King Larry

by James D. Scurlock

  Larry Hillblom’s route to Ousterhout’s office at the Davies Medical Center* here in San Francisco was a circuitous one. From Tinian, he had been airlifted back across the channel to Saipan’s Commonwealth Health Center—by far the largest and best-equipped hospital in Micronesia—where he was rushed into the emergency room on a backboard, his neck cradled in a white brace and the shattered right side of his face buried, mummy-like, beneath bandages. Joe Lifoifoi, Mike Dotts, and Joseph Waechter were waiting for him there.

  Jorgensen had contacted Lifoifoi, who had arranged for the medevac, but it was Waechter who had taken over from there. On the far side of his thirties, with prematurely white hair and the overfed and underslept body of a road warrior, Waechter had lived in Micronesia for four years. Hillblom had recruited him to run his disparate businesses in Asia, including UMDA a few years earlier. Waechter diverted an Air Mike DC-10 bound for Manila to Saipan. It had then been emptied of its passengers and flown to Honolulu carrying Hillblom and a small medical team.

  The young doctor who examined Hillblom on Saipan had not seen the purpose of flying a fatally wounded man 4,000 miles in a jumbo jet, but Waechter had insisted that the hospital free up a couple of nurses and an MD for the trip. Michael Dotts, terrified that he would be in the airplane when his boss expired, had refused to make the trip. So Waechter and Lifoifoi had gone instead.

  Onboard, time had passed slowly with nothing to do but watch Hillblom fight for his life. They had managed to keep him alive until they’d arrived in Honolulu, where a plastic surgeon named Jim Penoff had rewrapped his wounds and made an incision in his chest where he inserted a drainage tube to release pressure, then stabilized Hillblom for the flight on to San Francisco, where Penoff had referred Waechter to the best craniofacial surgeon he knew: Douglas K. Ousterhout.

  “I was quite surprised that Hillblom survived the plane rides,” Ousterhout says and smiles, “because I’d heard he had a pneumothorax [collapsed lung]—what’s called a tension pneumothorax, to be exact, where the pneumothorax is so bad on one side it moves all the contents over to the left side and you have no lung space and you die of suffocation.

  “Most of Hillblom’s fractures were on the right side of his face,” Ousterhout continues, reaching behind his chair for a human skull that he likes to use as a prop. “He didn’t have any neurological damage, but there was a great deal of shattering of the nose and face. The first surgery was performed right away, as soon as swelling ceased, which would have been six or seven days after the crash.”

  The first operation had lasted well over ten hours, as Ousterhout reattached and grafted dozens of bone fragments to Hillblom’s skull. One of the nurses remarked that she had never seen so many screws in one human being, but Hillblom’s face had eventually resurfaced. Three days later, the bandages came off, revealing a good start but also that Hillblom’s right eye had died. “A great disappointment to me,” Ousterhout sighs, “but even more so to him, I’m sure.”

  Initially, Hillblom recovered in a private room at the hospital. He received several visitors, among them his half brother, Grant, who had long since quit DHL and was now tending the peach farm on Zedicker, as well as his brother, Terry, now a lawyer. They’d brought him a huge basket filled with fruit from the San Joaquin Valley. Even Helen had stopped by for a visit. Mother and son had not seen each other for fifteen years or so, and the reunion was smoothed over by the fact that Hillblom could not speak. (An emotional Helen told her golden boy that she loved him and then left.) Finally, after a friend of Hillblom’s helped her secure a visa, Josephine showed up, and moved him to the Embassy Suites Hotel near the San Francisco Airport, where they checked in under an assumed name. Eventually, they were driven to the ranch in Half Moon Bay, which would be home for several months as Larry endured several follow-up surgeries under Ousterhout’s knife. Josephine and Larry were taken care of by a hearty Englishman named John Spice, who had worked for DHL in London, UMDA in Palau, and now oversaw Hillblom’s pet projects at the ranch.

