Starting as a number cruncher without connections, and long before LinkedIn, my career blossomed, and I became comfortable traveling the globe and moving through the worlds of business, fashion, entertainment, politics, and international crime. It was a thrilling journey filled with triumphant highs, heartbreaking lows, and unforgettable experiences and friendships.
During the years with Charles of The Ritz Group, Ltd., then a subsidiary of Squibb Corporation before its merger with Bristol Myers, I developed personal working relationships with fashion designers, Yves Saint Laurent, Gianni Versace, and Giorgio Sant’Angelo, Hollywood legends, Linda Evans and John Forsyth, and crossed paths with politicians, union leaders and giants of business and industry.
Together with employees in our offices, factories, and distribution centers around the world, we came to produce many exciting and successful products such as OPIUM, which for several years was the world’s largest-selling fragrance, and is now approaching its 50th anniversary. As president and CEO, I made a concerted but unsuccessful effort to save it from being destroyed by the company acquiring it.
After many years of deliberation, I decided to write this memoir, which highlights the creation and development of OPIUM as well as our other brands and businesses, reveals some secrets, and paints a picture of one of the most exciting events in the history of the fashion and beauty industries. As I progressed up the corporate ladder from vice president finance to president and CEO and member of the Squibb Board of Directors, I had a front row seat where I could observe the shimmering world of glamour, the profit driven world of business, and all that goes on behind the scenes to keep those worlds in motion.
But more than anything, this is a story about people—power, ego, the principled and unprincipled. It has the drama and pathos of a novel, all the more poignant because it is true. It is a highly personal story, and one I know well. It is my story.
Every perfume is a unique work of art, no different than a piece of music or a painting in its ability to evoke feelings in its audience. In 1976, Yves Saint Laurent fell in love with the idea of creating a new perfume that would convey the lush, sensual mood of the name he had already chosen, OPIUM.
Working with Yves, his personal and business partner Pierre, and so many others in the world of high fashion and fragrance could be exhilarating, infuriating, and often, a simmering pot-au-feu threatening to boil over. This narrative takes you behind the scenes, providing a glimpse of that fascinating world and the people who kept it spinning.
The extraordinary success of Orgasme perfume by Jean-Pierre Armand, the world’s leading fashion designer, attracts the attention of Joe Regalia, a small time player in the import-export business. Joe obtains financial backing from his boyhood friends, Tony Marino, head of the largest crime family in New York, and Sam Risen, an attorney and Tony’s silent partner, to import and distribute Orgasme through the gray market while laundering the Organization’s illicit income.
Noted Italian fashion designer Giorgio Donati is gunned down in front of his Greenwich Village town house in a professional style hit amid rumors of the designer’s connection to the Mafia. New York City Detective Frank Egan, assigned to investigate the murder, quickly identifies several individuals with strong motives to see the designer dead: his sister, Francesca, and several trusted employees of Donati’s company. Only the designer’s brother, Fabio, appears above suspicion. Working outside formal boundaries with Greg Harris, an FBI agent noted for his break-up of the Gianelli Family’s criminal empire years earlier, Frank learns of a Mafia connection in the initial financing of the Donati business, which might still exist. It is only after the discovery of similar style murders in Los Angeles and another in New York that the puzzle becomes clearer. As the drama unfolds against the background of the fashion business, the intrigues of its participants, and the Mafia’s use of this industry to launder its ill-gotten gains, evidence of guilt becomes apparent. But as the exciting conclusion demonstrates, appearances can be deceiving.
Do low income tax rates result in more job creation than do higher rates? The answer to this question is not a matter of opinion. There are historical records with facts that support or refute this premise and enable one to determine whether such a correlation actually exists. Yet the increasing staccato of voices from the right and left proclaiming their ideological viewpoint to be correct without bothering to provide any substantiation leaves the truly independent individual in a quandary. But no more. Robert H. Miller, a retired senior corporate executive and CPA, provides an unbiased, objective and most definitely non-ideological answer to that question with the facts to support it, and in a manner that can be readily understood by even the most partisan politician or beleaguered bureaucrat.