The Midas of Mutual Funds

At Geneva's new air terminal, the scene is a recurrent attraction: a bald and stubby executive clad in a redlined cape and a Pierre Cardin jacket buttoned to the chin clambers from a custom-built black Lincoln Continental. With him comes an eyebrow-raising entourage: one male aide and four mini-skirted lasses of Playboy pulchritude. The normally expressionless Swiss faces at the ticket counter light up with half-amused, half-respectful recognition. "It's Bernie," whispers a Swissair hostess to a new colleague. Taking at least two of his curvaceous companions with him, Bernie quickly boards his private Mystere jet. His destination: a London (or sometimes Paris) business appointment for which he is, characteristically, two hours late.

A ONETIME poor boy from Brooklyn, 5-ft. 5-in. Bernard Cornfeld causes quite a stir in almost everything he does. Despite the persistent antagonism of conservative European moneymen, some foreign governments and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, he has built his Investors Overseas Services into one of the 20th century's great financial empires. Geneva-based I.O.S. has prospered primarily by selling mutual funds outside the U.S., and Cornfeld has proved himself to be a master salesman. Today he manages some $2.2 billion of other people's money, and his personal fortune amounts to about $140 million. Still a bachelor at 42, Cornfeld is a bizarre figure, part Peter Pan and part Midas. His days and nights are packed with people, planes, horses, telephone calls, travel and parties. Everywhere he goes, even to address staid bankers, some of his girls accompany him. Cornfeld is ordinarily as mild-mannered and soft-spoken as a shoe clerk, but he can break abruptly into profane rages. His informality prompts all of his employees to call him Bernie. But Cornfeld's financial trailblazing has altered the investment climate of Europe and helped hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens (and perhaps a few crooks as well) to acquire a larger stake in the capitalist economies of the free world.

High-Voltage Sales. Cornfeld started I.O.S. 14 years ago as a one-man firm in a Paris flat. Today it has grown into the world's largest financial sales organization, with 16,000 salesmen and 800,000 clients in 110 countries. Despite the natural resistance created by falling stock and mutual-fund prices, the high-voltage organization last year almost doubled its sales, to $3.1 billion. Just under $1 billion in cash flowed into the company's coffers. I.O.S. not only manages eleven mutual funds of its own but has spread into almost every major field of finance. It owns or controls six insurance companies, a dozen banks and finance firms scattered from Italy to the Netherlands Antilles, real estate subsidiaries selling condominium apartments in Spain and Florida, even a small computer outfit and a financial publishing company.

Cornfeld always moves fast--critics might say too fast--but during 1969 he toppled his own expansion records. He launched two big new international investment companies, the go-go I.O.S. Venture Fund (assets: $170 million) and Investment Properties International, a real estate development concern that is starting a chain of luxury resort hotels in Jamaica, Mexico and Portugal. He spread into Australia, France and Sweden with "national" mutual funds --funds that invest some or all of their assets in local projects in order to overcome government reluctance to let their citizens send money abroad. Last week, in another precedent-breaking move, I.O.S. began offering its mutual-fund clients insurance against the possibility that in a stock market slump the value of their shares may drop below what they paid for them.

Dime a Week. Even as a youngster, Cornfeld showed some of the hustle that has become a major ingredient of I.O.S.'s success. He was born in Istanbul to a Rumanian father and Russian mother, who brought him to the U.S. when he was four. Growing up in Brooklyn during the Depression, with a 10-c--a-week allowance. Bernie worked nights and weekends to earn trolley fare to school. Later he attended tuition-free Brooklyn College, where he turned socialist and gathered thousands of signatures on Norman Thomas-for-President petitions in 1948. After taking a master's degree at Columbia and spending a year as a social worker in Philadelphia he became a full-time mutual-fund salesman. His performance, Cornfeld readily concedes, was mediocre.

The turning point came in 1955 when he took a vacation in Europe and decided to stay. It was virgin territory for mutual funds, and Cornfeld soon realized that investments in U.S. securities could be sold to great numbers of Europeans who had hitherto put most of their money into land or bank accounts. To avoid the risk of picking stocks for investment, he ingeniously created the Fund of Funds, a mutual fund that buys the shares of other funds. Soon Cornfeld was hiring salesmen in droves and inspiring them with his own zeal through generous stock options and commissions that grow larger as their sales volume increases. I.O.S. salesmen draw no salary and pay their own expenses: many fail and quit, but the survivors often grow wealthy. Many of Cornfeld's early associates have retired in their thirties as millionaires. I.O.S.'s clients have not fared quite so well; $10 invested in Fund of Funds in 1962 is worth $23 today--a 130% gain as against a 192% average increase for comparable U.S. mutual funds.

Skirmishing Continues. At first, most of Cornfeld's customers were Americans abroad. But the Securities and Exchange Commission complained that I.O.S. was illegally selling unregistered securities to U.S. investors and that some of its funds were submitting false statements to conceal illegal rebates of brokerage commissions. The SEC was also concerned that criminal elements might be using I.O.S. as an outlet for illicit profits, and demanded that Cornfeld reveal the names of all his customers. Cornfeld refused to do so, but he settled the case in 1967 by agreeing to cut all I.O.S. ties to the U.S. and to American investors. Nevertheless, the skirmishing continues. Last August, the SEC again charged I.O.S. with illegally selling unregistered stock in the U.S. In September, the commission accused I.O.S. of further technical hanky-panky involving fee splitting. The latest charges came just before I.O.S. successfully floated a $110 million public offering of common stock (TIME, Oct. 3), and they made Cornfeld furious. "Government agencies are full of halfwits and political appointees who can't get a decent job elsewhere," he told TIME Correspondent Bob Ball. "The SEC is playing a very dangerous game at the heart of our economy. It's an irresponsible body."

