Advance Praise for
KING LARRY
“Larry Lee Hillblom (1943–1995) does not have the immediate
name recognition of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Howard
Hughes, but the enigmatic founder of DHL has a story that
is just as fascinating—and more mysterious—than any of
these genius entrepreneurs . . . a gripping account of the mercurial,
visionary, complicated billionaire’s life.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Praise for
MAXED OUT
“Fiendishly clever . . . After reading Maxed Out, you’re going to want to shed
your creditors and reacquaint yourself with the concept of cash.”
—BARBARA EHRENREICH
“He’s right on the money.” —THE WASHINGTON POST
“Astute indictment of the credit card industry . . . Smartly written
and by turns funny, irreverent, serious, and angry, Scurlock’s
book is well timed . . . he builds a persuasive case that
deserves serious attention.”
—THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
“Debt is most certainly a taboo subject in our culture, which
makes Scurlock’s movie and book that much harder to eyeball.
Do. Both, if possible. It’s scary stuff, and oh, so real.”
—USA TODAY
“James Scurlock . . . is an engaging guide to the
corporate numbers games and the personal side of financial ruin.”
—MOTH ER JONES
“The bone-chilling, bloodcurdling, hair-raising story of a country (guess which one?) that’s up to its eyeballs in credit card debt.”
—NEW YORK
When globalization pioneer and reclusive billionaire Larry Hillblom disappeared in 1995, he left behind an international fiasco that is still unraveling today.
King Larry is a three-part journey, beginning with the early years of a mercurial young man who grew up fatherless on a peach farm outside of Fresno, California. Months after graduating from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1969, Hillblom cofounded DHL—three years before FedEx was formed—and it quickly became the fastest-growing corporation in history.
Hillblom’s expatriate life began twelve years later, when he retreated to a small tax haven in the Western Pacific. There, James Scurlock reveals, Hillblom led the resistance to American meddling in the Mariana Islands, rewrote the tax code and real-estate laws, and became a Supreme Court justice—among other unlikely exploits.
Hillblom’s voracious appetite for underage prostitutes is another facet of his convoluted story, illuminating the realities of the sex and human-trafficking industries in Southeast Asia. But Hillblom’s amoral, thrill-seeking nature finally caught up with him when his vintage seaplane disappeared off the coast of Anatahan in May 1995, and he left behind an estate worth close to a billion dollars. Weeks later, five impoverished women and their attorneys came forward to challenge Hill-blom’s will, his former business partners, and his alma mater, provoking a legal battle that has raged for over fifteen years.
From Howard Hughes to Mark Zuckerberg, the public has always been fascinated by larger-than-life entrepreneurs and their eccentricities. Now, James Scurlock engages us with the riveting story of one such man, who dressed in rags and lived in relative obscurity, but who has had a profound and lasting influence—a pioneer who shrank the globe, toppled the postal monopoly, anticipated electronic mail, and, most important, envisioned a world driven by economics rather than by laws.
JAMES D. SCURLOCK studied at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His first film, Parents of the Year, won numerous awards and was an official selection of more than twenty-five film festivals. His first feature-length film, Maxed Out, was named one of the top ten films of 2007 by the Washington Post. His previous book of the same title was awarded the 2008 Ridenhour Book Prize.
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Maxed Out: Hard Times in the Age of Easy Credit
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011019548
ISBN 978-1-4165-8922-8 (print)
ISBN 978-1-4165-9394-2 (ebook)
For my mother, Marianne Scurlock
Contents
Dead or Alive
Prologue: A Final Round
Part I: The American Dream
Chapter One: The Switch
Chapter Two: The Courier
Chapter Three: Unwelcome Attention
Chapter Four: Courting
Chapter Five: The Professor
Chapter Six: Interlopers
Chapter Seven: The Fighter
Chapter Eight: Hong Kong
Chapter Nine: The Messiah
Chapter Ten: Washington, D.C.
