BY THE LATE 1960s, Iran was beginning to reverse the “brain drain,” the eco­nomically debilitating malaise that afflicts third-world countries and results in the loss of their best and brightest to the more comfortable climes of the West. As petrodollars began to pour into Iran, and the Iranian government began an ambitious policy of economic development and industrial growth, more and more of Iran’s foreign-trained technocrats and engineers returned to Iran. Many were recent graduates from some of America’s top universities, and many more had spent time working in major American companies and learning firsthand modern managerial and technological innovations. These Iranians were proud of their accomplishments and their know-how and no longer saw Europeans and Americans as advisors or mentors-as the earlier generation of tech­nocrats tended to do-but as their equal partners. Their mastery of the English language, their intimate knowledge of new developments in their fields, their new-found sense of national pride, and their proud membership in the global community of technocracy made these “Young Turks” great innovators at home and tough negotiators abroad. Ali Ebrahimi was the epitome of this new kind of Iranian technocratic elite. 

His burly built, his athletic gait and deportment, his quick and bilingual wit, his impressive command of business trends around the world, his penchant for frank and honest discourse, his dedication to hard work, and his willingness to delegate authority enabled him and his partner, Akbar Lari, to establish one of the foremost construction companies in Iran in less than a decade. But the revo­lution destroyed the company. When he built a second fortune, again in less than a decade but this time in America-no less impressive in size and the pace of its accumulation-he proved that his meteoric rise was not a fluke or an accident of history. 

Ali was born in 1941 (1320) in the city of Sabzevar, one of the oldest municipalities in all of Iran. The city has been known for many centuries as a particularly devout center of Shiism. One of the most renowned Islamic theologians, Hadj Mullah Ja’far Sabzevari, was one of the town’s favorite sons. But by the mid-twentieth century, Sabzevar was a town of only 28,750 people and, save for the lofty mountains on the horizon, altogether bereft of grandeur. At the time of Ali’s birth, his paternal and maternal families were considered part of the political and economic elite of the city. His father came from a family of landed wealth, while his mother’s fortune was in trade. He was the tenth child of the family. It was a sobering sign of the times that although his mother was pregnant twenty times, only three of her children survived the traumas of birth and the dread diseases of infancy. Ali’s childhood, spent in the busy households of his father and grandparents, was full of love and affection. His uncles, the Rezai brothers, were active in city politics and had ambitions to represent the city in the Parliament. Like other candidates of the time, stuffing ballots, paying for votes, and bussing peasants on election days were part of their uncles’ election strategy, and observing and sometimes participating in these activities are part of Ebrahimi’s fond childhood memories. 

His mother was a devout and strict Shiite, but his father was a bon vivant, known for his jovial company, his poker parties, and his intellectual curiosities. He was something of a rebel without a cause, or in his son’s words, a “rich out­cast.” Ali’s mother doted on her only son. With the bitter memory of her many dead infants always on her mind, she insisted on sleeping in the same bed with her sole surviving son – a practice she continued until the day he left home. Her selfless love, and her gravitas as a member of her large family, made her not just a pivotal figure in his son’s life, but also in the lives of her brothers. “Without her,” lamented Ali Rezai, “none of us could have accomplished what we did.” 

Ali was twelve when at his own insistence he was sent to Tehran. He enrolled in the Alborz boarding school. Ali’s accent, bearing hints of his provincial birthplace, made him for a while the butt of cruel adolescent jokes. But he was capable of physically defending his turf. He never shied away from confronting or fighting his abrasive fellow students. On more than one occasion, he faced disciplinary action for his behavior. More important, he was a good student, and at Alborz that counted for much. “I was never at the top of the class,” he says, “but always amongst the better ones. In academics, math was his favorite subject. He was, and remains today, jovial and given to easy banter and light chatter with friends. He is also something of an intellectual manqué. History has always been a passion. The world of ideas, particularly those relating to the history of religion and the dangers of obscurantism, are of particular interest to him. He was thus an avid reader and has remained one all his life. “All we have suffered in our history,” he often declares, “has been because of religion, and the ability of religious leaders to abuse the trust of the people. Unless we can expose their hypocrisy, we can’t fix the mess in Iran.” He has written a still unpublished essay explaining some of his ideas in this area. In spite of his busy life as a developer, he still devours books on Iran and the critical history of religions. 

