But questioning his death certificate now does nothing more than make Hillblom a little more like his idols Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley. There is mystery enough in his life without debating his death, so I will let him rest in peace somewhere at the bottom of the Western Pacific Ocean. What I will not do is allow him to disappear—at least not quite yet. . . .
Prologue
A Final Round
Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands May 20, 1995
By 9:00 a.m., the first waves of Japanese tourists had emerged from the bay below, shimmering aluminum tanks strapped to their backs reflecting patches of morning sun as blinding as halogen. On the sprawling golf course above, clusters of tanned men grazed a mass of former jungle carved into manicured greens. A handful paused to acknowledge a Tokyo-bound Boeing 747-400 loaded with newlyweds and a belly full of just-purchased Louis Vuitton luggage. The plane banked to the north, then disappeared into an azure sky as smooth as latex.
Bob O’Connor, a pristine Californian on the early side of middle age and possessed of the bronzed, chiseled features of a young Burt Lancaster, pushed a tee into the moist earth at the start of the eighteenth hole. As he stepped back to reach for a polished wood driver, he heard Larry snap, “Don’t use that one.”
O’Connor did as he was told—not because Larry Hillblom was his most important client, or because they were business partners in a half dozen ventures, but because he could trace nearly every accomplishment in his life thus far—with the notable exceptions of his wife and newborn daughter—back to the advice of the man standing beside him. O’Connor turned to his friend, tried his best not to stare at the right eye that had gone dark or the skin that the doctors in San Francisco had pulled so taut and smooth around his skull that his face seemed doll-like. Surreal. He was grateful to have his eyes diverted to the glimmering 2-iron that Larry extended with his gloved right hand.
O’Connor pulled back, uncurled his long frame, and hit a near-perfect drive. Then he slipped the gleaming shaft into his own bag.
“That’s mine,” he heard Larry say. And immediately, a sheepish O’Connor handed the 2-iron back to Larry’s caddie.
Hillblom as best man at Bob O’Connor’s wedding (Courtesy of Michael W. Dotts)
They boarded the little white cart a moment later and moved forward up the green. O’Connor hesitated to make conversation. Hillblom had been unusually curt that morning, snippy even, and the usual subjects had become minefields. O’Connor knew better than anyone how Larry compartmentalized his relationships. “Larry is my best friend but I know that I’m not Larry’s best friend” is how he explained the asymmetry of their friendship to himself and others. True, Larry had agreed to be O’Connor’s best man two years earlier and had even showed up at his wedding in a suit and tie—a concession that, as far as anyone knew, Micronesia’s wealthiest man had made for only two other people: Senator Edward M. Kennedy and the secretary-general of the United Nations. And O’Connor was one of a handful of men who knew the true extent of Hillblom’s wealth, something that even the Ivy League–trained researchers at Forbes magazine had missed. (They had estimated his fortune most recently at a mere $300 million.) On the other hand, O’Connor also knew that Larry’s empire rested a little precariously. There was the $11 million in back taxes owed; the IRS investigation; the boy in Palau; the $9,000 checks that O’Connor’s junior partner, Mike Dotts, cashed on Larry’s behalf to pay for his extracurricular activities in Manila. Dotts was constantly calling DHL’s legal office in San Francisco for more money. As rich as he was, Larry was probably insolvent.
O’Connor briefly considered a conversation about his new daughter. When he’d mentioned her in the past, Larry had seemed to soften unexpectedly, had seemed engaged even, which was a departure from the hostility that any talk of children—or marriage—typically inspired. Maybe, O’Connor hoped, Larry would finally settle down with his Filipina girlfriend, Josephine, and start a family. It had taken O’Connor nearly ten years to warm up to Josephine, but the idea of himself and Larry being fathers appealed to him. Maybe their kids would even play together one day.
“You know,” Larry blurted suddenly. “You really ought to go flying with me tomorrow.”
