Olympian Tycoon

At a gunnery range outside Athens one hot morning last week, Greece's King Paul and 60 military men gathered to watch an ordnance test. At a signal from a dark-eyed, black-haired man in a black suit, a 3.5-in. bazooka was fired five times at a sheet of 8-in. armor. It punched five gaping holes in it. When the test ended, a U.S. Army colonel stepped up to the man in the black suit, Bodossakis Athanassiades, and formally approved $17 million in offshore-procurement contracts for him to make bazooka rockets for NATO.

To "Bodo" Athanassiades, the $17 million contract was all part of a day's work. At 60, he is Greece's top tycoon (worth anywhere up to $80 million). His enterprises run from alpha (for ammunition) to omega (for ore); he is the biggest Greek producer of chemicals, glass, minerals, munitions and wines. Bodo runs, in addition, a string of shipyards, fertilizer and textile plants scattered from Thrace to Crete. His payroll of 14,000 workers gives employment to 8% of Greece's manufacturing work force.

Starting from Alpha. Around Athens, Bodo Athanassiades is known to his friends as the man who made five fortunes and lost four. His enemies add a footnote; he has made his fortunes by nimbly hopping to the right political side at the right time. The son of a poor truck farmer who lived in Turkey, Bodo attended school for only a few months at the age of nine. Later he taught himself to read and write (and to speak four languages). He developed an eye for a quick profit at an early age, while driving a donkey to market carrying his father's produce. At 16, he started a flour mill. Business flourished until in 1914 Bodo was drafted. Though he got a medical discharge within a month, it was too late to save his mill.

Bodo started all over again, set up a food supply system for the Turkish army and the German Engineer Corps, then fighting the Allies. With the help of two brothers (now dead), and supply sources throughout the Middle East, Athanassiades amassed a fortune of $50 million in gold in four years. At war's end, Bodo, then 25, was "the richest Greek in the world." But, four years later, when Kemal Ataturk threw the Greeks out of Turkey, he was wiped out again. He moved to Athens, got into the tile business, and went bust once more. Says he: "I had to start again from the letter alpha."

"Because of Me." He scraped along for a few years with a small import-export business, then in 1934 got into munitions. He managed to talk the National Bank of Greece, which held control of the Greek Powder & Cartridge Co. and wanted to sell it, into lending him enough ($500,000), to buy its share of the company.

During Spain's Civil War, Bodo sold munitions to the Spanish Loyalists, thereby got on the wrong side of his old friends the Germans, who refused him patent rights to produce 88-mm. shells for guns supplied to Greece by the Germans. Athanassiades went ahead and made the 88-mm. shells anyway--and thus gave the Greek army a stockpile of ammunition with which to chase Mussolini's forces back into Albania. "They could do it," says Bodo, "only because of me."

When the Germans invaded Greece in 1943, Bodo was out of the country. He spent the war in Cairo, Johannesburg and New York, returned to Greece to find his munitions plants stripped of $50 million worth of equipment and raw materials. With the help of $2.6 million in ECA cash, he got back in business, spread into shipyards, chemicals and mining (iron, lead, zinc, chromium, nickel, manganese). He took care of his growing work force (and kept them from Communism) with new schools and churches, free medical aid, hot meals, and a chance to buy clothing and other fruits of their labors at cost. He thinks that the only way Greece can build up its economy is by developing its mining resources. Says Athanassiades: "Industry has got to stand on its own feet, and can, without state handouts."

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