‘You and your men,’ smiled Peter. ‘Where on earth do you find them?’

Manfred shrugged.

‘How much should I put in?’ asked Peter.

At that moment, George returned with the drinks. Manfred waited for him to leave before replying.

‘Forty thousand.’

‘It’s a lot.’

‘Not as much as the hundred you’ll make in a year, maybe two, not including dividends.’ Peter looked suitably impressed; one hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money even by his standards. It didn’t come close to the sum that Manfred’s family brokerage house had made that very morning.

It was Manfred, fresh from Yale, who had convinced the partners of Wallace, Greenwood & Company that they move into sugar when war ripped through Europe in 1939. Sugar was then selling at a paltry penny a pound. Prices had gone through the roof in the First War and there was every reason to suppose the same would happen again.

In all, Manfred and his father had spent a month in Cuba before settling on a producer just emerging from bankruptcy and controlled by the Federal National City Bank of New York. It was another six weeks before the firm formally took control of the operation. They spent heavily on processing and refining equipment, an investment which had more than paid its way by the time America entered the war in 1941. Sugar prices continued to rise, the business prospered, buoyed up by wartime demand for ethyl alcohol, readily produced from sugarcane molasses.

The foresight, the risk, the hard work had all been theirs. Eight years on, it was time to reap the rewards, a staggering seventy-six-fold return on their investment. The deal had been finalized that very morning—Manfred’s first victory of the day, indeed, his greatest to date. A few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, he was wealthier than he could ever have imagined. More importantly, though, for the grand design of his life, he had also made a lot of very influential people rich, and this was something they would never forget.