O’Connor laughed. Never. Not in a million years would I go flying with you, he said to himself. Few of those who knew Larry would fly with him. Less than two years before, Hillblom had nearly died when he crash-landed his little Cessna 182 on the neighboring island of Tinian, in part because he’d been in such a hurry to take off. And the first time Hillblom had landed his World War II–vintage seaplane on Saipan, the landing gear had collapsed—probably due to lack of maintenance, id est, Larry’s cheapness. Hillblom treated his planes like most people treated their cars: jump in, start the ignition, and off you go. Checklists were a waste of precious time; maintenance logs were not worth keeping, much less reading. In one infamous case, Larry had forgotten to reattach the gas cap, only to think of it as he was hurtling down the runway at a hundred miles an hour.
O’Connor finally engaged. “Where are you going?”
“Pagan,” Larry replied. Pagan was one of the small, uninhabited islands of the Northern Mariana Archipelago that linked Guam to Japan. The island’s old military airstrip had been truncated by lava years ago, making it a notoriously tricky place to take off and land, but explorers were rewarded by black sand beaches and wild game. “I’ve got this new pilot,” Larry continued. “A Vietnam vet. Flew fighter missions.”
O’Connor nodded ambiguously. They took a few more strokes on the green. Larry’s mind was never in the present, especially when he was putting. Occasionally, he skipped that part of the game altogether. He derived no pleasure from sinking the ball in the little cup. He preferred hitting it as hard and as far as possible.
A cluster of local politicians had already gathered in the clubhouse by the time they arrived; of course they intercepted Larry, wealth and power both being magnets. Larry had known every member of every legislature for at least a decade. He’d traveled to D.C. or New York with most of them. O’Connor was known too. He was the island’s first registered lobbyist and the stocky, betel nut–chewing legislators were accustomed to his visits, usually on behalf of Hillblom. (“Larry’s the brains and I’m the mouthpiece,” O’Connor liked to say.) Today the brief conversation veered from how to prevent an imminent federal government takeover of the islands’ minimum wage and immigration policies to how great Larry’s new face looked. Avoided was the incident, a few months before, when Hillblom had been arrested for drinking at a legislative hearing. On the way to the police cruiser, he’d hurled expletives at a news camera and claimed he had a bomb. O’Connor’s junior partner had bailed him out of what, in Saipan, passed for a jail.
Hillblom’s clubs arrived first and he abruptly extricated himself.
By the time O’Connor’s caddie showed up, the lawyer had reconsidered Hillblom’s offer to go flying, mainly on account of his friend’s promise that he would not pilot the airplane himself. A few hundred feet distant, O’Connor could see Larry’s caddie walking back toward the clubhouse, empty-handed, and Larry’s red Corolla crawling out from under the shadow of a coconut tree behind him. O’Connor shouted out his nickname, the one reserved for private conversations. Then he raised his hand and waved, but Larry wasn’t looking back. He waited impatiently for the caddie to stuff his clubs into the back of his SUV, proffered the tip, jumped into the driver’s seat, and fired up the engine.
When ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise. O’Connor repeated it silently, the mantra that had guided his life from the moment he’d become friends with Larry, the smartest man O’Connor had ever met or probably would meet—but also the most fun, the most blissful. Because Larry had taught him that the important thing in life was not to be happy but to be adventuresome.
O’Connor shifted into reverse, maneuvered out of the parking lot, drove the straightaway to Kagman Road a little too fast, passed the guard gate without a
wave, hung a left, and sped by the farms, looking straight ahead. He weaved up into the hills of San Vicente, threading a narrow road bordered on both sides by thick jungles of knotted, pea-green tangan-tangan trees, past the abandoned castle, then down toward the flats of Dandan, where he spotted the Toyota paused at a stoplight in front of one of the island’s ubiquitous video poker dens.
O’Connor brought his car alongside just as the light was turning green, but Larry barely glanced at him. O’Connor realized his friend, the perpetual teenager, had misread his intentions. Hillblom wanted to race. Of course he did. But as soon as Larry made a quick left turn ahead of the green light, O’Connor found himself blocked by oncoming traffic. He pressed on the accelerator and straightened the steering wheel, aiming for the townhome he shared with his new family.
