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He may not have stepped foot on U.S. soil for more than two decades, but billionaire Marc Rich manages to stay relevant.

Like a movie character optioned for perpetual sequel, Rich’s name has surfaced in two of the biggest news stories of 2009 – Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50-billion Ponzi scheme to defraud investors (Rich invested through middleman Ezra Merkin) and the installation of a new presidential administration (among the players, Attorney General-nominee Eric Holder, who made the ill-fated decision to forward Rich’s pardon request to then-President Bill Clinton with the recommendation “neutral, leaning towards favorable”).

Rich’s pardon was front and center at Thursday’s confirmation hearing of Holder, as Republican Sen. Arlen Specter sought incriminating information beyond the nominee’s acknowledgement that he had “made mistakes.”

The pardon, which was granted in the last hours of the Clinton administration, sparked a huge outcry at the time, especially after it emerged that Rich’s ex-wife, the socialite and songwriter Denise Rich, had donated an estimated $1 million to Democratic causes, including $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library fund, and had interceded on his behalf with Clinton.

To this day, the rationale remains murky – as does the 74-year-old exile at the heart of the case.

Rich is, in many ways, a character out of a John LeCarre novel. One of the world’s most successful and ruthless commodities traders, he has pursued opportunity where he found it, trading with despots and declared enemies when it was advantageous, from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and then receding into the shadows when the heat got too intense.

Born in Belgium, he emigrated with his family to the U.S. to avoid the Nazis and learned his trade in the dusty markets of the Middle East and the jungles of Africa.

Along the way, in 1966, he met Denise Eisenberg, the daughter of a wealthy shoe manufacturer from Worcester, MA on a blind date. They married a short time later – around the time he became a trader with Philipp Brothers, a dealer in raw metals.

One of his early business coups at Philipp Brothers came during the Arab oil embargo of 1973-1974, when he used his Middle Eastern contacts to circumvent the embargo and buy crude oil from Iran and Iraq, reportedly reselling it for twice the price to supply-starved U.S. oil companies.

In 1974, he and colleague Pincus Green left Philipp Brothers and set up their own company, Marc Rich & Co., using the relationships they had developed with some of the world’s great scoundrels and statesmen. They became notorious for trading with Iran during the hostage crisis, South Africa during apartheid, and Cuba and Libya during U.S. trade embargoes

Rich and Green were indicted by U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, on charges of dodging a $48 million corporate tax bill, racketeering and trading with an enemy state, Iran in 1983. The two, who had traveled to Switzerland just before the charges were brought, were put on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

Though living as an exile, Rich managed to hire some of the best-connected attorneys in Washington, among them, Jack Quinn, a former Clinton White House Counsel, Leonard Garment, a former Nixon White House official; William Bradford Reynolds, a former high-ranking official in the Reagan Justice Department; and Lewis Libby, who went on to become Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff.

And they delivered for him: On Jan. 20, 2001, hours before leaving office, Clinton granted Rich a pardon. In an op-ed column in the New York Times a month later, Clinton justified his decision, saying that similar situations had been settled in civil, not criminal court, and he also cited pleas from Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

In response to the outcry, George W. Bush appointed federal prosecutor Mary Jo White to investigate. She stepped down before the investigation was finished, however, and was replaced by James Comey, who was critical of Clinton’s pardons – and Holder’s pardon recommendation – but could not prove a quid pro quo related to Denise Rich’s contributions.

In the years since he fled the U.S., meanwhile, Marc Rich has lived a jetsetter’s life, traveling between homes on Lake Lucerne and in St. Moritz, Switzerland as well as in Marbella, Spain. He surrounded himself with Picassos, Chagalls and Miros and set himself the task of ingratiating himself with European leaders.

“He went to work charming, essentially buying Swiss loyalty … he really put out the money and the charm,” Shawn Tully, a reporter who has followed his career told MSNBC at the time of his pardon.

He became a major philanthropist throughout Europe and in Israel – his pardon application included dozens of letters attesting to his philanthropy, which reportedly runs at least into the tens of millions of dollars.

If his life was cushy, his exile wasn’t without personal cost, however. In 1996, his 27-year-old daughter died of leukemia in the U.S. without ever seeing her father again.

Denise Rich has always maintained that it was her daughter’s death that led her to forgive her ex-husband and to intercede on his behalf with Clinton, but has denied any quid pro quo.

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• Marc Rich dies – June 26, 2013
• Libby and Rich: pardon-me boys – July 6, 2007
• Glencore pulls off IPO despite some nefarious connections – May 26, 2011
• Of the many pardoned by Bill, few give to Hillary – May 1, 2008
• Denise Rich renounces citizenship – July 10, 2012
• In final days, Bush likely to pardon more than turkeys – November 27, 2008
• Obama picks Caroline Kennedy, Holder, Johnson to lead VP search – June 5, 2008
• Saudia Arabia, Norway, Kuwait donated millions to Clinton charity – December 18, 2008
• Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky to marry – December 1, 2009
• Muck tracker – Eric Holder said to be offered AG job – November 18, 2008