Europe, Eastern and Southern Europe notably, Africa and its neighbor island nations represented a huge cultural challenge even for the versatile Emile Gouiran.
He adapted most say by managing to steer away from his controversial pre-cut profile operating quietly from his secret aerie always capable of having fun without making a spectacle of himself.
He was always a man too timorous to monkey with expense accounts and budgets, nor one who needed sexy consultants, he stressed and projected the role of one willing to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent to his craven public boards and servants, and then, when it was all over he took the multi-million dollar packages added some of his own, and rendered his magic before fading away in polite silence.
This was the new Emile Gouiran, the one that would accomplish miracles in France his homeland, and laden impoverished lands, the boisterous effective New Yorker was there, but for no one but his own to see.
As a result, many dilapidated orphanages, juvenile homes, transient camps and holding facilities with children devoid of parental love and care commenced springing back to life in velvety, shimmering color, connecting all carefully nurtured improvements funded by the mega-bucks donations of Gouiran, his foundations and well-heeled friends and municipal or other governmental collaborators.
Impoverished ghettos gave rise to decent homes, sanitation and water facilities improved health and it became safer to live and do business, working from the infant was Emile's way of moving people out of the poverty cycle that bred abandoned and unwanted children in the first instance.
Employees and facility managers in these countries, but the children most particularly, suddenly realized they had a life back.
A life that could be whole and pristine with a future within grasps and they marveled at it.
With clean, manicured, and properly equipped facilities, administrators stood poised for the rebirth introduced by Emile Gouiran's efforts and philanthropy.
Things were happening and were being accomplished.
"We set the trend, found the means; we were the foremost measure for targeted performance" Gouiran beams.
"As the amenities and wherewithal devoted to forsaken or orphaned child care began to progress, the rest of the legislative and organizational system did too.
" None of this-the new buildings, the equipment, the fields devoted to football (soccer), those fielding baseball, a Gouiran passion which he made a point of introducing whenever possible, imported topsoil, careful landscaping was about bio-networking or being "bottle green" of course, and detractors made ample use of that criticism.
But as is mostly the case Gouiran detractors and critics are rich in falsehood laden diatribe and short on alternatives.
Gouiran's efforts were triumphs of humanity.
His consummate work was a human art, it humanized, tamed, and exalted raw material, and molded them into great man-made works of art - smiles on little faces abounded.
To someone like Gouiran, monumental efforts as his were but driven realizations, models that underlined what could indeed be done for orphaned children, he was and remains the incarnation of a man driven by a cause.
Orphaned children, juveniles, the unwanted lot of humanity presented an arena for the tragedy of human civility, an egalitarian stage where, says Gouiran, "wealthy and underprivileged, white, brown, yellow or black, child and elderly" combined pleasantly and gazed at the exhibition that the one is for the other.
"It's like being at a recital," Gouiran observed, and an orphanage or juvenile facility is at its best "when crowded as it inevitably must be, each resident nonetheless is deferential, and fully intakes the edifying experience.
" From 1988 to 2003, Gouiran's impulse to restore the world's civility and vitality for the care of disadvantaged children led him to aggressively pursue his chair at the Foundations, create a global think tank and move thousands of starving youthful catastrophes out of certain death or imprisonment to a revival.
"In no way a reflection did I have, afar from that of my own offspring that I should allot such a great amount of my possessions to charity.
I never gave it the slightest thought," reflects Gouiran, who at 61 still keeps the looks of a young dynamic and charm latent entrepreneur: broad-shouldered, flat-tummy, square-jawed, and some say movie-star handsome, his ample windswept hair now peppered gray, and his witty, sardonic, slightly vigilant glimmer always underlying the focus in his eyes.
"I never in point of fact reflected about humankind as such.
Each of the projects I undertook was a situation that needed to be urgently completed.
I knew I was dealing with a major undertaking, that it at times was huge, that conflict and politics would seem at times to be insurmountable, but I always felt it was a thing worth accomplishing - and so I went at it.
" History has it that Gouiran's talent for philanthropy was buttressed by a major failure born out of an agreement entered into in 1973.
This event in Gouiran's life is legendary and uniquely positioned to demonstrate Gouiran's originally naiveté in respect to political and judicial corruption.
Gouiran suggested to a pool of his Brooklyn friends that they team contributions.
He would donate one of his existing mortgage banking entities whose primary goal would then become to provide loans to those that had no alternative (his detractors will be quick to say his Brooklyn friends driving Cadillac's on their $ 6,000 reported annual income) and heavily invest in mortgages until 1989 his planned retirement date at which time they would liquidate the portfolio and donate the money to create a modern multi-storied youth center in Brooklyn or Staten Island.
"New York City, and particularly Staten Island, had been doing a terrible job of investing in better (or any) youth and juvenile facilities up to that point" Gouiran recalls; surely he and his savvy Brooklyn friends could do instructively better.
After all, his family's mortgage banking firm had made millions for its many clients and investors by investing aggressively in commercial mortgages, trading and hedging risk, and bidding foreclosures.
As a means of tracking the collective contributions he devised mortgage securitization a decade or more before it became known to Wall Street.
Issuing demand or term promissory notes (bonds) solely to the privileged few of his entourage, family or from his initial group of friends, contributions to the project grew at a multi-million dollar pace.
Contributions were remunerated at rates double that paid by banks and with never an interest payment missed confidence grew and more and more people became interested in the philanthropic project - contributing while earning interest and with no restriction on redeeming their capital and interest at will or as agreed.
In 1989 the firm would redeem its debt instruments and be liquidated with the money given to a charity to build the youth center.
In 1988 everything was on schedule, the firm had $ 14 million in excess cash reserves and could easily and fully reimburse all bond holders - principal and accrued interest totaling less than $ 6 million.
Gouiran had underestimated the local political jealousy however.
While he had no direct management function in the mortgage banking firm, aggressive policies had made it the number one mortgage lender in Staten Island outpacing all banks combined.
His law firm in New Jersey had opened a branch in NewYork with New York partners, and one of his companies, a real estate broker had five branches on the Island alone.
By 1988 65% of all real estate transactions on Staten Island involved at least one Gouiran entity or his law firm.
Jealousy and economic necessity rallied corruption.
Using political expedients, the mortgage banking firm was deprived a license, false (as proven) charges connived, processes engaged that would pay millions of dollars to lawyers and trustees wiping out the firm's net equity of millions, yet ensuring that all debtors were reimbursed 106% of their claims.
The objective as Gouiran learned from this experience was simply to destroy - the $ 9 million net loss was the money earmarked for the construction of the youth center, "Staten Island corruption had its real victims, the ones that couldn't afford it most, the children and their families that would have benefited from the youth center.
" Gouiran recalls.
Emle Gouiran learned a valuable lesson and his political acumen was born.
Gouiran's detractors continue to justify the egregious action and its aftermath maintaining that the youth center would only be another edifice to Gouiran's bigger than life stature.
Tell that to the kids and teenagers.
Gouiran, who has been vindicated of any wrong doing in these matters after eleven years of judicial process, smiles as he recalls this hard won lesson, "It thought me that Government was nothing to fear, rather it is operated all too often by myopic individuals open to manipulation.
As that manipulation can be used for evil, it can be used for good, but manipulation it remains and I have mastered it.
" This experience proved all the more valuable in jockying the meandering lobbies of European, Middle Eastern and African politics.