  “When the operations were done,” Ousterhout remembers, “Larry told me that he didn’t want to return to Saipan or to Vietnam until he looked better. So he came back here for a face-lift in 1994.” A few days after that procedure, Spice drove Hillblom back to Davies for his last follow-up. He was feeling elated, as only a man who has dodged a bullet can, and he was delighted with his new face, which made him look years younger even as the tightening of the skin made his face oddly translucent. After checking his patient’s chart and completing a pleased appraisal of his work, Ousterhout decided to drop the bomb. “I just sensed that it was the time to ask him for a donation!” the surgeon trills. “He was very, very interested in the surgery and the work I do. So I asked him for three million dollars for the Larry Hillblom Chair at Davies and he said yes immediately. I think it took five minutes! He said that he wanted to take care of kids.”

  So, that Thanksgiving, Ousterhout and his wife traveled to Guam and Saipan as Hillblom’s guests. He had told the surgeon that he wanted him to perform cleft-lip operations on Saipan. Hillblom envisioned the trip as a reconnaissance mission; other doctors would join them for a junket to Vietnam. While Jesse Choper and his girlfriend had been relegated to a hotel, however, Hillblom loaned Ousterhout and his wife his bedroom at the house in Dandan. “I had to peek in the closet because of the way he dressed.” The surgeon laughs. “All he ever wore were jeans and T-shirts. And sure enough, all I saw in his closets were jeans and T-shirts!”

  After a few days, they boarded an Air Mike 737 to Guam, spent a couple of days trolling the medical centers there, and picked up the other doctors. The expanded group then flew another Air Mike jet across the Philippine Sea to Manila, where they would have to visit the Vietnamese embassy for visas. Although the decades-old embargo with Vietnam had been lifted in February of that year, there was still no embassy anywhere in the United States. That night, Larry decided to give Ousterhout and his wife a taste of his life outside of Saipan. He met them at their hotel in a red Mitsubishi van driven by a taxi driver named Guido who often served as his personal driver, took them to dinner and then to a street lined with nightclubs flanked by young girls in bikinis and tall boots. Inside were more girls. Hillblom, it soon became obvious, was a regular. In fact, Hillblom bragged that the owner of the club had been the one who secured Josephine’s visa, because he had so many clients at the U.S. Embassy. As he had with Choper and his wife, Larry sat Ousterhout and his girlfriend at a small table and ordered a round of drinks. Directly in front of them was a small stage where dozens of very young girls in bikinis shimmied their adolescent chests to pop music.

  Ousterhout clutched his wife’s hand. He was horrified. Each girl had a piece of paper attached to her bikini top: a number. Every few minutes, a girl would be summoned from the stage and a new girl would step forward to take her place.

  Nursing a Bud Light a few inches to his right, Hillblom was staring intently ahead. Finally, he nudged Ousterhout with his left elbow. “Don’t you want a girl?” He grinned. “What about her? Number Twenty-three . . . ? Don’t you think she’s pretty?”

  Ousterhout clutched his wife’s hand a little harder. “Oh, Larry!” was all the normally verbose surgeon could muster.

  Later, Hillblom would tell Ousterhout what he had told Choper—that he slept only with virgins because he was terrified of HIV. And he would show Ousterhout the diplomatic passport proclaiming him the Marshallese ambassador to Vietnam. “Three percent flat income tax,” Hillblom explained. “I’m gonna make you a citizen.” For once, Ousterhout was impressed. Maybe he could become the Marshallese ambassador to somewhere, he told himself, before laughing off the thought.

  As soon as the visas were processed, they returned to the Manila airport, where a jet flew them the 1,100 miles across the South China Sea to Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city. The trip was a typical Hillblom whirlwind. First they toured the stoic communist buildings of Hanoi, then flew south, to Ho Chi Minh City, and finally, to Dalat, whe
re they golfed on a course that Hillblom said he owned. It was not yet complete, and Ousterhout was shocked to see women in traditional hats planting grass seeds one by one. But he was more disturbed by another vision. “In Dalat,” he recalls, “there’s a flatcar and engine—a relic from the old days—that Hillblom bought. He put a picnic table on the flatcar and drove it five miles through the fields, and I hate to tell this story, but one of the farmers kind of gave us the finger as we passed.”

