The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune
By Conor O’Clery
Public Affairs $26.95, 352 pages

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a mysterious philanthropic fund made a rule of swearing its beneficiaries to absolute secrecy about the origins of the money they received. “The donors do not want to receive any recognition for this gift,” said the letter from a consulting firm in New York.

These days, the Atlantic Philanthropies foundation is a little more forthcoming. Its website details the programmes it supports in nine countries, ranging from public health work in Vietnam to work on human rights and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. And it acknowledges that it was founded not by a group of donors, but by one: Chuck Feeney, the entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist whose story Irish journalist Conor O’Clery relates with verve in The Billionaire Who Wasn’t.

Born of a working-class Irish-American family in New Jersey, Feeney launched his career selling duty-free cars and alcohol to US sailors in Europe in the 1950s. But he made his fortune on the huge growth in Japanese tourism in the 1960s and 1970s, which led to the dramatic success of what became the DFS duty free shopping network.

Then, in the early 1980s, Feeney suddenly relinquished control of the bulk of his fortune, including his share in DFS, and set up a Bermuda-based foundation to start giving away his money. Even more dramatically, he chose not to tell anyone about it. It was only in 1997, with the sale of the DFS stores to LVMH, that the world found out about Atlantic Philanthropies. By then it had given away so much money it had, in Feeney’s words, “become synonymous with Anonymous”.

This makes for a book of two halves. There is the rollicking business story of how DFS became a retail powerhouse – even funding the development of an airport at Saipan in the 1960s on the theory that it was sure to lure the Japanese. And there is the story of the foundation, with a particularly fascinating account of Feeney’s active role in the secret initiative by prominent Irish-Americans that led to the IRA’s 1994 ceasefire, and put Northern Ireland on the road to peace.

Feeney himself emerges as a complex character, a driven and hard-nosed businessman who asked himself profound questions about the purpose of wealth, and who seems to have devoted as much energy to giving money away as he did to making it.

Inspired by the example of Andrew Carnegie, and ready to quote the Gaelic saying that “there are no pockets in a shroud”, he would probably take exception to the comparisons with St Francis made by some in the book. For America’s new generation of internet and private equity billionaires, this is an exemplary tale.

Jonathan Birchall is the FT’s US retail correspondent.