His own tortures increased. They hung him by his wrists from the ceiling of his cell and hit the bottoms of his feet with steel cables. This was not always done with malice; once, as he lay stretched and chained on an iron table, he managed to glimpse his tormentor from beneath his blindfold; the man hitting his feet — one of the most painful tortures conceivable and one that would leave him crippled a dozen years later — was calmly eating a banana.

Bouzari was never formally charged with anything. Instead, his interrogators (he calculates there were thirteen to sixteen in total, a figure he arrived at by keeping track of the sounds of different voices and by catching glimpses of their feet) made wild accusations. He was a spy. For whom? An industrial spy. An agent of the West. Ultimately, like nearly all other victims of torture (including Maher Arar and William Sampson), Bouzari gave in and signed a false confession, admitting that, yes, he was spying for the Italians.

“A few minutes before,” he says of his arrival at the first prison, “I had a $1.8 billion contract, twenty-eight people on my staff, big oil companies behind me. Then all of a sudden I have nothing. Their first goal was to remove me from the contract so that Mehdi could move in and have it.”

Indeed, one month after Bouzari was snatched from his apartment, in July, 1993, Iran declared the contract he had negotiated with the consortium of five European and Japanese companies void. A new company was quickly formed (as documented in the Iran Gazette) named oiec. President Rafsanjani was its titular head, the Minister of Oil, Gholam-Reza Agha-Zadeh (who is now in the UN’s crosshairs as head of Iran’s atomic-energy ogranization), was the chairman of the board, and Mehdi Hashemi was its managing director. Its main domain of activity, says Bouzari, was “facilitating the South Pars Project and all other offshore projects.”

Bouzari, though, had only one concern: basic survival. Astutely, he figured out that his best strategy was to convince his captors he was worth more alive than dead. (“They knew I had money,” he says.) It worked. His torturers contacted his wife, Fereshteh Yousefi, in Rome, using Saeed, a former employee of Bouzari’s, to make the call. Bouzari had heard Saeed had been kidnapped two months before himself and had been assisting the authorities. Saeed telephoned Fereshteh, informing her for the first time of Houshang’s situation, and asked for $5 million. In a second phone call, Fereshteh was told that Houshang had suffered a heart attack and would die if not taken to hospital, which they would do only when she paid. They then played a tape into the phone of Houshang screaming during one of his torture sessions. Fereshteh paid $3 million, all she could immediately lay her hands on, wiring the money to a Ministry of Intelligence account in the Central Bank of Iran. Ten days later, the torturers took Bouzari to a phone and allowed him to speak to his wife.

They refused, however, to release him. His jailers wanted the full $5 million and over the next six months they worked on him to get it. Bouzari knew the additional $2 million was his bargaining chip and used it to make a deal: if they let him go, he would get the money from Rome and return with it to Tehran.

Finally, on a cold January 22, 1994, dressed only in trousers and a T-shirt, Bouzari was dropped at the side of a busy traffic circle in downtown Tehran. After eight months, he was free. But only sort of. The authorities refused to allow Bouzari to leave for another six months. First he had to pay $250,000 to buy back his passport, then he was watched like a hawk. “They didn’t restrict my movements, but it was a limbo.” On two occasions he obtained an exit visa, went to the airport, bought a ticket, and boarded a plane before guards came to pull him off. Finally, in July, 1994, he succeeded in completing a flight to London, then Rome.

Incredibly, he intended to keep his part of the bargain with his torturers. He collected $100,000 as a first payment, stuffed the cash into a satchel, and headed back to Iran, believing what he’d been told: if he failed to deliver the ransom, they’d put a bomb under his car in Rome. He bought a ticket from Rome to Tehran with a stopover in Vienna. In the Vienna airport, he phoned his elderly father, who by then was living in Arizona, as were three of Bouzari’s nine siblings. “Should I go through with this?” he asked. The old man requested a few minutes to consult the Koran. Ten minutes later he called back. “We saved you once,” he said, paraphrasing a section in the scripture: “Don’t push your luck. Wake up.” Bouzari abandoned his journey and caught a flight back to Rome.

But his anxiety grew. He had not kept his part of the bargain; surely they would now find a way to kill him. He spent the next four years in a state of constant trepidation. “I had to hide myself,” he says. “I had betrayed their trust.” In October, 1994, his son started university in London. “I called him ten times a day to make sure he was alright.” Thanks to the money he’d made in the early days of his business, Bouzari was able to move around between apartments in Geneva, Rome, and London, finally settling his wife and daughter in London. On two occasions he was approached on crowded streets by people who were obviously Iranian intelligence agents. Eventually, finding the tension unbearable, the family abandoned Europe. In 1998, they arrived in Canada.

To this day, Houshang Bouzari often awakes in the night to wander around his house in a Toronto suburb, haunted by memories of his ordeal. “They put you on a stool, they put a rope around your neck, they tell you, ‘Say your last prayers,’ and it is just a matter of one small kick. If you are alive after that, it is always with you. It never goes.” Troubled by nightmares and insomnia, he sits in the eerie glow of his computer screen and checks up on the world via the Internet. At fifty-one, he is handsome, with a neatly trimmed goatee and hair that is now silver. But the marks of his traumatic experience remain. He has lost the hearing in his left ear from being beaten about the head; he has severe back pain and disk damage caused by being left to hang in his cell. Because of the injuries to his feet, his well-made shoes are two sizes larger than he used to wear. He moves like an elderly man, or someone gingerly crossing a bed of coals. With money still invested, he and his family are comfortable. But he is obsessed with his past. One day in 2000, he paid a visit to the law offices of Gardiner Miller Arnold LLT in downtown Toronto, where he met with Mark H. Arnold.

Bouzari’s first approach to Arnold was on a routine commercial matter, but in the back of his mind he had another agenda. At the end of their meeting, he told his story. Arnold was stunned. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” he says. Their meeting was scheduled for only half an hour; Arnold requested more time the following Wednesday and asked Bouzari to bring some documentation, some proof of his allegations. Bouzari came back with what paperwork he had: airline tickets, the receipt for the money transfers. Arnold asked what he wanted. Bouzari said, “I want my money back.”

Arnold had grown up in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and, briefly, Winnipeg, with politically radical Jewish parents. His father, Abe, was a founder of Manitoba’s Association for Rights and Liberties. “One of my early memories,” says Arnold, “is marching with my mother in a parade to protest the execution of the Rosenbergs [in 1953, after Julius and Ethel had been accused of being Communist spies].” Over the course of his professional life, he had strayed from those radical roots into a comfortable Bay Street commercial-law practice. Now, at fifty-seven, Arnold recognized in Bouzari’s case a chance to redeem his activist credentials. The strategy of launching a lawsuit seemed logical. “I’m a litigator,” he says. “I couldn’t conceive of doing anything else.”