"Now America Is the Thing to Do"

By J.D. Reed

Ready or not, here they come. Clutching their Vuitton luggage and checking their Cartier Panthere wristwatches, wealthy foreigners are lining up with their less fortunate countrymen at U.S. Immigration desks. The new arrivals are not jet-setters here for a month-long shopping spree or speculators merely stopping off to tuck away foreign currency in U.S. investments. They are ambitious entrepreneurs and professionals ready to catch the go-go spirit, to buy homes and consider citizenship in the nation that, for the present at least, offers them attractive business opportunities and an amenable society. "Ten years ago, everything was based on England," says Sahir Erozan, 27, a Turkish immigrant who owns Cafe Med, a luxe nightclub in the tony Georgetown section of Washington. "Now America is the place to go, the thing to do."

They are coming because conditions at home may not be all that comfortable, especially if they have a considerable amount of money and would like to keep it. In a number of countries, unsympathetic regimes and currency devaluations are forcing the well-heeled to move on. In many places the threat of kidnaping, terrorism and harassment prevents the rich from flaunting their privilege.

As they have for a decade, the international wealthy favor New York City for its comparative safety and social sass. Opulent European boutiques like Celine for French fashions, $1 million-plus apartments like those in the new Museum Tower, and luxury hotels like the Plaza Athenee, which are run for, and often by, the newcomers, continue to blossom in Manhattan. Owners of New York's most fashionable restaurants say that the arrives are influencing American dining habits with their Continental nonchalance. They give a cursory glance at the bottom line on the bill, and seldom practice power lunching and power tripping. On a recent Wednesday, Manhattan's superswank Le Cirque played host to Richard Nixon, Publisher Malcolm Forbes and Chris-Craft Chief Herbert Siegel all at the same time. "They all looked at each other," recalls Italian Owner Sirio Maccioni. "Maybe they were thinking, 'Do I have the right table?' I could put Mr. (Giovanni) Agnelli (whose family controls Fiat) anywhere. Europeans might complain about the food, but not the table." Some sybaritic loungers, of course, treat the U.S. as just another dish on the international smorgasbord. Young, titled transients from Europe and South America are drawn to the action in New York City, where they are politely known to real estate agents and party hostesses as multinationals. Dimitri Karageorge, 27, Prince of Yugoslavia, an E.F. Hutton stockbroker by day, has mastered American directness and uses a different word: "Eurotrash. People say we are a little idle, a little too rich. I suppose it's true." After work or shopping, the teenage countesses and bejeaned barons gather at Club A, a jewel-box disco, to dance, gossip and compare invitations. "It's all a game to them," says a Columbia University business student, Jeffrey von der Schulenburg, 27, a German count by birth, "really just playacting, and in the end, they're Europeans again."

Most newcomers around the nation, however, have more permanent designs. Miami, for nearly three decades a home to Latin political and economic exiles, is now drawing high-rolling French entrepreneurs who like the Mediterranean pace of business there. The nomadic Arabs who favored Los Angeles have departed for London, say scene watchers, where their riyals go further; and affluent Asians, attracted by the schools and investment values, are snapping up six-figure residences in exclusive San Marino with suitcase cash.

Once settled, foreigners are elated by American entertaining styles. Italian-Brazilian Count Rudi Crespi, a Manhattan-based publicist for a number of Italian fashion houses, finds his evenings less predictable. "In Italy the host will call you three days in advance and tell you who your companions are going to be. In New York you run into interesting people, pick up ideas and get into lively discussions. If I wanted a programmed evening, I'd stay home and watch TV!"

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the immigrant rich have come not to be entertained but to work. Young brokers, bankers and boutiquers emigrate because old-country commerce is too tradition-bound, slow and unresponsive for them. Even for someone with influence, it can take a month to get a phone installed in England, and no one would ever call a broker on the weekend. "In Switzerland if you ask, 'Why?', they tell you, 'Because that's the way it is,' " says New York Art Dealer Bettina Sulzer Milliken, 36, daughter of a Swiss industrialist, who with her American husband runs a gallery in SoHo. "In America the answer is 'Because that's the way we like it.' "

Economic opportunity is hardly the only attraction. Some newcomers simply fall in love with the size and grandeur of the land. Lebanese Engineer Walid Bohsali, 44, came to the bluegrass pastures of Lexington, Ky., to build a $5.2 million 18th century French-style horse farm for a Canada-based relative. Charmed by the quiet, order and beauty, he stayed on with his American wife Mary Lou and their two children and became a Thoroughbred racehorse broker for absentee owners. He has rented a house with an option to buy, and intends to apply for citizenship. Says Bohsali: "I don't think anybody who has come here would ever want to leave." To a growing number of the world's wealthy, the sentiment makes increasingly good horse sense.

With reporting by Barbara Kraft/Los Angeles and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York