Chapter Eleven: The Operator
Chapter Twelve: Cocos
Chapter Thirteen: Curt
Part II: The Island
Chapter Fourteen: The Island of Thieves
Chapter Fifteen: The Great Bird
Chapter Sixteen: Picking a Fight
Chapter Seventeen: Under Attack
Chapter Eighteen: War
Chapter Nineteen: The Bachelor
Chapter Twenty: The Legislator
Chapter Twenty-One: Brinksmanship
Chapter Twenty-Two: Strings
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Spy
Chapter Twenty-Four: Polar Bear
Chapter Twenty-Five: Money Problems
Chapter Twenty-Six: Clash of the Titans
Chapter Twenty-Seven: SMART
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Taxes
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Disaster
Chapter Thirty: Recovery
Chapter Thirty-One: The Playground
Chapter Thirty-Two: Vietnam
Chapter Thirty-Three: The Photo
Part III: Probate
Chapter Thirty-Four: His Majesty
Chapter Thirty-Five: Panic
Chapter Thirty-Six: Secrets
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Sparring
Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Rooster
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Evidence
Chapter Forty: The Pilot
Chapter Forty-One: Emergency
Chapter Forty-Two: Fishing Expeditions<
br />
Chapter Forty-Three: Judgment
Chapter Forty-Four: Lobbying
Chapter Forty-Five: The Hillblom Bill
Chapter Forty-Six: Reinforcements
Chapter Forty-Seven: Feeding Frenzy
Chapter Forty-Eight: Celebrities
Chapter Forty-Nine: Press
Chapter Fifty: The Journalist
Chapter Fifty-One: Kingsburg
Chapter Fifty-Two: The Number
Epilogue: Phan Thiet
Timeline
Characters
Companies Owned or Partly Owned by Larry Hillblom and/or His Estate
Acknowledgments
Index
I had not heard the name Larry Lee Hillblom until his eulogy appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, above the fold and under the headline “Heir Freight: How the Strange Life of a DHL Founder Left His Estate a Mess.” In my two decades as a Journal devotee, I’d never read any article more than once, but the moment I’d finished the last word of that piece, I started again from the top. Here was the tale of an eccentric multimillionaire who had disappeared in a small-plane crash one year earlier and of the already epic battle for his fortune—money that he had not seemed to care very much about in his lifetime. The reporter had woven the various aspects of Hillblom’s convoluted life into a narrative but had failed to resolve its glaring contradiction: Why would a hugely successful entrepreneur exile himself to an obscure island in the middle of nowhere at the dawn of his career? Imagine, for example, Bill Gates moving to Bhutan after the release of Microsoft Windows, or Henry Ford heading into the Alaskan tundra after the first Model T rolled off the assembly line at River Rouge.
The Wall Street Journal article teetered on a small shelf in the back of my mind for nearly a decade, slipping further and further from present concerns but refusing to leave my consciousness. Hillblom’s mysteries multiplied with time. Why had no one written about the man who had made globalization possible? Only after months of research would I learn that a biography had been in the works years earlier but was smothered by piles of lawsuits and confidentiality agreements that arose from what has been called the World Cup of probate. An unintended consequence of his notoriety was that it allowed him to remain anonymous. After a burst of publicity in the late 1990s that included two more Wall Street Journal articles, a Dateline NBC special, and a 10,000-word exposé of his sex life in GQ, Hillblom disappeared a second time. The story of his death is now far more familiar than the story of his life. That thousands of less important businessmen have become household names by hiring publicists to embed them on CNBC, ghostwriters to distill their success into ten catchphrases (humility is a popular one), and agents to book them on the speaking circuit would bother Hillblom not at all. Those who worked for Larry, as a friend of his once admonished, appeared on the covers of magazines; Larry did not. Another friend bristled when I mentioned the Wall Street Journal article that had inspired me; Larry, she said, would have hated it. DHL’s first general counsel told me that Hillblom was just not capable of examining his life.
“You’re looking at the luckiest guy in the world!” (Courtesy of Michael W. Dotts)
But that does not preclude us from doing so. How a peach farmer’s stepson from a flyover town in California’s Central Valley linked continents, abolished centuries-old institutions, and became fabulously wealthy is fascinating stuff. That his accomplishments interested him so little makes him all the more compelling.
Not that he was, as most assume, reclusive or even antisocial. Hillblom was as relentless socially as he was in business. He loved meeting new people—particularly young women and fellow adrenaline junkies—as long as they struck him as authentic. He could cut it up at a disco, though he was a disaster at karaoke. (Here, unfortunately, we are soul mates.) He abhorred luxury hotels, opting to crash on friends’ couches or floors. If those were unavailable, he found the cheapest motels or the YMCA, which he claimed was far safer than the Ritz; after all, no criminal would go looking for a rich target at the Y. Picturing his long, pencil-thin body cocooned in one of those self-enclosed first-class “suites” that have become fashionable among the jet set is difficult. On the ground, he eschewed limousines for taxis and sidewalks. He may have prized his anonymity, but he lived far more openly than most men whose net worths flirt with ten figures. He wandered Asia’s concrete jungles on foot, among the masses, without bodyguards or an entourage of minions. He was often alone. Even the behavior that would become so controversial after his death was, during his lifetime, hidden in plain sight. On more than one occasion, I was speechless when a former friend or business associate denied behavior that Hillblom had flaunted before others. Not that it matters. Hillblom’s hopelessly outdated will confirmed what one of his lawyers would confide to me after our final interview: “Larry didn’t give a shit what happened after he died. He’d be dead.”
