Aristotle Onassis was born in 1906 in the Greek city of Smyrna (later occupied by Turkey). What little data is available about his childhood suggests that those years were quite difficult: he lost his mother when he was still a baby, and his father remarried a year and a half later. Her relationship with her stepmother was extremely bad: they were in a constant state of war, he considered her a usurper and refused to obey her. Besides, his relationship with his father wasn’t much better. A wealthy wholesaler in Smyrna, he was a strict father whom his son feared.

As a result of these problems, Onassis did poorly in school. He did not like to study and constantly missed classes. He was also extremely disruptive and annoyed his classmates. As a result, he was expelled from all the schools he attended. Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that Onassis never finished his studies. When he took the final exams required to earn a high school diploma in 1922, he flunked out and never tried again.

The same year, the situation became even more difficult for him: the Turks invaded the city of Smyrna from Onassis after defeating the Greek army. Young Onassis, then 16, was caught up, as he would often later recall, in the disaster that followed. The Turkish army swept the city from one side to the other for many days, killing, looting and burning. Smyrna was completely destroyed.

Onassis’s father gathered his family inside his house when the Turks entered the village and closed the doors and windows. Terrified, they saw the destruction through the cracks in the walls. On the fifth day, the Turks entered the house and arrested his father, leaving young Onassis as the only male there. The next day, Onassis took on the responsibility of rescuing the family from him. He went out into the chaotic streets of Smyrna, and there by chance he met the American vice-consul. With his intervention, the Onassis family was immediately transferred by small boat to the nearby Greek island of Lesbos. Three weeks later, the Onassis family arrived at the Greek port of Piraeus – as war refugees – in a deplorable state.

Desperate, Onassis came up with the idea of ​​emigrating to the United States. But he couldn’t get a visa, so as a second option he decided on Argentina. Unfortunately, his father vehemently objected, so much so that he refused even to give her the money for the tickets. Onassis was forced to ask some of his friends for a loan. He got an insignificant amount, and with it he embarked on a risky adventure. In August 1923 he left the Greek port of Piraeus, arriving a month later in Buenos Aires. He was only 17 years old, he grabbed a broken suitcase and he didn’t have a penny.

His first priority was, of course, finding a job. He soon realized that it would not be easy. To stay alive, he had to wash dishes in restaurants and carry bricks on construction sites. Finally, in March 1924 he found work at the Buenos Aires Telephone Company as an electrician. This was not the Argentina that Onassis had dreamed of.

But in 1925, Onassis’s fate changed. As soon as he found a decent job, his next step was to reach an agreement with his father so that he could start selling Greek tobacco in Argentina. In early 1925, he began corresponding with his father and soon persuaded him to send her samples of high-quality Greek tobacco. With samples in hand, Onassis began visiting Argentine cigarette manufacturers to try to sell them tobacco. He quickly received the first order from him, for $10,000. As the quality of the tobacco was excellent, a second order soon followed, for $50,000. Orders came faster and faster. By May 1925 he had managed to put $25,000 in the bank, not bad for someone recently broke. And between 1930 and 1931 he expanded the business to Cuba and Brazil.

In the fall of 1932, Onassis pooled all his savings – some $600,000 – and sailed to London, the maritime capital of the world, to buy ships. Due to the economic crisis of 1929-1932, the prices of the ships had been drastically reduced. A ten-year-old freighter, which had cost $1 million to build in 1920, was now available for $20,000. Onassis soon found what he was looking for: an entire fleet of ten such ships was for sale in Saint Lawrence in Canada. In the winter of the same year, he was found in San Lorenzo. After brief negotiations, he bought six of those ships in 1933, for $20,000 each.

Onassis’s career as a point guard had begun.