It was all too good to be true, of course, and in January 1972, the impending doom that Larry Hillblom had constantly sensed suddenly clackety-clacked onto a white sheet of paper spitting out of a telex machine. Marilyn Corral read it aloud. The sender, she announced, was an attorney at the Enforcement Division of something in Washington, D.C., called the Civil Aeronautics Board. The missive—thirteen words printed in stark, black capital letters—could not have been more direct:
DHL SHOULD IMMEDIATELY CEASE AIR FREIGHT FORWARDING OPERATIONS UNTIL PROPER AUTHORITY IS RECEIVED.
Hillblom had no choice but to disobey the order; shutting down DHL’s operations for even one day would have been fatal to the network. Then he jumped into his station wagon and drove to the law library, where a cursory study of administrative law revealed that the CAB, as it was commonly known, claimed jurisdiction only over airlines. This, Hillblom thought initially, was a huge relief; DHL did not own, lease, or operate airplanes. By the time that Hillblom returned to the office, however, he’d decided to ask Corral to book him as the courier to Washington, D.C., that night; in an abundance of caution, he wanted meet with the author of the telex face to face.
Hillblom arrived at Honolulu Airport’s John Rodgers Terminal a little after 11:00 p.m. clutching a ticket for Pan Am’s midnight flight to LAX. A balmy evening gust tousled his hair as he climbed the steps to the 707’s front door, where he was greeted by a smiling stewardess wearing a sky-blue hat and gloves. He looked forward to spreading out in the back row of the cabin and getting some sleep, as he’d done in law school. He wasn’t particularly concerned. His professors had taught him that federal agencies existed to help entrepreneurs like himself, to foster young companies like DHL. After all, this was America.
Several months earlier, Hillblom had encountered his first real adversary. A vice president of Loomis Corporation, the large courier and armored car company based in Seattle, had called on Dalsey and himself at DHL’s office near the San Francisco Airport. For nearly two years, Loomis’s employees had flown in the same airplanes as DHL’s couriers and double-parked their vans outside the same office buildings as they made their pickups and deliveries. Otherwise, the companies could not have been more different. Loomis proudly traced its heritage back to 1852, the days of the Pony Express, the California Gold Rush, and the development of the Alaska Territory. Its bespectacled founder, Lee Loomis, had driven the first armored car west of the Mississippi in 1925, and the company’s literature boasted that its employees had included Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and Buffalo Bill Cody. The company was now run by Loomis’s grandson Charles.
The Loomis executive who had called on Dalsey and Hillblom had begun the meeting in an appropriately gentlemanly fashion. DHL was clearly growing very fast, he’d noted; its customer list, as far as the executive could tell, was very impressive. And DHL was already active in the Far East, a market that Loomis had been eyeing for some time. The obvious solution, he’d remarked, was for the two companies to combine their efforts. And because Loomis was roughly fifty times DHL’s size, that meant a buy-out of DHL’s two shareholders. Dalsey had enthusiastically nodded in agreement. Hillblom had not. By the time he’d stood up to leave, the Loomis executive had resorted to threats. “If you don’t accept our offer,” he’d said before leaving, “we’ll institute legal proceedings and drive you under. We’ve done it before.”
Within days, DHL’s couriers, including Steve Kroll’s father and Hillblom’s half brother, Grant, had reported being tailed; occasionally, the insides of their cars were photographed by mysterious men as they made their deliveries. Hillblom increasingly blamed Dalsey for attracting Loomis’s attention, and he wondered if the older man was secretly egging Loomis on in order to convince him to sell out. Dalsey nagged at Hillblom to sell, pointing out that MPA, their former employer, had recently gone bankrupt because of the kind of litigation that Loomis had threatened. “I can easily see Dalsey trying to sell to Loomis,” Kroll sighs. “Dalsey’s tolerance for risk would have been considerably less than Larry’s. He was of my parents’ generation, but he was probably more motivated by fear of losing everything, and you don’t criticize someone who lived through the Depression for feeling that way.”
