Aristotle Onassis: The Refugee Tycoon Who Took On Nixon and Monaco

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Aristotle Onassis was born in 1906 in Smyrna to a wealthy shipping family and spoke four languages by 16. Then the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922 destroyed everything: relatives died in a burned church, his father was imprisoned, and the family ended up in a refugee camp in Greece. In 1923 he sailed to Buenos Aires on a Nansen passport with $250. Working nights as a telephone operator, he noticed that Argentine women wanted a milder cigarette, imported Turkish tobacco through his father's old contacts, and made a quick fortune. During the Great Depression he spent it on freighters selling for pennies on the dollar.

This episode follows how he built the world's largest privately owned shipping fleet on flags of convenience and long time charters, and what that cost in safety, whales, and oil spills. It covers the Saudi tanker deal that set the US government against him, his secret takeover of Monaco's SBM and defeat by Prince Rainier III, Olympic Airways, and marriages to Athina Livanos and Jacqueline Kennedy that looked a lot like acquisitions.

• Richard Nixon reportedly told former FBI agent Robert Maheu that if Onassis had to be killed, it should not happen on American soil.
• His Liberian-registered tanker SS Arrow ran aground off Nova Scotia in 1970 with a broken radar, a dead echo sounder, and an unlicensed officer on watch.
• Peru sent naval vessels and air force planes against his whaling fleet in 1954, and he later sold the operation to a Japanese company for eight and a half million dollars.
• Prince Rainier created 600,000 new state-held SBM shares, cutting Onassis's 52 percent stake to under a third and forcing him out by 1967.
• The death of his son Alexander in a 1973 plane crash broke him, and he died in France in 1975 at 69, leaving 45 percent of his estate to a foundation in Alexander's name.