  They also visited hospitals, but none of the doctors, including Ousterhout, did any actual medical work. The surgeon would depart Vietnam after only a few days, secure in two beliefs: that Hillblom cared about helping children and that whoever was building his golf course was screwing him—but he kept that last observation to himself. After all, Larry Hillblom was both a shrewd businessman and his benefactor. So, despite their common interests in medicine and the easy rapport the two had developed, he knew that Hillblom was not quite his friend.

  “Do you think he’s still alive?” Ousterhout asks me suddenly.

  “I assume he’s not—” I reply.

  “You know, I flew with him once,” the surgeon says out of the blue. “My sons and I met him at an airport north of Nevado. He took us on a short flight and we landed at a lake near Napa in his seaplane. I wasn’t nervous at all!”

  Ousterhout relishes the shock value for a moment. Then he releases the skull still clutched in his thin, expert fingers and spins his chair around to conjure up a PowerPoint presentation on the computer behind him. This, he says, is his current work: male-to-female face reconstruction. The results are remarkable, I gush. Ousterhout’s patients are unrecognizable as their former selves or even as men. They have disappeared. “Larry would have been fascinated by what I’m doing,” he says proudly, and I am not prone to disagree. How better to vanish than to completely change your appearance? What better alias than an entirely new face?

  Hillblom, Ousterhout continues, was actually one of the last purely reconstructive surgeries he performed; those stopped when he received $270 from an insurance company for a fifteen-hour operation. Changing someone’s identity, on the other hand, is mostly cash and very remunerative. Plus, the clientele tends to be far more exotic. A major Hollywood director is among his current patients.

  On my way out, the doctor remembers one more thing that might be of interest to me. Standing up, he begins perusing his modest bookshelf, stacked with medical tomes—including his own—a black-and-white photograph of his mentor, Tessier, and more than a few random mementos. Amid these is a small plastic container, not much larger than a prescription bottle, filled with a sliver of what appears to be human tissue. It is, he reveals, what remains of Larry Hillblom—a thin slice taken during Hillblom’s face-lift. “This has sat on my bookshelf since 1993.” Ousterhout smiles. “I still can’t understand why no one asked me for it. I guess I should really just throw it away.”

  Thirty-One

  The Playground

  Why would I spend $500 on dinner? I’d rather spend it on pussy.

  —Hillblom to a friend in 1993

  “Last year, in August, of 1993,” the attorney Bob O’Connor wrote in response to a letter from the Internal Revenue Service, “Mr. Hillblom was in a very serious airplane crash when a private plane he was in took off from Saipan, developed engine problems, and was forced into a crash landing on the nearby island of Tinian in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (‘CNMI’). Mr. Hillblom was near death suffering from massive injuries to his face and head and cervical spine fracture. He has undergone numerous operations (one which lasted 141/2 hours). He is currently still recuperating from his most recent surgery and the overall trauma of the accident. Mr. Hillblom has no plans to be in the United States in the foreseeable future.”

  If not an outright lie, the letter was certainly a stretch. Hillblom had spent months recovering from the plane crash. But by the time O’Connor typed his letter to the IRS, Hillblom was hardly immobile. He’d spent weeks crisscrossing Asia in a Learjet, fretting over the golf course in Vietnam that was spiraling overbudget, and exploring a raft of new opportunities, including purchasing Philippine Airlines and starting a new airline in the north of Vietnam, where the trade embargo had finally lifted in February. While “recuperating,” Hillblom had also met with the billionaire financier David Bonderman at a Moroccan restaurant in Washington, D.C., and agreed to invest millions of dollars in Air Partners, a buyout fund that had just purchased Continental Airlines out of bankruptcy. And he had been spotted at the United Nations building in New York City once again, this time imploring the Security Council to explain, as he put it, “how the Administering Authority can take a position on democratic ideals concerning Nicaragua, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China, while taking a totally contrary position when dealing with the Northern Marianas.”