But now that Dalsey’s worst fears had been realized, Hillblom dug in his heels even further. He ignored Loomis and refused the CAB’s order to shut down, even as he called on their Washington, D.C., headquarters in an effort to placate them. While the CAB’s bureaucrats dallied, apparently unsure what to make of his rebuke, Loomis lost its patience and filed an action against DHL for operating illegally without a freight forwarder permit. What they wanted was an injunction to stop DHL from doing business, the theory being that a cease and desist order from a federal court would be more effective than a telex from a constipated federal agency.
Elements of Loomis Armored Car v. DHL Corporation were laughable, including the pretense that allowed Loomis’s attorneys to file it in the first place. Loomis claimed to be a “party of interest,” legalese for innocent bystander. As an upstanding corporate citizen, the armored car giant was being unfairly forced to compete with a rogue operator. Or so said Loomis’s polished attorneys. They did not mention that their client was at least equally roguish as DHL. Despite transporting similar goods on the same routes in exactly the same manner—sometimes for the same clients—Loomis had never filed for an operating certificate either.
Hillblom hired Kroll to draft DHL’s response. Then they flew to the San Francisco courtroom of Judge Samuel Conti, a stern Nixon appointee, who had been assigned the case. Adrian Dalsey, ensconced in the gallery behind the bar that separates attorneys from observers, sensed trouble the moment that Loomis’s attorneys strutted up to the plaintiffs’ table in tailored suits. “It’s like Huey and Dewey versus Perry Mason,” he groaned to Marge within earshot of Hillblom, Kroll, and Marilyn Corral, who had stayed up all night typing DHL’s reply brief.
When Conti entered the courtroom, Loomis’s legal team, from the white-shoe firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, immediately zeroed in on DHL’s operating without authorization. Conti nodded appreciatively, as Kroll, nearly hysterical, jumped up from the counsel’s table to object, pointing out the glaring double standard of Loomis’s action. Conti dismissed him in curt volleys. Kroll became argumentative and, after an exasperating back-and-forth, questioned the judge’s motives. By the time Conti’s gavel fell, the judge had made it clear that he considered DHL an illegal operator, though he would allow Kroll a chance to change his mind at trial rather than rule on summary judgment, as Loomis’s lawyers asked. Hillblom and his company were left hanging.
“There was one night with the lights coming through the fog, dreariness,” Kroll remembers. “We were in Burlingame, which is where DHL’s San Francisco office was. We were deep in the Loomis case, but I’m just telling you it’s strange because my memory is of the entire sense of it. Larry was crying; he was terrified of losing the case and losing his company. I do remember that because it was something so unlike Larry, the fear of losing, and that is when my maternal instincts kicked in to protect him. I vaguely remember him talking about being very concerned for the people who worked for DHL and that it was not just a dream of his that was at stake, but that there were human beings whose livelihoods depended on what was going to happen here. And that impressed me deeply. The pessimism surprised me. He was not a negative person. I’d never seen him think that he might lose before or since.”
Kroll began preparing a countersuit accusing Loomis of anticompetitive behavior that would be filed in federal court in Honolulu, but it would take months, maybe years, to go to trial—much too long to save his company. And Kroll, maternal instincts aside, lacked the experience and gravitas to fight the kind of litigators they had just encountered. Hillblom’s only hope was to throw himself at the mercy of the CAB and hope that they’d give him the operating certificate that he was still convinced he did not need, before December, only a few months away. So the next morning,
he boarded a Pan Am jet bound for Washington. He was ready to play ball, still dangerously unaware of the forces conspiring against him.
Four
Courting
Of course he got nowhere. The CAB’s monolithic cement-and-glass headquarters on Connecticut Avenue was even more of a fortress inside than out. “Larry,” recalls Patrick Lupo, who would accompany him to Washington on future trips, “starts trying to see people. And they won’t see him. And the classic is, Larry used to fly in from SFO [San Francisco International Airport]; he’d fly all night. He’d go into the CAB to see somebody and they wouldn’t see him, so he’d sleep on their couch. He’d fall fast asleep on their couch—one hour, two hours, three hours—and then, finally, someone would see him. Or maybe not. I think there were a couple of times when he stayed there all day and they refused to see him. So, on the one hand, they didn’t call the police to cart him out, but on the other hand, they ignored him. . . . He got absolutely nowhere.”
