Back in 2001, Sead Dizdar­evic’s name was inseparable from the Olympic movement—but it wasn’t exactly the association he sought. The smooth-talking hospitality pitchman had first burst upon the Olympic scene in 1983 by finagling the right to sell, through a modest travel agency he owned in Staten Island, New York, package tours to thousands of Americans wanting to attend the Winter Games in his native Sarajevo, Yugo­slavia. But some two decades of Olympic wheeling and dealing later, he was almost laid low when he was swept up in a cash-for-favors scandal involving Salt Lake City’s bid to host the 2002 Winter Games. A number of International Olympic Committee members were forced to resign when it was discovered that they had accepted bribes in return for voting to award the Games to Salt Lake. Two prominent Salt Lake bid officials were indicted for fraud in the scandal, and one city official intimated, in a memo that ended up in federal court, that Dizdarevic had pretty much put the idea that the Games could be bought into local Olympic officials’ heads.

Dizdarevic escaped federal prosecution himself only by agreeing to testify that he’d assisted in the payoff scheme. He admitted that he’d given $131,000 to the Salt Lake officials—which they used as bribes—hoping his favors would win him the Games’ contract to broker travel, lodging, and tickets. Though a judge ultimately threw out the fraud case, Dizdarevic says his brush with the law scared him straight.

Well, straight is a relative term, but there is no doubt that the tawdry Salt Lake episode, rather than ruining Dizdarevic’s Olympic money machine, rejuvenated and reformed it. Now make the great leap forward to Beijing. Dizdarevic, pluckier than ever at 57, is sipping sugary espresso in the 26th-floor executive lounge of the Sofitel Wanda hotel, the French chain’s luxury flagship in Asia. His Olympic hospitality firm, Jet Set Sports, of Far Hills, New Jersey, owns the rights to 175 rooms in the Sofitel, plus the $20,000-a-night presidential suite, for this month’s Games.

That’s nearly half of the five-star hotel, for 18 days, paid in full. And the Sofitel is but one property in Jet Set’s vast portfolio of high-end Beijing hotels, making Dizdarevic the must-see man for corporations heading to the Olympics.

Still, on a recent swing through Beijing to nail down final arrangements, Dizdarevic is feeling fleeced. A Sofitel manager is asking $65 a head for buffet breakfasts during the Games, twice the hotel’s normal rate. The hotelier is also demanding that Dizdarevic pay extra for the grand ballroom, where Jet Set plans to wine and dine hundreds of clients for BHP Billiton, the Australian mining colossus. Annoyed, Dizdarevic counters with what he calls the Jet Set model: a package price for food, drink, and facilities for 7,800 meals, including a “guaranteed” 40 percent profit margin for Sofitel.

“You should capitalize on the Olympics, but that doesn’t mean you have a license to steal,” he scolds the nattily dressed Frenchman. “Remember, I have other options, even for breakfast.”

“For everything,” the young manager demurs, in heavily accented English, “you have options.”

Dizdarevic leaves without a deal, trailed by his son Alan, 25, who runs Jet Set’s China office. “They’ll learn,” Sead (pronounced Sid) says, driving off into the smog-filled city, as I tag along for the ride.

It’s a lesson everyone who wants a piece of the action at the Olympics figures out: It’s Sead Dizdarevic’s world; the rest of us are just guests. Since Sarajevo, Dizdarevic has perfected the art of what he delicately calls the “advanced royalty”—paying off Olympic pooh-bahs for the ultimate service monopoly on the ultimate destination event. For years, “it was almost like an under-the-rug deal,” Dizdarevic acknowledges. He was the supreme promoter, schmoozing, boozing, and cajoling Olympic organizers and teams from around the globe—including the U.S. Olympic Committee—to secure the best tickets and accommodations, which he bundled at hefty markups for corporations and ultra-affluent clients. This system, energized by Dizdarevic’s 1,000-watt salesmanship, a world-class Rolodex, and an impeccable record for service, pumped millions of dollars of profits into his pockets—and into the Olympic coffers of several cash-starved countries. This made Dizdarevic the Games’ indispensable, if unofficial, fixer.

