About me

A seventh generation Californian, born in Pasadena, Owen III grew up in the affluent bedroom community of San Marino, just north of Los Angeles and adjacent to Pasadena.  Owen III traveled extensively during summer holidays, visiting Hong Kong when it was still under British rule, China when it was still mostly rural and undeveloped, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.  This fostered in him a love of global exploration, to which later in life he would add trips through Europe, and later, where he achieved significant financial success, Africa.

 

Richelieu’s entrepreneurial ventures were widely varied and certainly variable as to their success, but uniformly spectacular when they failed. His business activities all had in common Owen III’s audacity and brash tolerance for risk, albeit only when risking the capital of others.  By the late 1990s, his fortunes had ebbed considerably in the United States, and so he cast his net wider to the continent of Africa, one of his lifelong loves.  Embarking on partnerships with the late John Braedencamp he enjoyed considerable success in brokering tobacco and other agricultural sales.  This eventually evolved into quasi-merchant banking, and Owen III and his Braedencamp-affiliated group were at times rumored to be responsible for funding several wars on the African continent.  After Zimbabwe issued a warrant for Owen III’s arrest for alleged financial crimes, he wound up his agricultural affairs on the continent and focused on his financial dealings from a new headquarters in Mauritius.  His private banking agency based in Mauritius was eventually accused of money laundering for several authoritarian rulers and alleged organized crime figures, including Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs (allegations which he has consistently denied).  He settled with Mauritian and the International Criminal Court in the Hague after a Red Notice was sought for his arrest.  Sheltered by cloistered discalced Carmelite Nuns in the Ivory Coast, who later facilitated his evacuation from the country by sea, he returned to the United States, and in 2008 purchased the Fisca Oil Co., Inc., headquartered in Kansas City, Kansas, which had annual gross revenues of $105.0 million.  He sold the assets of Fisca over the next several years, and entered into a retirement of sorts around 2014.

 

Owen III continued his collecting of antiques, including china and silver, and especially furniture of the period of Louis XVI and more contemporary pieces of Hollywood Regency furniture and art from the mid-20th century.  

 

His ongoing love of the hospitality business shows through in some of his African ventures including the rebuilding of the colonial-era Bulawayo Club in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, originally founded by Cecil Rhodes, as well as numerous other hospitality-focused developments in southeastern Africa.

 

A devout Catholic convert, Owen III fostered close relations with key Vatican officials and was a significant intelligence asset for African politics for the Holy See.  So valuable were his diplomatic contributions that he was thought by some to have been named a cardinal in pectore by the late pope Benedict XVI. 

 

Owen III resides in southeastern Wisconsin, and maintains a home in Zanzibar and another in Naples, Florida.  He is a frequent traveler on the Cunard line, especially to visit ports in the Middle East and Northern Africa.  Rumors of a significant trade in arms for mercenary armies on the African continent have occasionally surfaced, which he has denied.  Allegations of facilitating the extra-legal transfer of agricultural commodities in violation of current international sanctions for North Korean-affiliated front companies based in Africa have also been vigorously denied, though never conclusively refuted.