Hillblom, Marilyn Corral remembers, once arrived at the CAB before the office was open. Exhausted from the red-eye, he pulled a bench up to the front doors and fell asleep, assuming that the first employees to arrive would wake him up. Instead, thinking that he was intentionally blocking them, they called security. Hillblom had finally met his match, an adversary even more stubborn and more ambivalent than himself: bureaucracy. He complained bitterly that his Boalt Hall professors had sold him a false version of America. “How can you be more patriotic than to believe that one of the branches of government will bring justice?” Kroll smiles.
Hillblom felt betrayed, but not defeated. He spent a good chunk of DHL’s precious cash hiring a Washington, D.C., law firm. And on his way back from Washington, he decided to lay over in New York City, where a friend from law school named Jimmy Braziler had settled. Braziler was young and inexperienced, but he was practicing environmental law for the EPA, so he had some insight into how large government agencies like the CAB worked. Hillblom wanted to pick his brain about a legal term known as “compliance disposition.” A CAB attorney had promised that, if DHL could prove that it had acted in good faith and was doing its best to be in compliance with the law—i.e., its compliance disposition—then the agency would issue the company its license and Conti would vacate his cease and desist order. Even if Hillblom’s research, as well as common sense, strongly suggested that DHL did not need an airline license in the first place, DHL did not have the time (or the money) to fight a turf battle with a much larger competitor aligned with one of the federal government’s most powerful agencies.
Braziler still lives in New York City. He’s retired and prefers not to talk about Larry Hillblom in light of all the press attention. Given his age and lack of experience in the matters vexing his former classmate, one can assume that Braziler provided little more than a couch for Larry to crash on in his tiny basement apartment back then. But Braziler’s wife, Alice, a vivacious Queens native with a ready smile, provided access to something equally important: a girl.
“I’m not positive when we met,” Carla Summer tells me as she picks at a small bowl of cut watermelon with elegantly thin fingers. “He decided that he liked me when I had hardly met him.” Summer is now a middle-aged grad student majoring in social work at nearby Yale University. In 1971, she was Carla Bostom, a nineteen-year-old psychology major at Queens College—a striking girl with jet-black hair, a dancer’s body, and a penchant for both antiwar and civil rights activism. She was then in the midst of divorcing her husband. And she was Alice Braziler’s best friend.
To say that Summer was different from the girlies—the stewardesses and the secretaries—that Hillblom was used to dating (his previous girlfriend’s name was Peaches, if that’s any indication) would be an understatement. Summer had been a member of the antiwar group SDS at Barnard College. In the spring of 1968, she’d participated in the takeover of the president’s office at Columbia University, alongside members of the school’s African-American alliance.
When Alice introduced her to Hillblom at an apartment party in Brooklyn, Summer ignored him—not because of his politics, which were diametrically opposed to her own. She didn’t let the gangly weirdo with the blond hair get that far. Indeed, Summer found it hysterical that a guy who looked like Hillblom could believe that a girl who looked like her might be interested at all. But when he kept coming back to New York, he became harder to brush off. Finally he cornered her at another party. “I really want to get to know you and you’re not letting me,” he blurted. “Can we go somewhere else and be together?”
“Some other time,” Summer replied. “And let’s do something fun.” In other words, she wasn’t interested in a date; if they hung out, there would have to be a built-in distraction.
On their first non-date, a canoe outing to the Delaware Water Gap with Alice and Jimmy, Hillblom became infuriated when the current turned against him. Summer laughed hysterically as Larry stabbed the water with his paddle again and again until he finally allowed the canoe to move with the current. On subsequent encounters, he would show up at her mother’s house in Queens with a caseload of grapefruit or cherries—grapefruit because he’d read that they dissolved fat and cherries because they caused your bowels to move, thereby increasing the flow of calories through the body. “He ate armloads of grapefruit and cherries,” Summer laughs. “It was about him wanting to be attractive and thin.”
