Rafik quickly began mixing his politics with his money. Prior to the civil war, Beirut—with its deep port and one of the longest commercial airstrips in the region at the time—had been a center of banking and trade, as well as a tourist destination for the entire region and much of the Francophone world. The 1970s jet set had dubbed it the Paris of the Middle East, both for its picturesque mix of colonial and Arab architecture and for its lax French-inspired mores. But the war wiped all that out and took Lebanon’s economy with it. Rafik’s dream was to tap into the growing global market created by free-flowing capital, financial service centers, and oil-rich sheiks looking to escape the burkas and the booze-free zones of their desert kingdoms. “My father believed in Lebanon,” Saad says. “He believed in the people. He believed they deserved to rebuild their country.”

Rafik Hariri created a reconstruction company called Solidere, which seized all land in the bombed-out city center, and managed the rebuilding effort. The redevelopment would cover 472 acres and cost $18 billion. (Rafik would later be accused of bribing 40 parliament members with up to $100,000 each or interest-free loans from his bank of up to $1 million, in return for their passing the law that approved the new plan. Rafik always denied it, and no charges were ever filed.) Rafik then appointed men from his own companies to run the firm.

When Solidere went public in 1994, it raised $650 million from investors. Rafik bought in for $180 million, close to the 10 percent ownership cap, becoming its largest stockholder. To supporters, he was putting his money where his mouth was. But to critics, such involvement was a blatant conflict of interest; they felt that Rafik was treating the prime minister’s post as his own private real estate office. “Hariri was not a leader of Lebanon,” says Mroue, who as publisher of the Daily Star chronicled Rafik’s rise. “He was chairman of the board.”

But trouble was brewing between Rafik and the Syrians, who would come to feel their onetime vassal had become too powerful, with too many influential friends. In the immediate aftermath of post-Saddam Iraq, Rafik’s ties to the West seemed suspect. “If you want to understand what happened to Hariri, think The Godfather,” a Lebanese journalist says. “Two gangsters get into a fight over turf. One loses. Now his son is in the middle.”

No one expected Saad Hariri to succeed his father in politics. Before he arrived on the scene, few people in Lebanon even knew him. He had spent much of his adult life in Saudi Arabia. (The Saudi goatee he still wears is a reminder to many that he is an outsider.) Unlike his father, Saad grew up privileged and connected; he had bodyguards, flew on private jets, socialized with Saudi princes. But Rafik, a devout Muslim, had schooled his children on modesty.

“My father was against what you’d call the capriciousness of the rich,” says Saad’s half brother Fahed, a 26-year-old architect. Fahed, who inherited $2.3 billion, discusses the family with me one January afternoon in his Paris apartment. It is a big place, stuffed with Nan Goldin photos (still crated), guarded by a couch-jumping Italian greyhound, and overlooking the Place de la Concorde, where Marie Antoinette lost her head. “This is something the whole family learned in Saudi Arabia,” he says, “this nobility they have. We could have taken a car to a nightclub and done the whole flashy thing. My sister, Hind, could have been Paris Hilton. But our father was respected and admired by everyone. Why would we seek that?”

After Saad graduated from Georgetown University in 1992 with a bachelor’s in international business, Rafik put him to work learning the ins and outs of business at Oger. He supervised construction sites, and as a maintenance contractor for the Saudi royal palaces, he was on call night and day. But by the time he became general manager, he was eager to prove himself and diversify beyond rebar and poured concrete. He began spending billions of dollars of his father’s money buying up cell-phone licenses, partnering with big boys like Virgin Mobile and Qualcomm in such places as South Africa, Pakistan, and Romania.

“It took my father a bit of time, because my father was a very down-to-earth man,” Fahed says. “He liked buildings, things you could see. ‘Money is here; why would it be over there?’ Telecom seemed like a wild gamble. Saad convinced him. He pushed Oger.”

Saad was negotiating his crowning business achievement, the purchase of Türk Telekom, when assassins killed his father. In the days that followed, it was not Saad, but Bahaa, who took charge of the family’s affairs and became the face of its grief. Bahaa addressed the angry crowds looking for answers to the murder and political solutions to the Syrian occupation. But it was not Bahaa who became the chosen heir. “My brother wanted to go back to his private life,” Saad told me in Beirut, then jokingly added, “He is the older brother, so he pushed me: ‘Listen, you go and take that job.’ ” But when I pressed him about rumors that he himself orchestrated his ascent, he turned serious: “I hear people say that I pushed myself on somebody’s shoulders to make myself the leader. You don’t take that seriously. Some people speak of a political dynasty, but it is not like that.”

The family says it collectively agreed that Saad should be the one to assume his father’s mantle. But according to Western officials and people in Saad’s party, the Saudis did the pushing. The royal family has long kept a strong hand in Lebanese affairs, and being Sunni Muslims, as are the Hariris, the Saudis have a strategic interest in keeping the Syrian regime and its Hezbollah allies at bay. They already knew Saad from his work in Riyadh and preferred his deferential style over Bahaa’s unpredictable temper. “Bahaa has a very strong personality,” Fahed says. “In Chinese astrology, he is horse and fire, which is very rare and strong. I love him for this because he is straight and direct. Saad is a different kind of intelligence. We can say he’s more diplomatic than Bahaa.”