Running Against the Tide

by Captain Lee

  This is to say that even when there’s a lot of money on the table, and even when you go to a reputable professional who has performed work at a very high level for many years, there’s still room for error and corruption. Why open the door to crippling conflicts of interest by allowing kickbacks and bribes? The guy offering the kickback isn’t doing it because you love money—he’s doing it because he loves money. Once that payoff is made, he’s not just going to see that kickback as a gift to a capable businessman—it’s a loss that needs to be recovered. And where’s the first place he’s going to try to make up that loss? On the job he just paid the kickback for. He’ll try to cut corners, hire less qualified people, buy sub-prime materials, pad the billings. When someone’s getting a little extra, someone else is sure as hell getting shortchanged.

  Do your job and demand others to do the same, and you’ll do all right.

  Of course, it can go the other way, too. Money doesn’t always flow from the vendors to the captains or the chefs. Sometimes, the owners like to get in on that kind of action. If bribes are a way to grease the skids, owners aren’t immune from wanting to get a little greasy every now and again.

  One time, I saw an owner come to visit his boat while it was getting a refit, and as a way to encourage everyone’s best efforts, he handed out one hundred dollars to every painter, electrician, and carpenter working his boat that day. And it worked. Those guys really wanted to put in a top effort for that owner. Added to that, news spreads fast at the docks, and lots of other painters and electricians and carpenters heard about the high-roller who liked throwing out bonus money.

  But it wasn’t a popular move with everyone.

  The guys who managed the yard weren’t too happy with that kind of maneuver. Sure, it improved morale for the guys working that job, but as a result, everyone else stopped their jobs and tried to get on at our boat.

  “Need an extra carpenter?” someone would ask.

  “No, we’ve got a full crew,” the foreman would reply.

  “Okay. I’ll just hang around in case you need someone.”

  These guys had other jobs they were being paid to do, and now they couldn’t figure out a reliable schedule because everyone wanted to bail on what they were doing and come help refit my boat. So, the owner ended up dropping $2,000, which was nothing to him, and set the whole yard on fire with guys thinking they were going to be courtside when he came back to make it rain. Guys should just do their jobs and not get greedy, but everyone likes money.

  Some people might argue that this is just practical economics at its most basic. You make a little bribe, offer a little kickback, and you get what you want. In return, the person paying gets what he wants. Everyone’s happy, and the money helps identify how much things are genuinely worth. Adam Smith’s invisible hand in action.

  But what happens when the money makes things worse?

  The Eastern Seaboard is spotted with lovely towns where the rich folks like to party for the weekend during the summer.

  Sometimes, those wealthy weekenders like to travel by boat. If they wanted to dock their boats at the pier, they would have to speak to the dockmaster. The dockmaster is the person in charge of the waterfront. He or she is the one who got to decide who stayed and who went. For at least one, whom I’ll call Rob, one of the things that helped him make those decisions was how amenable a captain might be to contributing to his favorite charity, which we might call the Rob Retirement Fund. It was a kind of art preservation society, for Rob was keenly interested in collecting the portraits of dead presidents. If you wanted a slip, it might cost you $1,000 in cash for a single night, plus your normal docking rate.

  Some might argue that this simply clarified who wanted the dock space the most. The person who paid proved he was the one in most desperate need, and this way, the slips were allocated in the most fair and judicious fashion.

  But the thing was, if Rob didn’t get the payments he demanded, those slips would remain empty. Does that seem like smart economics? The boaters didn’t benefit, since they couldn’t dock, and the town wouldn’t benefit, since now there were fewer people entering the town to eat at its restaurants, shop at its antique shops, and find other ways to spend their money. The only person who really seemed to be benefitting was Rob.

  Still, his defenders would say he was just doing his job. He kept order, he discouraged the riffraff, that kind of thing. However, when Rob found himself eating at a nice restaurant and there was a captain in the vicinity, he would never have to pay his own tab. It was almost always taken care of. How does the dockmaster getting a free dinner help the town? The straight-up truth is that he ran the harbor his way because he liked money, something certainly not unique to Rob.

  But, in some places, there are a few things that even money can’t buy.

  Where there’s glamour, there are yachts. And there are fewer places as glamorous as Cannes, France, for its film festival or Monaco for the Grand Prix, one of the most prestigious races in all of motorsport. People come from all over the world to attend these events, but it’s not exactly open to everyone. You need to have a lot of money, and you need to have celebrity.

  It’s kind of fascinating how the economies of glamour work. Take the Cannes Film Festival. If you want to dock at a slip, it’s going to cost you. You’d be smart to give the harbormaster a nice “gratuity” if you want to be able to get a plum space, a tip in the neighborhood of $100,000. A very nice neighborhood, indeed. Otherwise, instead of getting a nice slip right at dockside, be prepared to drop anchor in the bay and send an A-list passenger landward in a dingy.

