I was humbled and honored, ARAMCO's bootlegger-in-chief was giving me his last beer.
"The religious police finally figured out why the supermarket was selling so much hops and they've taken it off the shelves. No more beer in the entire Kingdom [Saudi Arabia]. I should still do well selling gin [two varieties: white and brown]."
The Kingdom was an Islamic state: alcohol was prohibited and a lot of other stuff people consider fun. They actually had bureaucrats dedicated to censoring the paperback romance novels sold in the local hotel where we were staying just outside the ARAMCO gate. Racy bursting bodice on the front cover? Magic marker blacks out the problem. Something too hot inside. Magic marker again, or just remove the offending pages. Tough job, but someone needs to stand up for decency.
The Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) can be summed in a few words: we provide energy to the world. In a world where Americans were not always popular, they were admired, if not loved, in Saudi Arabia. Americans might be Christian Infidels trespassing in the birthplace of Muhammad, The Prophet, but they had discovered oil in the Kingdom and made the Arabs rich. Very, very rich. Unlike the British, the Americans weren't condescending or slow to pick up a tab... Lawrence of Arabia notwithstanding. Americans got things done and the Kingdom bent the rules for them. ARAMCO headquarters was its own little American town. It had its own Little League. Women could drive and have jobs (sort of). There was even a golf course for those who could deal with playing on sand with "oiled" greens instead of grass ones. All the compound homes came with a small concrete block bunker-room in the garage. This was a practical concession to American employees who brewed their own liquor. In the early days some of the stills exploded leveling the entire home. To minimize the damage, new homes were built with bunkers for the stills to limit the damage. Some employees, like the bootlegger-in-chief, had taken brewing to the next level and were making more money from the liquor business than they made as employees (and ARAMCO employees got paid a lot).
Eventually the authorities caught up to the bootlegger-in-chief. The dilemma the authorities had was what to do with him. They couldn't just throw an American in jail. They had to give him a public trial. In the trial the details and extent of the bootlegging business would come out and embarrass the Kingdom and ARAMCO. In the end, as they often did, the Saudis pretended nothing had happened and just let the bootlegger go and told him never to return to the Kingdom. He got to keep his profits.
