A Fistful of Dinars

If you were looking to send someone on an under-the-radar mission to the Middle East, someone who would blend in with the locals, Bryan Canavan would not be your first choice. At 6 foot 6, with sandy-blond hair and blue eyes, he looks like Will Ferrell playing Jay Gatsby. In Boston, where Canavan lives and works, this is not an issue. But on the streets of Amman, Jordan, the towering-patrician look can be problematic, particularly if you’re alone, unarmed, carrying half a million dollars in cash.

Canavan, a 42-year-old businessman, is one of the people who make a living on the fringes of the Iraq war. He runs a firm called Dartmouth Capital, which is one of the largest Iraqi-currency traders in the United States and was, at the time of its founding a few years ago, one of the only outfits of its kind. Which, when you find out what being an Iraqi-currency trader entails, isn’t that surprising. On the spectrum of enterprises in Boston’s financial sector, Canavan’s falls into a remote category, somewhere between “highly specialized” and “nuts.”

With conventional currency trading, funds are moved around electronically — a button is pressed in Tokyo and an investor in Des Moines receives a billion yen. With the dinar, things are more complicated. Because the currency isn’t exchanged on the world market, trading it is a decidedly hands-on proposition. In order for an investor to acquire Iraqi bank notes, someone has to make the trip to the Arabian Peninsula, pick up a bundle of dinars, then schlep the bundle back to the States.

For the most part, these jobs are farmed out to security contractors, usually highly trained special-forces veterans. “We do a lot of clandestine things: We switch directions, switch clothes, we have a guy go in one way and out another looking like a different person,” says a representative of Templar Titan, one of the companies that often handle Middle East trips like these. “We’re trained, and we stay in the shadows.”

When Canavan started out, though, private security contractors weren’t part of the setup. In fact, there was no setup. You played it by ear. You asked around. You found a local who’d sell you dinars at a certain rate. Then you wired money to a Middle Eastern bank, flew over there to pick it up, made the swap, and came home. You hoped. “I’d go into the bank to get the money,” Canavan recalls. “The manager would take stacks of $100 bills, in $50,000 blocks, and put them on the table — in front of everyone in line, everyone could see me — a half a million dollars, and I’d walk out of there with all that money in a paper bag.” Canavan tells his story sitting in a Boylston Street Starbucks, his voice rising above a pair of chattering baristas. “It was stressful,” he says, shifting in his chair. “You become aware of who’s watching you — here’s this guy walking out with this big bag, you know, he’s not carrying Snickers bars.”

By disposition, Canavan is a man who values order, a systematic approach to getting things done. Just the memory of his seat-of-the-pants missions to the Middle East has him grinning like a man who’s taken a baseball to the groin. But he’s also a businessman, and there’s money to be made in dinars. So, over the space of a year or so, Canavan made more than a dozen trips to Jordan, putting himself in situations that would make your average Merrill Lynch trader yelp.

As he puts it now: “I always said to my partner, who’s my best friend, that while his dollars were at risk, if I didn’t get them back I’d be a lot worse off than he was.”

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