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Feeney’s. He was brought up in Quincy, south of Boston, where his father was a salesman for an industrial oil company. Miller got a draft deferment and went to Cornell from high school on a scholarship. Money was tight in his family, too, and he had to work part-time as a waiter and short order cook. A couple of months after graduating in 1956, when he was working as a line cook in Newport Beach, California, he got a message from his father in Quincy that his call-up papers had arrived. Miller drove to Santa Ana, signed up for the U.S. Marine Corps, and was sent to San Diego boot camp. However, a medical examination revealed a scar on his head from a childhood accident, and
a marine captain asked him to sign a waiver releasing the U.S. Marine Corps from liability should he injure his head in combat, adding that if he didn’t sign he would be honorably discharged. Miller took the honorable discharge. He was given $78 and put on a bus to San Diego.
    Like Feeney, Bob Miller did not want a white-collar job. Having read a lot of Hemingway, the twenty-two-year-old Cornellian had romantic ideas of becoming a writer or a soldier of fortune. He signed on for a three-month trip on an ocean-going tuna boat and while waiting to sail, crossed the Mexican border into Tijuana for a weekend spree. There he got involved in a brawl and was badly beaten and thrown into jail. By the time he was released, with torn shirt and only one shoe, the tuna boat had sailed. It was the low point of his life, and he decided to sort himself out. Miller went back to hotel work in the United States, saved $3,000, and headed for Spain on a Greek ocean liner, the Queen Fredericka. He made his way to Madrid, and from there to Barcelona and the job at the Ritz reception desk.
    When Miller finished his shift that day, he and Feeney went out for dinner. Miller still had his $3,000 bankroll and was already bored working “in a monkey suit” in the hotel. They decided to throw in their lot together and try to make money from doing business with the U.S. fleet. Miller told the Belgian hotel manager, Juan Vinke, what he was planning and handed in his notice. Vinke laughed and said, “There’s no future in that. Stay with us at the Ritz. You could be a great hotel man one day.”
    While Miller was working out his notice, Feeney enrolled for Spanish lessons. “He was a hyperkinetic person always charging around, so he figured while he was there he might as well learn to speak Spanish,” recalled Miller.
    Miller had already gotten a glimpse of the duty-free rackets that were common in postwar Europe. He told Feeney about a Hong Kong priest in Barcelona who changed U.S. dollars at black-market rates. The priest had shown Miller a small assortment of watches, film, cameras, and cigarettes for sale in his back office that he had smuggled under his soutane from Andorra, a tiny tax haven in the Pyrenees. “Don’t worry, all of the profits that I make go to the church,” he said cheerfully, adding that Miller should go to Hong Kong, where almost everything was duty free.
    Feeney and Miller made Villefranche their base and started taking orders for liquor from U.S. naval personnel. They needed cars, so Feeney got a little Renault Dauphine and Miller a Simca, and they started driving or taking
trains to ports all along the Mediterranean where the fleet docked: Marseilles, Cannes, Barcelona, Valencia, Gibraltar, Genoa, and Naples. They would not see each other for weeks, then would meet back at Villefranche, agree on what to do next, and go off in different directions. Chuck designed a business envelope to give to people on the naval ships with a price list of whiskies. They found “bird dogs” on board, to whom they promised commission for getting sailors to sign up for the five-packs that they could pick up at their home ports. Receipts for duty-free liquor became so commonplace on board ships they were accepted as stakes in