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Per Epstein, Armand bugged his office and home, plus his cuff links, to record decades’ worth of conversations, had a fixer, and was known to do business with a briefcase full of cash. He died in 1990.īut in 1996, Epstein’s bombshell biography exposed the late Occidental Petroleum chairman for wide-ranging grifts, including laundering money using artwork to fund Soviet espionage bribing his way into the oil business and knocking off Fabergé eggs. Bush, among other presidents) collected expensive artwork and convinced Chinese leaders to lend two pandas to Los Angeles for the city’s 1984 Olympics. and attended the inaugurations of FDR, Reagan, and George H.

He had a private Boeing 727 palled around with Prince Charles and high-powered politicians (he was a close friend of Senator Al Gore Sr. That’s my family.’”Īrmand tried to distance himself from his Soviet connections, reimagining himself as a self-made industrialist-he even hired a journalist to ghostwrite a memoir, The Remarkable Life of Dr. “I started watching Succession and I had to turn it off,” says Armie’s aunt Casey Hammer, “because it was like, ‘Oh, my God. While there, he married a Russian singer named Olga and together they had a son named Julian-Armie’s grandfather.īy the 1950s, Armand had divorced Olga as well as a second wife, Angela, who had told the court that, due to his time in Russia and his medical training, “ causes him no pain to see the sufferings of others.” He moved to Los Angeles, married a wealthy woman named Frances Barrett Tolman in 1956, invested her money in the then failing Occidental Petroleum, and drove the company to incredible success. According to Epstein, Vladimir Lenin sent a message to Joseph Stalin encouraging “particular support” for Armand, telling him, “This is a small path to the American ‘business’ world and this path should be made use of in every way.” Armand moved to the Soviet Union in 1921 for about a decade to fortify family connections. With Julius in prison, his 22-year-old son, Armand Hammer (Armie’s namesake), abandoned a medical career to take over his father’s other business, Allied Drug.