The next morning arrived bright and hot. On the southern end of the island, the sun bounced off the airport’s twin Polynesian-style terminals and heat rose from the tarmac in phantom waves. Guy Gabaldon, Saipan’s second most famous resident, awaited its first in the area reserved for private aircraft. Gabaldon, a Mexican-American marine, had been stationed on the island during the tail end of World War II and never left. He’d become famous when he emerged from behind enemy lines followed by more than eight hundred demoralized Japanese troops who had surrendered to him after an unsuccessful banzai charge. His exploits had been memorialized in the 1960 film Hell to Eternity and, after a long wait, he’d received the Navy Cross Medal.
Gabaldon was standing next to his plane, watching another early riser crouched next to Larry Hillblom’s latest toy, tinkering with one of the cowlings. SeaBees were impossible to miss, their propellers pointing backward from a small, round cabin, causing the fuselage to dip before looping back up to join the tail. In profile they resembled cartoon whales, and they were old but very reliable. Republic Aircraft Corporation had over-engineered them to such an extent that the company had gone bankrupt when it proved impossible to sell such a well-built airplane at a profit. The only flaw was that they were notoriously underpowered. Most owners had solved that problem by replacing the single engine with two wing-mounted propellers, but that made them trickier to fly.
Hillblom’s SeaBee was a two-engine conversion, trimmed with light brown and orange racing stripes. It kept his pilot, a big American named Robert Long, plenty busy. Things were constantly falling off the plane; most recently the tail rudder had to be replaced. Hillblom had bought a twin just for spare parts, but many of the instruments were still unreliable and the gas line connecting the auxiliary tank didn’t work. But maintenance was only one of the SeaBee’s problems.
Gabaldon turned his attention back to his own plane. He was making his way through his checklist several minutes later when he heard the SeaBee’s engines start up. He turned to notice Larry Hillblom and another man, a heavyset islander, standing next to the Pacific Aviation hangar. Gabaldon had agreed to follow Hillblom to Pagan that morning and he would give the relatively slow SeaBee a decent head start. They had been doing test runs between Saipan, Anatahan, and Pagan for nearly a month; Long had to be sure of the plane’s range because Hillblom had ordered him to fly the SeaBee all the way to Vietnam and he’d have to do quite a bit of island-skipping to get there. All told, this morning’s journey would be a little more than 450 nautical miles, which was pushing the SeaBee’s fuel limits.
It took only a few minutes for Long to taxi the plane over, scoop up his passengers, and hustle to the end of the runway. When Gabaldon heard the throttle open up, he noticed that the engines did not sound quite right. Turning his gaze to the runway, Gabaldon watched as the SeaBee’s wheels finally left the pavement and cleared the thin border of jungle before banking over the Philippine Sea. It seemed to him that the plane was not climbing as fast as it should. Like it was struggling to stay in the air.
Part I
The American Dream
The trouble with my life is that I do not think I am cut out to sit behind a desk.
—Howard Hughes
One
The Switch
By the time he reached his thirties, Larry Hillblom had invented a childhood in which he had been captain of his high school football team, a member of a radical liberal student group, and the son of a notorious bank robber executed in the electric chair at San Quentin. Like many things born of Hillblom’s imaginative mind, this version of himself was not true but not totally false either. He had lettered in football as a cornerback—number 29—of the Kingsburg Vikings. He had been something of a radical in law school, though hardly a liberal one. And his father had died, when Larry was just three years old, but not at the hands of prison guards. Instead, the young man had suffered heatstroke while repairing a roof in Bakersfield on one of the hottest days in the summer of 1946. Whether he’d died before or after he’d hit the ground was something that no one, including his son, would ever know.
