A Shopping Mall, The Iraq War, and Me

A number of years ago I was director of corporate communications for a developer of large shopping and entertainment complexes. It was an exciting time, as we were expanding aggressively in the U.S. and making inroads in Europe. My job was to get positive coverage in national business media, like The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, that could drive up our stock price, or in local media that could help us get approvals or build consumer excitement for development projects.

One of our projects, Madrid Xanadu, opened in 2003. I got to make a few trips to Spain to work with a local public relations firm to make sure the press (there wasn’t much in the way of electronic media then) adequately covered our development milestones – regulatory approvals, groundbreaking, tenant signings, and so forth.

One of the early milestones was obtaining the tract of land the mall would be built on. We had put a deposit on the land, about 20 miles outside the city in an area called Arroyomolinos, with a contingency that the owner obtain the zoning we would need to build a massive retail center. There was a double-wide trailer on the site where our development and legal people would meet with the landholder and his people to negotiate and get updates on zoning progress.

I attended one such meeting, probably in 2001. Our CEO, head of development, director of international development, head of legal, and a few others, including me, were driven up in a caravan of big SUVs. We parked in a gravel lot outside the trailer. The seller and his team had already arrived and were inside, except for an armed guard outside the trailer’s door. That seemed pretty strange to me and the others, but we went in.

Tables in the trailer were arranged in a big square, with the seller’s team on the side closest the door. We took our seats on the opposite side of the square, and after introductions, things became tense. The seller, whose first name was Jaafar, was agitated. He wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone, was disrespectful to some, and would speak only to our head of development.

I don’t remember details of what transpired at the meeting. I remember the sense of alarm I felt that something could go very wrong very quickly. Jaafar was unpredictable at best, and possibly irrational and dangerous. Nobody wanted to do business with him, but he had a valuable piece of land and vital connections with the regional and national governments.

Ultimately, Jaafar got the zoning, we got the property, and Madrid Xanadu – with an indoor ski slope, go-cart track, massive cinema, and more than 200 shops – opened to great fanfare.

The year Madrid Xanadu opened also was the year the United States invaded Iraq, amid concerns, later disproved, that dictator Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Those concerns were fueled by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi who had fled Iraq (in the trunk of a car by a Jordanian prince) amidst a banking scandal. He was accused, and later convicted in absentia, of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from Petra Bank, an institution in Jordan he co-founded with a brother of the Jordanian king.

Living in exile in London, Chalabi formed the Iraqi National Congress with an agenda of toppling Hussein to give him a path to return to Iraq and assume a leadership position. To achieve that end, he lobbied Washington to overthrow Hussein’s government. He persuaded President Bill Clinton to fund an expedition into northern Iraq to foment an insurgency, which failed, and later fabricated the WMD story and convinced President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to launch the Iraq War. After the war, Chalabi returned to Iraq and served as deputy prime minister for a year but was then voted out of office. He died in 2015.

During the war, more than 100,000 civilians were killed. Estimates range to more than one million civilian deaths. In addition, 4,507 U.S. soldiers were killed; 17 were captured, of which nine died in captivity; and 32,292 U.S. servicemen and service women were wounded.

Jaafar Jalabi, the owner of the land parcel on which Madrid Xanadu sits, was Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew. One of the executives of the company I worked for, Mills Corp., told me that Jaafar had had a falling out with his family, and was forced to change his name from Chalabi. I can’t verify that. But I can tell you that on the day of the meeting in the trailer in Arroyomolinos, I was very glad to get out of there.

Note: The grand opening of Madrid Xanadu was something I’ll never forget. We had promoted it heavily; a well-known radio celebrity (radio was much more influential there than in the U.S.) was to be the emcee for the day’s events, which were to begin with the mall’s opening at 10:00 am. Thousands of people arrived early that morning and began pressing against the doors to get in. By 9:15, we decided to open the doors so they wouldn’t be broken and to prevent injuries. We opened and there was a stampede, like something you see at a Wal-Mart on Black Friday. Luckily, there were no more than a few bruises and scrapes. The emcee, on a stage in the middle of the mall in front of thousands of folded chairs, went through her routine and introduced the Mills executives and local politicians, but most people were racing around the complex, wanting to soak it all in.