The Salt Lake scandal ended this improvised, quasi-legal system, and Dizdarevic no longer carries around bricks of cash and unsigned traveler’s checks, which—according to Ante Jedrejcic, Dizdarevic’s former brother-in-law, who worked for him before they fell out in the mid-1990s—he once used to acquire the suitcases of tickets earmarked for, say, the Polish or Bulgarian Olympic team. (Dizdarevic dismisses his former relative as an “exaggerator.”) Nor does he still pad his payroll with the wives, girlfriends, and daughters of the powerful men he needed to grease his exclusive access to the Olympics. Now he pays millions of dollars in formal sponsorship fees to the Olympic gods, just as Nike, Hilton, and other corporations do. In exchange, he gets all the top-tier tickets and hotels he needs, plus a catchy title: official hospitality operator of the Olympic Games.

But if you think this legally acquired title has quieted controversy around Dizdarevic, you’re wrong. Competitors gripe that he’s a concierge gone wild—that Jet Set’s monopoly cuts them out and that it may even violate U.S. antitrust laws.

Dizdarevic seems oblivious to such bad-mouthing—or perhaps, with the Games imminent, he’s too busy to pay much attention. After marching out of the Sofitel, he spends more hours haggling over breakfasts for AT&T and Medtronic at Beijing’s Novotel Peace hotel and over lunch menus for HSBC, Herbalife, and Lehman Brothers (among dozens of others) at the Commune by the Great Wall Kempinski hotel. His mind is a sponge for details—rooms, wines, snacks, buses, tickets, distances, even wallpaper. He meets his match in a Kempinski sales director named Adelina Ye, who drags him clause by clause through their food-and-beverage contract, quibbling over such unusual demands as Jet Set’s requirement that the hotel chef order all raw materials 45 days before the Games. “Believe me, we’ve learned the hard way. There are always scarcities,” Dizdarevic tells her. Later, he dispatches an aide to find out if Ye will come to work for him.

In traffic between meetings, Dizdarevic works a BlackBerry and answers a Chinese cell phone from the backseat of a black Audi. “Sergei, how are you?” he says ingratiatingly. The caller is Sergei Plastinin, the Russian dairy, fruit juice, and fashion tycoon, who’s inquiring about a luxury suite in the main Olympic stadium. “It’s $650,000,” Dizdarevic tells him without flinching, “plus my brokerage fee,” capped at 20 percent by Olympic rules.

Actually, Jet Set’s corporate packages sold out months ago, but Dizdarevic, like the scalper he professes not to be, always holds certain “assets” in reserve. In Beijing, he’s husbanding most of the city’s five-star presidential suites, a dozen in all. “You sit on them, wait for people to come to you,” he tells me. “Usually the richest people come very late. They think they can get anything.”

One such request pops up hours later, in the lobby of Dizdarevic’s Beijing hotel. Over tea, Lynn Robbroeckx of ArcelorMittal says she desperately needs eight tickets to the opening ceremonies for her boss, Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate ranked fourth on Forbes’ list of billionaires. “We’ve been so busy running our steel business, we forgot to take care of this,” Robbroeckx says. The same thing happened in Athens, Dizdarevic reminds her. The Mittals showed up at the 2004 Games in their yacht without a place to dock. Dizdarevic had to scurry to find them an official Olympic car—to drive in the official Olympic lanes—and a berth for their yacht near the cruise ships that Jet Set had chartered for its guests.

Beijing is more complicated. Though the Mittals want to attend just the first four days of the Games, Dizdarevic recommends that ArcelorMittal lock in packages for the entire period to ensure premium access. Jet Set can meet their plane at the airport, he says, but the private jet will have to land under Jet Set’s auspices because, during the Games, Beijing is only accepting the private planes of Olympic officials, heads of state, and official sponsors like Jet Set. For the opening ceremonies, the Mittals will be dropped off at Jet Set’s hospitality suite on the main Olympic Green; hostesses will escort them to their seats in the stadium, based on Olympic protocol. Afterward, they’ll file back to the Jet Set lounge. “It’s mass confusion, so we’ll need to calm everybody down with a drink,” Dizdarevic says.