As for Larry himself, neighbors remember an infant so prone to wanderlust that he chewed through his wooden crib. And who could blame him? Kingsburg, the tiny Swedish enclave equidistant from San Francisco and Los Angeles along the 99 freeway, where his parents had bought a modest house, was hardly a suitable place for the man who would one day shrink the globe. Downtown was a double-wide strip of pavement framed by banks, a hardware store, and the occasional restaurant. The neighborhood a few miles distant where he would spent his childhood was dark and deathly quiet by 8:00 p.m. Hillblom saved the money that his stepfather, a farmer named Andy Anderson, paid him for driving a tractor, then he switched to more lucrative work at the peach cannery near the freeway, driving a forklift and ultimately becoming a supervisor. He had to go to the local community college’s library to read the Wall Street Journal, which is how he learned to invest. “Someday,” he told Dave Crass, his best friend from sixth grade on, “I’m going to move far away, and I won’t write any letters.” He thought a moment more before adding, “I’ll call you once in a while, but I will not write any letters.”
Crass did not take the remark personally. Hillblom was small, maybe five-nine the day they graduated from Kingsburg High, but he was clearly destined for big things. He worked harder than kids his age and he was more ambitious. Larry’d joke about how he was going to make a lot of money, and Crass never doubted that for a moment, particularly when, barely out of high school, his friend bought a Corvette with part of his stock market winnings. Larry was luckier, too, uncannily so. He always won the all-night poker games they played at Reedley, the local college they both attended as a stepping-stone to Fresno State. And he always won the dice games, which made no sense unless he was cheating. How he pulled that off was, like many things, a secret. Larry cherished secrets more than anything.
Back in Kingsburg, with half brother, Grant Anderson (left), and younger brother, Terry (right) (Courtesy of Michael W. Dotts)
In high school, they’d nicknamed Larry “Mountain Blossom” as a play on his last name. Freshman year, he was a skinny, stubborn, brainy mama’s boy fond of plaid shirts, his teeth hidden by gleaming braces and blue eyes framed by thick glasses. A square who taught Sunday school, played the piano, and earned perfect grades . . . then, poof! One day he showed up without the glasses, a shiny ducktail peeking from behind his neck. He stopped trying so hard in class and went out for football, basketball, and golf. In a school as small as Kingsburg High, even a small kid like Larry could play varsity football. But Larry had refused to use his smallness to his advantage by avoiding his opponents. Instead he met the gorillas head-on, resulting in several concussions; more than once, his contact lenses popped out, and both teams were forced to crawl the field on their knees until they were located—an event memorialized by a half-page photograph in his senior yearbook.
But being a jock was not the goal. Larry wanted to be popular, and guys who played sports just happened to be more popular than guys who played the piano and studied in the library. The switch worked. Mountain Blossom won a plum role in the senior play, and he was voted class pr
esident. He dated girls too, though none seriously; relationships with the female species entailed an unacceptable level of risk. When he and Crass discussed marriage, Larry’s most memorable observation was that he intended to marry a Catholic woman, because Catholics don’t get divorced, meaning that his fortune would be safe.
Larry had been by his mother’s side as she struggled to raise him and his younger brother, Terry, without a husband. They’d moved into a small apartment and she’d made money cleaning her friends’ homes for two years before Andy Anderson married her. By then she’d developed a toughness that was unusual in a woman, particularly one from a bedroom community like Kingsburg. She could be sarcastic enough to make less confident women cry. Rather than sacrifice her son to the culture, as did so many mothers, she held on tighter and raised her standards. The center of his youth was the Concordia Lutheran Church, a stately brick edifice across the street from the high school where Helen and Andy were called founding members. There she reigned with a sharp tongue that her son would learn to emulate. “Oh, that Helen!” was a knowing refrain back then. She was ambitious for the church and for the community, also becoming a founding member of the Kingsburg Business and Professional Women’s Club. And she was ambitious for Larry, who became skilled enough at the piano to substitute for the organist, and familiar enough with Scripture to deliver sermons on Sundays when the preacher was unavailable.
Helen resented prideful women but she was a terribly proud mother. On Halloweens, she rewarded Larry and his friends with hayrides. Vacations were spent in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where her three sons—Larry, Terry, and Grant Anderson—fished and swam in crystal-clear lakes as she sunbathed in a stylish black one-piece, beaming with pride, oblivious of Larry’s latent hatred. “He talked about all of the nice things she’d done for him in a negative way,” remembers one of his closer friends. “‘So she’s done all of these great things for me, the bitch.’”
King Larry Page 2