Ali was also an athlete and still regularly plays different sports in the exclusive club he frequents in the city of Houston. In his youth he played soccer, but Greco-Roman wrestling was his forte. When he came to America, his wresting experience became his first source of revenue. 

In 1959, Ali came to the United States. While his father was ambivalent about sending his son abroad, his mother was resolute about it. Ali arrived on the East Coast, landing where some of his cousins and nephews had landed before. Like many other Iranian students of his generation, these relatives became his de facto guides and gurus in academic matters. In fact, he and two cousins decided to enroll in the same college. For a while, the four young men drove around the East and made cold calls to admissions offices, asking whether they would accept the foursome into their colleges. They visited a number of institutions, from Columbia and Fordham to military schools that happened to be on their path. 

It was surely a strange way to find a college, and the result was no less strange. Ali ended up in a small Presbyterian college in West Virginia called Davis and Elkins College, where students were expected to attend church at least three times a week. Established in 1904, and located in the city of Elkins, in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, the private college was established by two American senators, named Davis and Elkins. What the school lacked in academic excellence it more than made up in the fact that two-thirds of the school’s students were girls, and for a young man from a traditional family in Sabzevar, that was the very heaven. 

To his credit, Ali stayed in this heaven only one year. His eyes were on a bigger prize. As soon as he learned the academic ropes and as soon as he cut the emotional umbilical cord that had kept him tied to his cousins, he transferred to the University of Maryland, where he joined the department of civil engineering. His facility with mathematics was now an asset. 

Although in his first year he had worked at sundry part-time jobs-teaching Greco-Roman wrestling and working as an attendant at an amusement park, his main source of support had come from his parents. But by 1961, his family fortunes were changing. There was a land reform going on in Iran and much of his father’s income had come from the villages that were about to be sold by the government to the peasants who worked on them. Ali decided to support himself and began to work in a restaurant. 

By then he had to provide not just for himself but also for his family. In his first year in the United States, he had met and married an American woman. Before long they had a son. The marriage was something of a secret. Ali was reluctant to break the news to his parents-particularly to his mother, who would find the idea of her only son marrying a non-Muslim difficult to fathom. 

In summer of 1964, Ali paid a visit to Iran, and in his own words, “for the first time began to think about the country in a serious manner.” The country was changing, and Ali liked the pattern of change. He decided that the shah must be supported in his modernizing effort. He was not alone in this decision. By the early 196Os, a whole generation of Iranian technocrats had made much the same de facto pact with the shah. Amir-Abbas Hoveyda and his “Progressive Circle” were the obvious political manifestations of this pattern. Modernizing technocrats, sometimes even critical of aspects of the shah’s regime, decided that only by supporting him and his leadership could they help bring much-needed change to Iran. 

When Ebrahimi returned to the United States, he immediately began to set up an Iranian student group that was, contrary to the usual trend, supportive of the shah. The early 196Os were also the years when the Confederation of Iranian Students in America was beginning its rapid turn toward radical anti-shah politics. The confederation was chiefly composed of students who, contrary to people like Ali, believed that only by opposing and deposing the shah could they help end the cycle of poverty and despotism in Iran. One of Ali’s roommates was an activist in that group. 

His name was Sadeq Gotbzadeh, and he and Ali had been roommates for about three months. Gotbzadeh was a rabble-rouser and, even in those early days, the subject of an intense diplomatic row between Iran and the United States. Iran accused him of being a communist and wanted him deported, and the Kennedy administration, led in this case by the attorney general, Robert Kennedy, refused to comply. Gotbzadeh went on to become a close confidant of Ayatollah Khome­ini and returned to Iran as part of his entourage. For a while, he was Iran’s foreign minister. He was then arrested on charges of attempting a coup against the ayatollahs and sent to the firing squad. At the height of his power, he and Ebrahimi, his erstwhile roommate, talked on the phone once.