  Hillblom’s appearances on Saipan had become less frequent but more memorable. With his newly taut face looking at least a decade younger, he gave a glib interview to a reporter from his own TV station, in which he appeared to brush off the seriousness of the accident and incorrectly claimed that the FAA had said he’d done everything right; in fact, they had forbidden him from flying and revoked his already expired license. In another instance, police were called to his house at 3:00 a.m. when a crazed woman from Palau started banging on his windows, demanding child support for her son. On yet another occasion, police dragged a drunk, cursing Hillblom out of the CNMI Legislature during a late-night tax-writing session and arrested him when he claimed to have a bomb. More in character, he was spotted a few days later bounding down the stairs of the Nauru Building, waving a photocopy of his middle finger that he had just faxed the State Department, in response to an inquiry about his activities in Vietnam. Finally, Ted Mitchell had encountered him stocking up on sale-priced frozen broccoli at Costco; according to Mitchell’s law partner, the two nemeses had somehow managed a civil conversation.

  But from the date of O’Connor’s letter forward, Larry Hillblom was noticeably absent from the island where he had once seemed intent on building his empire. Where he had disappeared to was known by fewer than a handful of men, only one of whom is willing to talk to me about those days.

  “Larry never worried about anything,” says my lunch guest, an expat businessman who was Hillblom’s frequent companion during the last twelve months of his life. I will call him Jim because there are things that happened back then that he does not want his children to know. I can reveal our location, the crown of the Nauru Building, which has miraculously begun to rotate again, just one week before my departure from the island, and is now home to a tourist restaurant called 360. “Larry’s feeling”—Jim grins—“was that there would always be another deal and there would always be another girl.”

  When he’d first started making the four-hour flight to Manila in the early eighties, Hillblom would stay at the Admiral Hotel, a stately if spartan white edifice on Roxas Boulevard across from Manila Bay. Like a lot of sex tourists, Hillblom loved the Admiral because whatever rate they charged you the first time was your rate for life. Several years later, he bought two small condos in the Chateau de Baie, a twenty-four-story condo building overlooking Manila Bay in Malate, not far from the strip clubs on Del Pilar Street. He also bought a studio in Makati, Manila’s upscale financial district.

  Hillblom’s sex life had always been an open secret—with one exception. He would lie to Josephine, telling her that he was going to Guam, where she was not allowed to travel on her limited work visa, and instead used it as a stopover on his way to the Philippines. Hillblom traveled under an alias and, if he had one, he would force his companion to do so as well. One of his favorites was Fred Flintstone—his companion being Barney Rubble for the evening—though he sometimes picked the name of his favorite rock star at the time. Most of the locals would have no idea that he was making fun. (There are, in fact, a number of stories of such jokes being lost in translation—some with serious endings. Case in point: a
n Elvis impersonator who met his wife because she didn’t know that Elvis was dead; apparently, she thought she had hooked Elvis.)

  But Hillblom went a step further than most. He kept two passports, in addition to his diplomatic ID, as a ruse so that Josephine wouldn’t see the Manila stamp when he returned. When she found a pair of panties in his luggage, Hillblom snatched them away and ordered Mike Dotts to find a Barbie doll wearing a dress in the same color, so that he could pretend that the panties she’d seen were something much more innocent—though Dotts is at a loss to explain how Hillblom rationalized carrying a Barbie dress in his bag. Regardless of what was said, Josephine became proactive and started writing her name on Hillblom’s underwear in permanent marker.

  These deceptions did not seem to bother my lunch companion. “When Larry recovered from his surgeries,” Jim remembers, “we met up at the Chateau, and after that we traveled to Manila frequently. He gave me a key, but you needed two, so it was kind of useless. One of the first things Larry told me was that he’d slept with 132 virgins, which was kind of a harbinger of things to come.”

  The billionaire who was more comfortable in a rickshaw than a limousine (Courtesy of Michael W. Dotts)

  Their days in Manila revolved around Hillblom’s twin pursuits: empire-building and pleasure. Though he purposefully avoided routines for security reasons, mornings usually started with a series of phone calls to the United States, followed by a quick visit to the driving range or a longer outing to Tagaytay—a village in the highlands thirty-five miles south of the city popular with local celebrities, where Hillblom liked to play golf. Jim, as with most of Hillblom’s friends, had a skill that was extremely valuable—a willingness to drive in Manila. “I’d drive his Mitsubishi L300 van,” Jim recalls, “which he was very proud of, by the way, to the golf course while Hillblom slept in the back. At night, we’d go out to the strip clubs. I guess you know how they work.” In the morning, he tells me a little sheepishly, there were usually girls around.