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.”