But it wasn’t enough for Hillblom to fixate on a particular food. “He would physically take the food and stuff it into my mouth,” she recalls. “I couldn’t die before him—he talked about that a lot. He had decided that I should be as healthy as he was going to be.”
Another reason that Hillblom loved to shove cherries and grapefruit down her throat was that she didn’t expect it. His unique way of relating to other people was to tease and torment them and become very overbearing. If they went to a dinner party hosted by liberal Jews, for example, Hillblom would loudly praise the writings of Ayn Rand, the objectivist author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. But if he was surrounded by Republicans, Hillblom might suddenly espouse the genius of Chairman Mao. Summer began to think that he was incapable of relating to people except as a provocateur. But while those who didn’t know him could be offended, Summer had never taken Larry seriously from the start. “He was actually very fragile and very shy,” she says. “He would get me to introduce him to other people. Then he would be able to start in. He enjoyed living but there were some ways in which he was inhibited that I was not that he really enjoyed, almost kid-like. For example, I loved to sing. Larry would say that everyone in Kingsburg told him that he looked and sounded like Elvis, but he wouldn’t sing. He just didn’t have that style of expressing his joy of living. He was living vicariously. He was very cautious. He liked to watch.”
Summer grabs a cube of watermelon from the table and pops it into her mouth. “My grandmother would take me to the beach when I was very little,” she says, “and I would insist that she take the first bite out of the peaches because I thought she would make it juicy for me. That was Larry: ‘You make it juicy for me.’”
Hillblom had a harder time making it juicy for her. Summer was flattered, amused, even charmed by his attention, but seduced she was not. “I didn’t find it endearing,” she says of his initial attempts at courting her. “In hindsight, I probably hadn’t met someone like him. I just didn’t think of him as unique.”
Like the uncooperative river, the more Hillblom tried to force her to his will, the faster she resisted. “In some ways”—she laughs—“it was the way I ended up treating my kids—laugh and know that I’m not going to get anywhere fighting it, distract him to move on to something else.” But Hillblom was just as incapable of being distracted as he was of going with the flow. He had never really courted women; he’d recruited them with the promise of a job or a vacation. Carla would not make him change his tune, though Hillblom eventually realized that she required a variation on the same theme.
“I felt v
ery responsible for the condition of the country and the condition of the world,” Carla says with a smile. “At different times, there were things that became the most important. Larry wooed me by painting DHL as a civic duty. It was the rights of a small company up against this huge conglomerate and the Civil Aeronautics Board.” She pauses. “I took the bait, with pleasure.”
That May, she agreed to spend her short break before summer semester in Honolulu. Larry had bought a little house in Kaneohe, a small village on Oahu, which he shared with his half brother, Grant, and a high school friend, both of whom worked for DHL. He showed her off to Marilyn Corral at the bunker, but they spent most of their time canoodling in bed, frolicking in the pool, or lying under a clipped mango tree. He nicknamed her “Audie,” short for “Arty-Farty,” because he said she passed gas. Driving through the short tunnel that connects Kaneohe with Honolulu, Carla sang along to the radio at the top of her lungs as Larry turned up the volume, lips moving silently, hips shaking to the beat:
Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by
At night, tucked into bed, she whacked his head with a rolled-up newspaper to relieve his constant migraines. He told her that the metal plate in his forehead had saved him from going to Vietnam. He confided an intense desire to emulate Howard Hughes—running an empire from the background, pulling the strings from behind a curtain. He would stay up for hours after she’d dozed off, watching the preacher Jimmy Swaggart, sometimes manipulating the screen so that only Swaggart’s lips were visible. He told her that he wanted to be an evangelist. As with Mao, he was fascinated with the almost psychic power that Swaggart held over millions of people.
King Larry Page 5