Robbroeckx looks relieved, especially when she hears that Jet Set will have plenty of vegetarian food on hand for the Mittals. Dizdarevic requests that the family, who lives in London, register for the trip through the Yale School of Management, which is co-sponsoring a leadership conference at the Games with Jet Set. That should avoid any territorial conflicts, because Dizdarevic doesn’t hold Olympic rights to solicit business in Britain. “And tell your boss,” Dizdarevic says, “if he wants to do any entertaining in London”—at the 2012 Games—“he needs to tell me two years in advance.”

The Beijing games dwarf anything Dizdarevic has done before. Jet Set has sold more than 70,000 packages for Beijing, compared with 20,000 trips for the Turin Winter Games in 2006, its previous high. Dizdarevic has plunked down roughly $130 million on this year’s Summer Games, including more than $30 million in sponsorship fees, mostly paid to Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee; $37 million for hotels and meals; $20 million for management systems and local staff (including a yearlong course to teach local hires Olympic etiquette and how to deftly handle foreign visitors); and $15 million for tickets. He expects revenue of nearly $200 million. Beijing could have been even bigger. “I simply stopped selling,” he says. “With so much new business, I didn’t want to jeopardize delivery.”

Jet Set’s rivals say that his control of the market is unfair and is possibly an illegal monopoly. “Jet Set uses tickets as their choke point for everything they do,” says the president of a sports-­management firm, who claims his company has lost several major clients in recent years because of Dizdarevic’s hold on tickets. “A service monopoly isn’t like a Coke or a Visa sponsorship,” says this person, who insists on anonymity because he fears retribution from Dizdarevic and the U.S. Olympic Committee. “You can always walk across the street and use your Amex card or drink a Pepsi. Not with this deal.”

Even the U.S. Olympic team’s own corporate sponsors must go to Jet Set for tickets—leverage that Dizdarevic uses to sell them full hospitality packages, according to an executive who runs the Olympic program for one corporate sponsor. To illustrate the point, a Jet Set competitor recounts a conference call earlier this year: It was organized by a Canadian corporation for several firms vying to manage its guest program at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. During the Q&A, whose participants included SportsMark Management Group of Larkspur, California, and Iluka of London, Dizdarevic blurted out, “Where will you get gold-medal-hockey tickets?”

The answer is, of course, obvious. Dizdarevic has the lion’s share. After a long, knowing pause, the would-be sponsor chuckled and said, “Oh, Sead, you ask such good questions.”

Technically, each national Olympic committee controls ticket distribution in its own country. But in recent years, the U.S.O.C. and the Olympic committees of Canada, Australia, and several European countries have anointed Jet Set as their exclusive hospitality and ticket provider. Elbowed aside, other firms say they’ve explored challenging Jet Set’s monopoly in U.S. courts but are afraid of saddling the Olympic hierarchy with costly antitrust litigation. “The time to strike would have been in 2003” after Dizdarevic signed his initial deal with the U.S.O.C., one rival says. “Now he’s too big. There just aren’t a lot of people with the stomach for a fight.”

Those who do defy Dizdarevic find a tough adversary. Beijing’s most popular luxury hotel, the Grand Hyatt, just two blocks from Tiananmen Square, negotiated for months with Jet Set back in 2005 over a block of roughly 100 rooms and suites, says Christopher Koehler, the hotel’s general manager. After six months of talks, Dizdarevic walked away. But Koehler says he has no regrets.

“They’re sharks,” Koehler says. “They came in very early and tried to scare us that we wouldn’t fill the hotel for all 18 days.” During the negotiations, Dizdarevic invited Koehler to attend the Turin Games as his guest, but the New Jersey native declined. “I didn’t think it was appropriate to be in his pocket,” Koeh­ler says. The manager says his hotel will earn more from the Games than what Jet Set had offered. “Why hand over product to somebody else who’s just going to profit from your work?” Koehler asks.