Others do give a shit. Hillblom—at least, his initial—is emblazoned on tens of thousands of delivery vans, airplanes, and trucks worldwide. The foundation bearing his name gives away millions of dollars every year for medical research, and at least two women named their children after him. But more than a decade past the meltdown of his empire, Larry Hillblom remains radioactive. Family members refused to meet with me. When, by chance, I was seated next to DHL’s director of media relations at a charity party, the man groaned, “I guess my job is to convince you not to write your book.” DHL’s new owners, the German postal monopoly Deutsche Post, fear the retelling of Hillblom’s life as a potential PR disaster—a concern that is not a little ironic, considering the billions that the company has lost trying to make DHL a household name in the United States. The terse official corporate telegram announcing Hillblom’s disappearance is evidence of how difficult it would be to assess the legacy. “Larry was a true visionary who helped create the air express industry,” it read. “While Larry will be greatly missed, DHL’s day-to-day operations will not be affected. Our business continues as usual.”
By then, as one of the company’s vice presidents told me, Hillblom had become a legend, something not quite real. In America, Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, is considered the pioneer of the express industry, yet DHL’s certificate of incorporation precedes FedEx’s inaugural flight by half a decade. Smith, in fact, would not transport documents anywhere until Ronald Reagan occupied the White House—and only after Hillblom had engineered a landmark victory against the United States Postal Service affirming the right of private companies to transport time-sensitive documents. By the time DHL’s better-known competitor flew over an ocean, Hillblom’s network already connected more countries than the United Nations. Not only did DHL make it possible for banks to go global, American engineers to develop the oil fields of the Middle East, and multinationals to exist, DHL sometimes served as the only means of communication between enemy states. During the Iranian hostage crisis, for example, DHL’s couriers flew in and out of Tehran without interruption. DHL couriers were also flying into Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, and North Korea long before it was acceptable—or legal—for American companies to do so. Probably the fastest-growing company in history when measured by pure geographical reach, DHL pioneered the notion of the truly global enterprise that flies under no country’s flag. When it came to stating a nationality, Hillblom himself seemed either agnostic or polygamous. He carried at least three passports. Officially, he died a citizen of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, whose legal status is currently being challenged in the federal courts—a process that Hillblom himself started a quarter century ago.
DHL was not his only adventure and certainly not his favorite. Hillblom also created one of the first word processors, bought two major airlines, led the fight for deregulation, stymied American imperialism in the Western Pacific (no less a character than Jack Abramoff was hired to replace him), and brought American investment to Vietnam years before the embargo was lifted in 1994. Less significantly, but more fun, were his side jobs: bartender, Supr
eme Court justice, island ambassador, backhoe operator, and pawnshop owner, among them. That he is remembered for his sexual exploits rather than any of these things is testament to our fascination with the hedonistic.
More than a few of those I interviewed believe that his “death” was simply a ruse to avoid responsibility for his actions. Fifteen years later, the name still provokes. “I have nothing good to say about Larry Hillblom,” one of DHL’s original shareholders barked at me before hanging up the phone. A previously friendly shopkeeper on Saipan groaned that her island was home to “the only law library named after a known pedophile” when I told her the subject of my research. And then there is the CNMI bishop’s bemused take on Hillblom: “Larry was my favorite heathen.”
Can one book do justice to a man so complex? Hillblom was honored with no fewer than three memorial services, each representing a different facet of his life. He has been described as the head of an octopus whose tentacles flailed uncontrollably after he vanished. A few of those tentacles, like DHL, were hugely valuable. Others, like his interest in an island pawnshop, were little more than hobbies. Assets amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars were never recorded on paper; shares he owned were sometimes assigned to others without their knowledge. That there was more to Larry Hillblom than can be reconstructed from the printed record is certain, though his probate alone amounts to more than a million pages.
But here is my attempt at exhumation, regardless. Not to attempt it would be to expunge one of the most important men of the twentieth century from the historical record. For efficiency’s sake, I must assume that Hillblom is actually dead, and not basking beneath a Southeast Asian sun somewhere surrounded by nubile young women, pineapples, and Vietnamese coffee, as many still believe, including agents of the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of State. I must disregard a former governor of Guam, who claimed to have seen Hillblom recently on a trip to Thailand, as well as an MIA organization that may or may not possess physical proof of Hillblom living in that country. Hillblom’s estate chose not to verify the latter, despite paying out nearly two hundred million dollars to law firms, of which millions have been spent chasing less credible rumors.
King Larry Page 1
