He had only been rousted once, and that was just by the casino security guards. He said he didn't understand why it freaked him out because he was pretty much FEARLESS, he thought.

He told me about the time he was washed out to sea by a strong rip tide and he was so far out he couldn't see shore anymore. And he thought to himself, "Well, I can either give up or I can keep swimming." He kept swimming and made it back to shore. I'm not sure that proves you're fearless entirely, but it does show you have… persistence and guts.

Maybe, because Jacek was raised in the authoritarian communist system, he was just afraid of confronting the man.

With the Polish Zloty about 500 to the dollar, however, he'd tasted the honey, and the money he'd made made him almost a rich man in Poland. So he was looking for another gambling gig. He later told me that's why he was courting my favor.

I'd gotten an undeserved reputation as being a sort of political Svengali because a few years before the Berlin Wall came down, I had asked every one of my Polish friends, "How long till The Soviet Union collapses?" That was a result of reading, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984 by Andrei Amalrik, who, writing from the Gulag, argued that things were so bad and the land was so fractured among different language speakers that It wouldn't survive until 1984.

They all told me that was a silly conspiracy theory, that The Soviet Union was too strong and entrenched and it would last forever.

Political Svengali at your service.

So, Jacek figured I'd be interested in the Gdansk Shipyards where the Polish Revolution to break away from the Soviet Union started with Solidarnosc (Solidarity), the Polish trade union, and led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. And so he hired that socialist economist, the one mentioned in the title, to take me on a tour.