Mexico: Modern Medici

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Acquisitive Urge. Pagliai lives like the fiscal prince that he is. His showplace home in suburban Mexico City is a white brick Georgian mansion, graced with 14 live-in servants and 50 imported Italian umbrella cypresses planted in holes blasted into lava rock. Besides collecting pesos, he acquires Dresden figurines, Chinese jade, Venetian glass and ancient Spanish books that he often pores over until 2 a.m. His house also shelters Mexico's most distinguished selection of wines (7,000 bottles) and its finest private art collection—El Greco, Botticelli, Van Dyck, Dali, Diego Rivera—as well as Pagliai's picturesque third wife, international Screen Star Merle Oberon.* When someone once asked why he does not retire to contemplate his gentle Corots and just clip coupons, Pagliai replied that "clipping coupons gives you calluses on the brain. I work because I still have the ability to create." While making articulate points about the businessman's duty to develop a country, he is the first to agree that he has made a good thing out of it, and does not consider the two motives contradictory.