Dizdarevic, for his part, says the Grand Hyatt is slashing prices to fill rooms during the Games, just as he predicted it would. He says Jet Set recently turned down single rooms going for 50 percent less than what the hotel was asking in 2005. “ ‘You’re three years too late,’ I told them,” Dizdarevic says. (Koehler counters that he’s comfortable that the Grand Hyatt will earn a healthy profit from the Games.)

It’s perhaps no paradox that some of Dizdarevic’s corporate clients praise him with the same intensity as his detractors criticize him. “Sead really understands the Olympics. He’s also a great negotiator,” says Deirdre Latour, who runs the Olympic-­guest program for General Electric, a worldwide Olympic sponsor. This summer, G.E.’s corporate and business units are sending 2,000 guests to Beijing with Jet Set. “How do you structure a day for customers that includes Olympic events, tourist sites, meals, transportation, drop-offs, signage in multiple languages? Sead gets it done,” Latour says.

Raised in a secular Muslim family north of Sarajevo, Dizdarevic left the air force academy at age 20 and moved to West Germany to play club soccer. In 1972, he went on a shopping junket to New York and stayed. “I thought, What a great country. No one asks my religion,” he says. Following a stint as an airline mechanic in Newark, New Jersey, he opened a travel agency for Yugoslav immigrants on Staten Island. The business mushroomed, drawing Yugoslavs of every ethnic stripe. “Bosnians were considered neutral. We worked with everyone,” Dizdarevic says. It was that very agency through which Dizdarevic—aided by a check he delivered to the right people in what was then Yugoslavia—won the right to become the travel and ticket agent for the Sarajevo Games, which launched his Olympic career. He married a Croatian-American Catholic. They have two sons and a daughter.

Prosperity and the stress that comes with it have brought him a shock of white hair and crow’s-feet that nearly engulf his eyes when he laughs, which is often. Though diminutive, Dizdarevic still moves with athletic grace, which he puts to good use during the occasional ski trips that the demands of his Olympic-­concierge life still allow. His real love, though, is hunting: He’s a little guy with big guns and the trophies to prove he knows how to shoot them. At Jet Set’s headquarters, in an old mansion in Somerset County, New Jersey, a pair of giant elephant tusks frame one end of the main hall; a seven-foot-tall mounted Canadian polar bear stands guard at the other. But Dizdarevic is proudest of the stuffed African lion and leopard that adorn his home.

Beijing is his richest prey ever. It took three years of coddling and cajoling to reach a sponsorship deal with China’s Olympic leaders. “We had to educate them,” he says. “At first, the Chinese said, ‘Okay, the price is $500 a room, plus tickets.’ We said, ‘You need to talk thousands of room nights, multiple hotels, 100 percent occupancy, sponsorship rights, staff costs. What if you sell only 60 percent? How do you factor all that in?’ We explained to them, ‘The first and last waves of guests, for the opening and closing ceremonies, you can mark up 100 percent. But you can’t mark up the middle wave.’ They thought you could just book the Olympics like a hotel.”

Dizdarevic worried that Chinese competitors would undercut Jet Set by selling Olympic packages overseas. So he paid the Beijing organizers to become the official hospitality operator for China’s domestic market too. The sponsorship deal had to be approved by China’s politburo, Dizdarevic says. His key Chinese associate is a functionary named Li Qibin. Li is general manager of China’s largest travel company, government-­owned C.I.T.S. Beijing, which procured most of Jet Set’s hotels, restaurants, vehicles, and local workers.

To an Italian lunch with Dizdarevic in Beijing, Li brings his English-speaking assistant; Lu Jun, the head of the C.I.T.S. department devoted to English-speaking clients; Lu’s English-speaking assistant; and Lu’s assistant’s assistant. None of them speaks English very well. Li, the boss, speaks French.

Dizdarevic broaches a sensitive subject. “As you know, Jet Set’s guests are special,” he begins. More than 11,000 of them will tour the Great Wall, Forbidden City, and Temple of Heaven during the Games, and they don’t like waiting in lines, Dizdarevic explains. “Can we have special entrances for Olympic-family V.I.P.’s?” he asks.