  But money won’t buy everything. You can’t just be rich—you have to be a celebrity. And not just some art-house darling like Darren Aronofsky or TV star like Jim Parsons. You need to be A-list all the way: George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, or Steven Spielberg. If you don’t have someone in that weight class, it’s not going to be easy.

  And this is where things get interesting. Hypothetically, let’s take someone like David Geffen. Geffen is one of the biggest music and film producers in the entertainment industry. In music, he owned the label that produced albums with John Lennon, Elton John, Cher, the Eagles, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, and Nirvana. In film, he founded the studio DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg (the S and the K to his G), producing such films as Gladiator, American Beauty, Shrek, and A Beautiful Mind. He has an estimated net worth of $6.5 billion. He is, to put it mildly, a pretty big wheel. But he could walk down almost any street in America and never get recognized. A gazillionaire and no one would know who he was.

  And he might not stand a chance of getting a slip in Cannes.

  George Clooney, on the other hand, is a big, recognizable star. You know he’s not walking down any street without getting mobbed. And he’s not doing too bad in terms of money, with about $500 million in the bank. But he doesn’t own a giga-yacht, because that would wipe out half his net worth. So, Clooney can’t get dockside because he doesn’t have a boat, and Geffen might get rejected because he’s not a big enough celebrity. So, what do they do? Geffen asks his friend George if he might want to be a guest on his boat, and George kindly accepts, and someone pays the harbormaster a six-figure tip, and they can pull right onto the dock without having to drop the hook in the harbor like some lesser-known billionaire might have to.

  In a lot of ways, it doesn’t seem fair. But there’s a reason why a good number of the harbormasters in Monaco drive Ferraris and have a phone full of selfies accompanied by the world’s most famous people.

  And it isn’t limited to the harbormaster. Once you’re finally in port, you’re going to want to have a good time. The owner and his guests are going to want to eat, drink, and be merry. But so does everyone else with a boat. That means that lots of purveyors are getting orders for mussels, for steaks, for wine. The chef will get a message that his order is in, but that he’s at the bottom of the list.

  “I need that case of wine tonight. It’s Harrison Ford
’s favorite! You can’t get it in America!”

  “Oh, I understand completely. If you want to move up the list, you could pay for express service.”

  It’s not the chef’s dime, after all, but it’s his job to make it happen.

  “Sure. Add ten percent for yourself. But get it here this afternoon.”

  “No problem.”

  When you’ve got the cash, there’s never a problem.

  It can be a cruel world out there. Everyone is looking to make a buck, everyone is looking to get ahead, and some things can just drive you crazy. Some folks will work their whole lives in a West Virginia coal town, digging coal and barely putting food on the table, while a few miles away, some rich kid is born who inherits a couple of billion dollars and never wears the same underwear twice. Even among the rich, there are different strata. Some guys are buying yachts and then feel insecure when they see someone else with a helipad on theirs.

  It’s amazing the things people will do when they have the money. I knew one guy who owned a very nice 40-foot center console, but he didn’t want it to get polluted by people using it for a tender when they chartered his mega-yacht. So, he spent $500,000 on an Intrepid, a 12-meter tender, just to use when the big boat was on charter. That’s like buying a Lexus just to keep around for when your brother-in-law is in town, because you don’t want him driving your Bentley. He had the money, and that’s how he wanted to spend it.

  Or take PJ. He would charter a boat for his friends to use, even though he owned his own boat. He’d pay $100,000 just to charter a boat so his friends wouldn’t get their Manolo Blahnik shoeprints all over his deck.

  But that’s their business. That’s not something I have to worry about at all. Just because some guy has the money to spend on two boats doesn’t mean he’d be happy if I skimmed a little off him with some creative expense reports. If an owner is willing to pay a million bucks to refit his boat, that doesn’t mean I get license to pocket $20,000 in kickbacks. Someone being richer than me doesn’t mean I have to be miserable. Even with billionaires buying tropical islands and castles, you can still make a nice life for yourself. You can be happy driving a Mustang even if someone else is driving a McLaren. You can be happy eating a porterhouse steak even if someone else is chowing down on lobster stuffed with caviar. Taking a kickback might get me a hair closer to those kinds of deep pockets, but I’ll never do it, because you only get one chance at integrity. That’s worth a lot more to me than a shoebox full of cash.

  Some things, you just can’t buy.

  Chapter 9

  There Is No Dumbass Vaccine

  If you’re working with a bad captain, it’s rough, but at least he’s a captain. He has to know something to be there in the first place, and that knowledge can be helpful. It’s not always the same with an owner. To own a boat, the only thing he needs to know is the location of his checkbook. You can’t argue seamanship with someone who doesn’t know a square knot from a half hitch, or effective staff management with someone who inherited his fortune. One of the biggest problems you can possibly face when dealing with an owner, or anyone, is a disagreement with someone who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

  Such was my problem when I took a new assignment, becoming the captain of a custom-made 140-footer. I liked the boat. It had five staterooms and good lines, and I figured it would be a decent job to captain her through charter season. But there were problems. One issue: there were two owners. That’s not uncommon. Yachts cost a hell of a lot of money, and sometimes, to avoid the full impact of the sticker shock, guys like to have a partner. Or an owner will know that he won’t need the boat 365 days of the year and might as well have someone else be able to use it. Still, having multiple owners can also mean multiple agendas, where one guy will vote going in one direction and his partner will disagree. You either end up with crossed wires or discussions that take four weeks instead of one day.

