From PEOPLE Magazine
Click to enlarge
Several celebs—Marlon Brando, Brooke Shields and Tony Curtis, among others—own isles. But Vladi, who has 20 employees in Hamburg, Germany, and in Canada, sells mainly to a lower-profile clientele. Prices range from $16,000 (for three rocky acres off Scotland) to $30 million (1,112 lush ones off Panama). Author Edward de Bono, 66, has bought four. "They are cheaper and less trouble than women," he jokes. "And you can have as many as you like."
The Hamburg-born son of a homemaker and a businessman, Vladi is divorced and has an adult daughter. He got his start while working as a banker 28 years ago, when he tried to buy an island but found it outside his price range. So he took a few photos and sent them to wealthy prospects. When one agreed to pay him to arrange the sale, his new career was launched, one that has gone so well he now has two islands of his own, near Halifax and New Zealand.
The job is not without adventure. A few years back a fisherman forgot to pick him up. "I had to take off my pants and swim through cold water," he recalls. And that, he says, taught him a lesson he passes on to clients: "Your island must never become your prison."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
