 1932 was a raw, sunless day in Paris, and the city's restless tempo was slowed to a funereal rustle as Frenchmen filed into la Salle de l'Horlage at the Quai d'Orsay to stare at the bier of the illustrious pactmaker. Aristide Briand. All Paris seemed to be wrapped in a shroud of melancholy over the passing of the great democrat--all but a luncheon party of American. British and Swedish bankers who waited in edgy silence at the Hotel du Rhin to confer with an autocratic emperor of finance. "Match King'' Ivar Kreuger. If they had cause for melancholy, they did not yet know it. They were somewhat nervous about some bookkeeping discrepancies that had cropped up in one of Kreuger's subsidiary companies, and there had been Ivar's strange breakdown on his recent trip to New York when he babbled, "I can't think any more! I am going crazy!" But Ivar would explain everything in his magnetic, confidence-restoring way. Ivar always had.

But Ivar. like Aristide. was past thinking and past explaining. At 11 a.m. he had shuttered the blinds of his unostentatiously elegant flat at No. 5 Avenue Victor Emmanuel and lain down neatly on his bed. Then he had drawn aside his black coat and the leather locket with the gold coin that always rested on his breast like a superstitious token of his only god. and shot himself with a 9-mm. Browning pistol, neatly through the middle of his heart.

Never, it soon became evident, had so many been bilked of so much by a quarter-ounce pellet of lead.

The Bird Charmer. Though the suicide was hushed up that afternoon to allow the New York Stock Exchange to close, the market opened the following Monday to a flood of "sell" orders on Kreuger stocks and bonds, to which hardheaded U.S. financiers and softheaded speculators alike had subscribed some $250 million. Prices plummeted; one issue of Kreuger stock opened at 5, off 37 1/2 points from the previous close. In little over a month after his death, it was clear that Kreuger had been the world's greatest swindler, having "misappropriated" some $1,168,000,000 in nine years. In another month Sweden's Prime Minister had toppled, bank clerks were committing suicide, and King Gustaf's brother, a heavy Kreuger investor, had to move to humbler lodgings. In May, Pope Pius XI gave the Kreuger legend its epitaph by issuing an encyclical, Caritate Christi Compulsi (Urged by the Charity of Christ), the gist of which was: "The i love of money is the root of all evils."

But neither popes nor accounting firms could fully resolve the why and how of Ivar Kreuger. Perhaps the French came closest when they dubbed him L'Olseleur, the bird charmer. In disinterring the Kreuger story, Author Allen Churchill (no kin to Winston), onetime managing editor of the American Mercury, enjoys the valuable quarter-century distance that lends disenchantment. His research is sometimes superficial and his prose tabloidish, but he captures the flair and flavor of the Napoleonic con man who was the Match King.

Enter, Caesar. Born in 1880, one of six children, Ivar Kreuger enjoyed a comfortable, humdrum boyhood in the forest-encircled town of Kalmar, Sweden. After cheating his way through school, and with an engineer's diploma in his pocket, Ivar began ricocheting around the globe. He did wiring jobs on Manhattan's Plaza and St. Regis Hotels, operated a restaurant -in Johannesburg. Back in Stockholm in 1908, he co-founded the building firm of Kreuger & Toll. Then he took over his family's three match factories, was shortly gobbling up competitors and building his giant Swedish match combine.

He branched into iron and gold mines, newspapers and film companies (Greta Garbo got her first job as an extra in a Kreuger-financed film). Up to this time, Kreuger was an aggressive industrialist, but not the dishonest manipulator he later became. Yet he was in the grip of a grandiose passion--to make and sell every match in the world. He had always thought of himself as a superman, and in 1922 he had a superidea. He would personally shore up the tottering, post-World War I governments of Europe with loans, in return for match monopolies.

To get the money, he sailed for the U.S. On the high seas Kreuger decided to fire the American imagination with a flamboyant gesture, commandeered the ship's wireless room and spent the next 24 hours dispatching business messages. Thus was born the notion of Kreuger as a dedicated, enigmatic Caesar of international finance. It was on another trip that Kreuger made his only recorded witticism. When asked by a ship reporter if he had come to marry an American heiress, the lifelong bachelor replied: "No, I much prefer a Swedish match."

Two out of Three. Wall Street looked into Kreuger's hypnotic, ice-blue eyes and found that it could not resist this charmer. The staid and honorable banking firm of Lee, Higginson & Co. begged to be his broker and soon bore him a bouncing new corporation, International Match. Kreuger promptly convinced the directors, among them Percy Rockefeller, nephew of John D., that the millions raised from this and subsequent flotations should be deposited by him with a European subsidiary, to "avoid taxes." Kreuger, in turn, would mail back the dividends, some of them as handsome as 11%.

This transfer of funds to Kreuger, which eventually brought him $144 million, enabled him to go into his criminal corporate juggling act. His fertile mind spawned some 400 subsidiary holding companies, many of them mere names. He used their paper assets to establish his credit in borrowing more money for his loans to European countries; 15 nations received a staggering $400 million. He duly received his match monopolies in return, and soon he was making two out of every three matches in the world.

"Q" Marks the Spot. Part of the enigma of the Match King is that the man who commandeered millions spent comparatively little on himself. He maintained elegant apartments in Stockholm. London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and New York, but these were almost business necessities. He had little interest in women. His favorite possessions were two Rolls-Royces and three high-speed motorboats.

The Wall Street crash of '29 wrote an invisible "X" across Kreuger's name. Being an uncommon crook, Kreuger did not crumble on Black Thursday. Indeed, he never defaulted on a dividend; but he was in the trap of paying dividends out of capital. He gambled millions in the market himself, and lost. Outwardly calm but inwardly frantic, he became the master forger of the age when, in 1931. in the inner fastnesses of his regal headquarters at the Match Palace in Stockholm, he forged with his own hand $143 million in Italian government bonds. By now, Kreuger's Depression-gored empire was bleeding cash too fast to be saved by bogus credit plasma. A sprinkling of embarrassing questions began. As they sat in the Hotel du Rhin waiting to hear his answers. Ivar Kreuger fobbed off his creditors with one final, non-negotiable note: "Goodbye now and thanks. I.K."

For his era, Ivar Kreuger was both idol and symbol--not, as most men then thought, a Paul Bunyan of finance, but a gross glandular case of surpassing greed. Today, only one tiny match flare from Kreuger's mighty kingdom remains on the financial pages of U.S. newspapers. In mingled hope and irony, Kreuger & Toll 5% debenture bonds, with a $1,000 face value, sell on the N.Y. Stock Exchange for about $40. Before the bond's name appears the tiny letter "q," signifying "in bankruptcy."

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