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.