I.O.S. has periodically tangled with other suspicious governments, which sometimes accuse its operatives of bending the spirit if not the letter of the law. I.O.S. salesmen have been temporarily jailed in Brazil, India and Pakistan on suspicion of helping residents to avoid laws against sending money abroad. Last week Greek police were investigating I.O.S. on similar grounds.

Partly to smooth over such difficulties and partly to give his organization cachet, Cornfeld has recruited numerous political celebrities and other famous names as I.O.S. executives. Former U.N. Ambassador James Roosevelt, F.D.R.'s son, deals with foreign governments. Erich Mende, former Vice Chancellor of West Germany and onetime leader of the country's third largest political party, runs I.O.S. operations in Germany (where the company makes nearly 40% of its sales). Sweden's Count Carl Johan Bernadotte and Britain's Sir Eric Wyndham White, the former head of tariff-writing GATT, sit on I.O.S.'s board of directors. Former German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard spurned Cornfeld's overtures, and now heads a rival mutual fund, but no less a personage than German Economics Minister Karl Schiller turned up as the main speaker last month at a pep rally for Bernie's German salesmen.

Tax Havens. A raffish odor clung to I.O.S. for years because its legal home was Panama and so many of its 100 subsidiaries were incorporated in tax havens --the Bahamas, Luxembourg, the Netherlands Antilles. (One result is that I.O.S. paid only $945,000 in taxes on its 1968 income of $15.3 million.) Lately, as Cornfeld's success has led dozens of other mutual funds to incorporate "offshore," the tax-dodging criticism has lost much of its sting. Last June, I.O.S. quietly shifted its legal domicile to Canada. European bankers who once sneered at Cornfeld's brash ways have lately begun to copy his sales methods and solicit his business.

Three years ago, Swiss restrictions against foreign workers forced Cornfeld to move most of his 1,100-person administrative staff from Geneva to the sleepy French border village of Ferney-Voltaire (pop. 2,000). Cornfeld built prefab offices and apartments for his young male employees and lissome legions of British, German and American file clerks and secretaries. He gave the town a new school and low-interest loans to fix its roads and creaky telephone system.

Today, Cornfeld's colossus has grown so huge that he has turned over most of its management to two executive vice presidents, Lawyer Edward M. Cowett, 39, chief operating officer, and Allen R. Cantor, 37, the head of the sales force. Both are slight of build, quiet in manner and married; with their full beards, they look more like Victorian poets than multimillionaire financiers. Chairman-President Cornfeld provides inspiration; Cowett and Cantor devise the tactics.

The arrangement gives Bernie time to pursue his personal fancies. For example, he recently bought an interest in two fashion houses, Manhattan's Oleg Cassini and Paris' Guy Laroche. He has set up the I.O.S. Foundation, which last year donated some $750,000 to welfare, science and the arts in 60 countries. Last month Bernie himself was received by Pope Paul VI in a private audience, and won the Pontiff's consent to issue a book relating I.O.S. activities to the papal encyclical urging that workers have a larger share in the fruits of industry. The project can scarcely fail to enhance I.O.S.'s appeal in Catholic countries.

Midnight Parties. Cornfeld lives in a style that a maharajah might envy. He rarely rises before 10 or 11 a.m. and seldom goes to bed before 4 in the morning. He divides his time between a 13th century chateau in France, where he keeps a stable of horses, a Geneva lakeside villa loaded with costly antiques, a Paris apartment, a small but elegant London town house and a suite at Manhattan's Carlyle Hotel. Though he does not smoke and drinks mostly Coke, Cornfeld's passion for midnight parties is legendary. Last month's I.O.S. Christmas party in Geneva was typical: the staff danced from 8 p.m. till dawn to the beat of a psychedelic band, washed down an elaborate buffet with 3,000 bottles of Moet et Chandon brut. Despite the reddish stubble of his incipient beard, Cornfeld bestowed avuncular kisses on scores of comely employees. He observed a little sadly: "The family has grown too big. In the old days I knew every face. Now it's maybe one in 20."

Cornfeld has big ideas for the future. He sees opportunities in credit cards, travelers' checks and a communications network involving film studios, television stations and shopping centers built around an entertainment nucleus. He expects to expand his mutual funds, banking and insurance business into dozens of other countries. But now that his main income is derived from banking and insurance, his dream is to become Europe's largest investment banker. He envisages using I.O.S.'s torrent of cash to arrange mergers, to finance promising new enterprises, and most of all to buy and sell companies. "Our resources give us a substantial edge," says Cornfeld. "And profits are almost guaranteed."

Success has conferred a heavy responsibility on Bernie Cornfeld. I.O.S. remains essentially beyond the control of any major government. If his empire crumbled, the very size of the collapse could destroy public confidence in mutual funds across large portions of the world. I.O.S. has prospered by flouting tradition and stretching laws to their limit. Yet Cornfeld has popularized equity investment in Europe and, in the scramble to compete with him, a whole continent is beginning to turn toward the "people's capitalism" that Cornfeld preaches. Cornfeld's innovating has produced problems and controversy, but so far the benefits have outweighed the troubles.

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