Biggest Tanker

Down the ways at Quincy, Mass, last week went the largest cargo vessel ever built in the U.S., and the largest tanker in the world: the 45,130-ton World Glory, with a capacity of 16.5 million gals.--enough to fill 2,062 railroad tank cars. Built by Bethlehem Steel at a cost of $10 million, the huge tanker was the latest ship to join the fleet of Stavros Spiros Niarchos, 44. With 39 ships totaling nearly 1,000,000 tons on the seas, Niarchos claims to be the biggest independent tanker operator in the world, an honor that is disputed by his wife's brother-in-law, Aristotle Socrates Onassis.

Stavros Niarchos is something of a man of mystery who manages to keep out of the public eye. Born in Greece in 1909, he studied law at the University of Athens before entering a small family flour-milling company that imported grain from Argentina. Noticing that most Greek millers, like his family, imported their grain in small lots, Niarchos soon organized import pools and went into the shipping business to handle the trade. He built up a fleet of six ships, turned them over to the Allies during the war, and put in a tour of North Atlantic destroyer duty with the Greek navy. At war's end, with half his fleet sunk, Niarchos started building up a tanker fleet, was able to finance the building and purchase of 36 vessels by chartering them in advance to big oil companies.

Last year Niarchos ran into legal trouble. The U.S. Justice Department seized 15 of the ships chartered to him, on the charge that he had bought them from the U.S. Government through U.S. front corporations, though he himself was an alien and hence prohibited from such purchases. But Stavros Niarchos, who is in Europe, is not letting his troubles interfere with his career. Next week another new 33,000-ton tanker, built for him in Britain, will be launched, and soon after that a third will go down the ways in Germany.

Aristotle Socrates Onassis, 48, the man who bought Monte Carlo Casino last year to get some office space on the shores of the Mediterranean (TIME, Jan. 19, 1953), hurried back to the U.S. from France "to clear my name." He is under indictment with eight others on the charge of defrauding the U.S. Government by buying surplus tankers through U.S. front corporations. This did not cramp his style. Last week he announced that with the approval of King Saud he had formed a new company to operate some 25 ships transporting about 10% of Saudi Arabia's oil exports.

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