But in the early 1960s, all of that was still in the distant future. Ebrahimi received his engineering degree from the University of Maryland in 1965 and was immediately hired to work at the Maryland State Road Commission. His salary was $5,285 a year. His part-time work at one of Washington’s trendy restaurants, where Richard Nixon was a regular customer, paid him more than his engineering salary. 

While at the commission, Ali began to teach part-time at Catholic University, where he also enrolled in the graduate engineering program. In 1967, he completed his master’s degree. By then he was a project manager at the commission. In this capacity, he occasionally ran into Spiro Agnew, who would soon become Nixon’s running mate, and was, in his early days a county commissioner in Maryland. 

In 1967, Ali went west. He found an engineering job for the state of California. He was happy at his job and unhappy in his marriage; moreover, home beckoned. In early 1968, he answered the call, and, having accumulated impressive professional and educational experiences, he quit his job and returned to Iran. The country was bustling with new economic energy. By then he had broken the news of his marriage to his family.

When he returned, his uncles, the Rezai brothers, had already established a near-dynastic domination over some arenas of Iranian industry. They both wanted Ali to work for them, and much to their consternation, he refused. There was something of a rugged individualist in him. He wanted to find a job on his own. 

In spite of the booming economy, finding one proved difficult. His attempt to find employment with Majid A’lam, the biggest contractor in Iran, failed. Eventually, he was hired to work in Hamid Ghadimi’s firm, itself one of the biggest in the country. On his way to his job in Shiraz, where he was to be a project manager, he lost half of the lump sum his mother had given him, as a homecoming gift, in a poker game. All his adult life, he has been an avid poker player. His friends consider him a good player. But that night, the results were disastrous. His relations with his wife were also less than satisfying. He decided to work at his new job only as long as necessary to save enough to pay for his and his family’s return trip to the United States. 

After about a year, he decided to work for one of his uncles, Mahmood. By then Mahmood had split from his brother and started a company of his own. He was concentrating on mining. On a whim, he had purchased, for one million tooman, the rights to the Sarcheshmeh mine from a professor at Tehran University. It was an old copper mine that had been passed up as unworthy of further exploration by a number of prospectors and big Western companies. It turned out to be one of the richest copper mines in the world. Much of the construction around the mine, everything from access roads to housing for workers and staff, was built under the direct supervision of Ali. 

After a few months at the new job, Ali was promoted to the position of deputy managing director of what was rapidly becoming the most important company in Iran-with billions of dollars in future estimated revenues. In this capacity, Ali had to negotiate multi-million dollar deals with some of the biggest banks and mining companies in the world. “The experience was,” he said, “good for me. It taught me much about the world of high finance.”

Then suddenly the government, without prior notice, decided to nationalize the mine. Ali was shocked and angry. He was particularly distressed by the level of corruption. While one famous developer offered Ebrahimi one million dollars for privileged information about the company, a prominent politician had apparently taken a bribe to ensure that an American company got a piece of the copper mine. He had already decided that the country was being mismanaged in economic terms. The experience of the mine only confirmed his views. But he still believed that working within the system was the best alternative. Moreover, increased oil revenues had further heated up the Iranian economy. Ali finally decided to fulfill the dream he had long nurtured and with a friend, Akbar Lari, started a new company. Housing and construction was a booming business, and both partners had worked in American companies that specialized in the field. 

The partnership they started began to grow at a dizzyingly rapid pace. They built houses and roads, hangers and airports. They used the most modern techniques in operating their work sites. They developed a reputation for efficiency and honesty. “In all the years we worked,” he says, “we only paid a bribe once to get a job.”

Iran at the time had no mortgage system. Houses were essentially bought for cash, with few people able to gamer special loans from banks. At the same time, major cities in the country, particularly Tehran, were faced with massive housing shortages. Ali and his partner began negotiating with General Motors to start a factory for constructing prefabricated homes in Iran. At the same time, they began thinking about establishing a mortgage company along the lines of Fannie Mae in the United States. 

