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.”