“We’ll try our best,” responds Lu. Unsatisfied, Dizdarevic homes in on the young manager, who will oversee 16 C.I.T.S. supervisors assigned to Jet Set for the Games. “Is it possible for you to spend a week with us training in the U.S.?” Dizdarevic asks Lu.

The invitation, translated into Chinese, whirs around the table. “Really? Not joking?” Lu erupts. “Okay, if my boss says it’s okay.” Across the table, the C.I.T.S. chief, himself one of seven Chinese officials whom Dizdarevic hosted at the Turin Games in 2006, nods his approval.

Li says he became a big supporter of Jet Set while visiting Dizdarevic’s V.I.P. operation as his guest in Turin. Several foreign travel companies came through Beijing seeking Olympic tie-ins, Li says, but Jet Set was the only one to offer yearlong training in English and “how to treat the V.I.P.’s.” Li waves away the question of whether V.I.P.-ism clashes with Communism, noting that the Chinese government stands solidly behind the country’s economic rise. “I never imagined that Chinese could afford washing machines and Walkmans. But now many Chinese have them. I have 300 employees in my agency, and more than 100 have cars. The government is giving bonheur for the majority.”

Li’s firm interviewed 3,000 university students to select 800 for training at Jet Set Academy as guides and protocol officers. The students are paid to spend three hours a week in the classroom learning about Western culture and etiquette and Olympic history, with one overarching goal decreed by Dizdarevic: “To get them to think outside the box,” says Elizabeth Ganschow, the veteran China hand who runs Jet Set Academy.

During one evening class, a trainee asks if Westerners have any special needs that “Orientals” don’t. “They want downtime, to be left alone,” answers Jay Liu, a program manager at Jet Set. Another young woman asks what to say if asked about sensitive topics like Taiwan. First, Liu tells her, take the guest aside and speak privately. “My answer would be, ‘I think Taiwan’s part of China, like a younger brother. How can part of the family leave the family?’ ” Liu says. “Don’t be too detailed. Keep it ambiguous.”

Before wrapping up in Beijing, Dizdarevic stops by the Sofitel to see if the manager has come to his senses. This time, the Jet Set boss tells the Frenchman that his groups will eat breakfast in the main dining room—a nightmare scenario for a hotel planning to run at 100 percent occupancy. “What if there are no seats?” the manager asks.

“People will get up earlier the next time,” Dizdarevic says.

A few days later, back in New Jersey, Dizdarevic gets word that the Sofitel has slashed its quote in half for breakfast and is throwing in use of the ballroom for free. “If I wanted to play a game with him, I could squeeze him to death,” Dizdarevic says. “I charge a lot of money too, but I have never charged anyone three or four times my cost.”

The Highs and Lows of Attending the Olympics

Two ways to go: Jet Set’s corporate packages versus tourist class

Deluxe Corporate Hospitality Program
18 days for up to 30 people.
15 rooms or suites at the five-star Sofitel Wanda hotel, Ritz Carlton, or JW Marriott.
V.I.P. tickets of your choice for each occupant of each room (two events per day); could include tickets for the opening or closing ceremonies, hockey finals, basketball finals, or other premium events.
For every 15 rooms, one deluxe bus or limousine for transportation to and from the events.
Reserved dining at premium restaurants, including those at Commune by the Great Wall Kempinski hotel
Guided tours of the Great Wall, Forbidden City, and Temple of Heaven.
Daily breakfast in hotel ballroom.
$2 million to $3 million
Provider: Jet Set Sports,
Far Hills, New Jersey

A Typical Package for the "Civilian" Traveler
Five days’ accommodations at the Tianlun Songhe Hotel.
Tickets to two Level-1 events and two Level-2 events, like boxing or rowing (surcharges may apply)
Round-trip transportation to and from events.
Guided group tour of Beijing’s tourist attractions with English-speaking guides.
Access to the trip provider’s Olympic Green hospitality area with English-speaking guides and concierges
Optional upgrades to Level-1 tickets.
Daily breakfast.
$6,250 per person
Provider: Roadtrips Inc.,
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Note: Prices are for double occupancy and do not include airfare.—Jessica Liebman