By 1978, their partnership had grown into two companies. One focused on housing, the second on other construction projects. Ebrahimi took over dealing with housing. At the time of their breakup, the two companies employed sixty engineers, almost sixty thousand workers, and owned machinery estimated to be worth fifty million dollars. They also had hundreds of foreign technicians from as far away as Korea and Taiwan, working on their projects. 

The revolution changed everything. By then Ali’s private life had also changed. In 1974, his first wife, along with their three children, left for America in what was the first step toward divorce. By 1977, Ali had married again. His second wife, Suzann, was also American. Together they have two children, a boy and a girl. “Only after my marriage to Suzann,” says Ali affectionately, “did I really know what it means to be married.”

On the work front, Ali tried to keep his company operating. Aside from occasional stoppages brought about by workers’ wildcat strikes, he was successful in keeping the projects, particularly the big construction work in the city of Ahwaz, more or less on schedule. But workers were not his only trouble. Revolutionary Committees had spread throughout the country, and the local committees for the city were a source of agitation. On several occasions, they arrested Ali; each time he was released hours later by the intervention of the governor, Admiral Ahmad Madani. 

On one occasion, Ebrahimi met with Bani Sadre, in those early days a close confidant of Ayatollah Khomeini and the first-elected and first-impeached president of the new republic. “You have won,” Ali told him, “the country is yours; why are you destroying it?” Bani Sadre’s response was an omen of things to come. He blamed the chaos and destruction on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and went on to add that people like Ali should stay and fight. 

But by July 1979, conditions had deteriorated enough that Ali found it impossible to continue. He decided to leave Iran, but he had no exit visa. Fortunately, the new revolutionaries were as corrupt in deeds as they were pious in words. Ebrahimi paid off the gang that controlled the main Tehran airport. On the designated day, he arrived at the airport, and without an exit visa, and without his name appearing on the passenger manifest, he left Iran aboard a flight heading to Europe.

His final destination was America, where Ebrahimi settled in Houston and created a new company called Ersa Grae. This company, too, has grown with incredible speed, with projects in a variety of places-from Sarasota, Florida, to Houston, Texas-that include everything from high-rises to plans to develop shopping malls and residential developments. The “sell-out” value of his projects is now estimated to be close to one billion dollars. He is unrelenting in pursuing his goals. 

Part of his time and effort in America has been devoted to taking care of his many needy relatives. He has been a patron saint for his two uncles-Mahmood, who lived in Houston, and Ali, who still lives in Costa Rica. He is also keen on taking care of his first family. 

In Tehran, he had turned 18 percent ownership of his company over to his first wife and their three children. The agreement signed between Iran and the United States ending the hostage crisis allowed for American citizens to sue Iran for damages caused by the revolution. Ali spent countless hours in depositions and court sessions to show to the international tribunal, set up at The Hague to adjudicate cases brought by American citizens against the Islamic Republic, that his children’s share of his company must be restored to them. It was a testimony to his tenacity that his was the first case and only one of four where those holding dual American and Iranian citizenship successfully sued and won a case against the Islamic Republic of Iran in that tribunal. “I was overjoyed,” he said with a grin on his face, “when I received a check for $14 million from the tri-bunal.” The entire sum was put in trust for his family.

Copyright© 2008 by Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York 13244 and Persian World Press, New York, New York 10128 

All Rights Reserved.

First Edition 2008.

080910111213654321 

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI 239.48-1984.-‘” 

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ISBN-I 3: 9 78-0-8156-0907-0 ISBN-10: 0-8156-0907-8 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA 

Milani, Abbas. 

Eminent Persians: the men and women who made modem Iran, 

1941-1979: in two volumes/ AbbasMilani.-lsted. 

v.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-81 S 6-0907-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 

1 lran-History-Mohammed Reza Pahlavi 1941-19 79-Biography.

2 lran-Biography. I. Title.

0S316.85.MSS 2008 

9 SS.0S’30922–dc22 

2008033410 

Manufactured in the United States of America