Avenue Capital Group founder Marc Lasry and Bruce Grossman, his senior manager of investment, were on a private jet returning to New York from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 2005 when they felt the plane’s cabin suddenly heat up.

Even in an industry full of risk takers, James Dondero stands out.

Israel’s multilane Ayalon Highway runs parallel to the Mediterranean Sea, past Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers, funneling traffic to its wealthy suburbs.

When Antoine van Agtmael was traveling around Asia in the late 1970s, he became convinced there were companies worth investing in throughout the developing region. In 1981, while working for the World Bank’s International Finance Corp., he presented an idea for a “third- world equity fund” to Salomon Brothers Inc.

When Margarita Louis-Dreyfus took her 13-year-old twins on a weeklong trip to Brazil for school break in October 2010, it wasn’t a beach-filled vacation.

When Alan Howard set off for a business trip to India as a young Salomon Brothers bond trader in the late 1980s, colleagues advised against drinking local water. When he got back, the buzz on his trading desk was about the huge tab Howard had run up buying cases of Evian water, according to a person who worked with him at the time.

On a dark, drizzly November morning, Michael Farmer steps to the pulpit to deliver a stern message to fellow parishioners at St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, an 800-year-old church in the shadow of the London Metal Exchange and in the heart of the City, London’s financial district.

Charles Payson Coleman III, known as Chase, is as close as one gets to American aristocracy.

Cradling his iPad, Sheikh Fahad bin Abdullah Al-Thani, a member of Qatar’s royal family, casts his gaze on a bay colt.

Erik Nelson was working in Stamford, Connecticut, as a research analyst at FMG USA LLC, the U.S. arm of FMG, a fund of funds specializing in emerging and frontier markets, when his bosses called him into a meeting in September 2009.

It’s just after 8 a.m. on Nov. 11, and Peter Ackerman is staring at red numbers flashing on an electronic board. He sees 2,008,069.

Clarisse Kambire’s nightmare rarely changes. It’s daytime. In a field of cotton plants that burst with purple and white flowers, a man in rags towers over her, a stick raised above his head. Then a voice booms, jerking Clarisse from her slumber and making her heart leap. “Get up!”

Herman Sifontes used to manage more than $200 million in client assets as the head of Venezuela’s largest brokerage. Then, in the spring of 2010, he was arrested and his firm was shut down as part of a purge of brokers by President Hugo Chavez.

Laszlo Birinyi says he knew it would be hard to make predictions for 2012 in October, when he saw a headline suggesting that markets would rise or fall depending on whether the tiny nation of Slovakia approved a bailout plan for Europe.