[Dottore]

I traveled to Brunei on business fairly often in the early 1990's, and have a thousand stories about the Sultan. He's a very strange dude.

One time one of my clients was there to sell armored Mercedes limos to the Sultan. The Sultan gathered a few family members in a viewing stand near the palace while my client and his helpers drove by with an assortment of these limos to demonstrate their maneuverability. As they drove through the slalom course, the Sultan and his staff took pot shots at them with automatic weapons. My client nearly shat himself.

Another time I was booked on a Brunei Airways flight from Brunei to KL. On a 757. It was the last flight of the day. When I got onboard, there was a net suspended half way down the cabin, and the rear of the cabin had the seats taken out and was filled with the Sultans polo ponies—which had to be in KL the next morning for a match. Amazing flight with a dozen horses in the passenger cabin!

His car collection is legendary in Asia. Among other things, he has a bunch of replica 1960 Mercedes Gullwings that the factory built for him at vast expense—with new mechanicals (including air-conditioning) of course, but otherwise indistinguishable from the original article. And he loved Ferrari station wagons for some reason. You would see the regularly in Brunei—all purpose built for the Sultan in very strange colors. The strangest car I ever saw was an elongated Rolls Royce pick-up truck which was built to transport his dogs around the palace grounds.

But the best gossip always had to do with the cat-fights between his various wives and mistresses. Those were truly the stuff of legend.