According to Koskoff, James became fascinated with guns at an early age. In 1969, he moved to
Delhi, India, which he used as a jumping off point to undertake exotic animal hunts across
India,
Afghanistan,
Nepal,
Mongolia,
Iran,
Pakistan, and
Thailand. Mellon renounced his
United States citizenship in 1977 and took up residence in
Monaco, while maintaining a penthouse in
New York City. He is a British Overseas Territories citizen. A second edition of
African Hunter, published in the 1980s, was sold exclusively by
Abercrombie & Fitch. In 2011, Mellon authored a biography of
Thomas Mellon,
The Judge: A Life of Thomas Mellon, Founder of a Fortune. By the early 2000s, James was being referred to as the patriarch of the Mellon family.
Finances Mellon was named in the
Offshore Leaks files released by the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2013. According to the ICIJ, he "used four companies in the BVI [British Virgin Islands] and
Liechtenstein to trade securities and transfer tens of millions of dollars among offshore bank accounts he controlled... He often used third parties' names as directors and shareholders of his companies rather than his own". In the 2020s, he unsuccessfully fought a claim of tax delinquency brought against him by the
IRS, arguing he had no tax obligation to the United States due to his primarily foreign residency and citizenship; according to James, his American home was occupied exclusively by wife Vivian, the pair living "interesting, separate lives". ==Personal life==