  The two owners were almost night and day. One of them was Anderson, a CEO for a Fortune 500 company. He presided over 35,000 employees, and was accustomed to hiring people to do jobs that he had no experience or interest in. He was smart as a whip but also knew that captaining a boat was my job, and he deferred to my experience. The kind of guy I could easily work with.

  The other owner was another story. Harry was a California attorney, specializing in lawsuits. Three red flags right off the bat: lawyer, California, lawsuits. This was the kind of guy who was used to operating mostly on his own, without having to work with a team, and whose area of expertise was suing people for screwing up. He also had a pretty high opinion of himself. In other words, the perfect boss.

  Having two bosses wasn’t the only issue at play, however. Another problem was that they’d bought the boat half-finished. That’s not a unique situation. Sometimes, a customer will put in an order and then suffer some financial reversals and not be able to take possession of the boat. The yacht builder stops work on the custom boat and looks to find another buyer. Enter Anderson and Harry.

  Unfortunately, they didn’t know what they were getting into. They bought the boat, but then hired some engineers who were just drooling at the chance to soak a couple of rich marks. They immediately started work on finishing the boat and started screwing things up.

  I knew instantly that these guys had to go. For one thing, they’d installed the generators backward. That was, to use a very technical term, a big problem. As a result, you couldn’t get access to service them, to check the fluid levels. On top of that, the plumbing and the wiring were all screwed up. My guess was that they put in a bid, got the job, then farmed it out to some bottom-of-the-barrel contractors to do the actual work. They got what they paid for.

  Now, if you hire lousy contractors to renovate your home, you have some experience in living in a house. You can therefore call people on their shit when they do things like try to run the wires across the ceiling, or link pipes from the toilet directly to the shower. In those cases, you can say, “That just should not be,” fire their asses, and get competent replacements. But virgin boat owners don’t know what things should look like. When they came to visit the boat, they had no idea that the generators were installed backward. They were basically just looking at the hull, making sure there were no obvious breaches. They nodded their heads and said, “Let us know if you need more money.”

  That was, in part, why I was there. I knew what I was doing. When I saw the work that had been done, I wasn’t happy. One morning, an engineer told me, “I’m going offsite to pick up some parts.” Those parts must have been in Cuba, because he didn’t come back for four hours and then just called it a day. Another plumber was a total drunk, and if he got paid on a Monday, he was AWOL the rest of the week. That kind of thing didn’t inspire a ton of confidence. I fired the whole lot of them and imported professionals who could get the job done. I had to rip out all the work they’d screwed up and redo it all from scratch. If you hire people who prove incompetent, you have to get rid of them.

  Or so I thought.

  Enter the chef. I’ll call him Duane.

  I was getting everything squared away on the boat for the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show. This was a big deal. We wanted to rent the boat out for charters, and it was the season, so we anticipated getting a lot of traffic from brokers interested in the boat. For that kind of thing, you want every piece of brass polished, every inch of teak on the deck scrubbed, and every member of the crew dressed smart, acting professional, and minding his manners.

  Duane, our ship’s chef, didn’t get that memo.

  “What’s up, skipper?” he said as he walked up the gangway at six that morning.

  “You Duane?” I asked. I hadn’t met him before, but it was just process of elimination, since everyone had already showed up.

  “That’s what it says on my driver’s license,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

  Who did he think he was talking to? The booking agent for the Ha-Ha Hut?

  “You ready to work today?” I asked
. The guy looked like he was in the final stretch of a three-day bender. Bloodshot eyes, unshaven face, not a lot of focus. Just the kind of guy I wanted cooking my food and swinging around razor-sharp knives.

  “That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” he said.

  A real charmer.

  Problem was, I didn’t have a lot of options. Just like I’d inherited the boat and had to get it into shape, I’d inherited the crew, as well. This was the first time I’d met him, and I didn’t have time to fire him and replace him, since we were supposed to entertain the brokers all day. But just because I couldn’t fire him didn’t mean I had to make it easy for him.

  “Just point me toward the galley, my good man,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You got a uniform in that bag? Chef’s coat?”

  “You know it.”

  “Well, find a nice hook to hang it on, because you’re going to be doing a different job today.”

  “Bikini inspector?” He laughed, the perfect audience for himself.

  “Gangway duty. Talk to Jeff, the deckhand, about getting a spare uniform. And put some shades on.”

  “So nice of you to think about my comfort.”

  “It’s not for you, it’s for anyone who comes within ten feet of you and doesn’t want to have to see those Ebola eyeballs. Get some coffee down your throat, get sobered up, get a uniform, and be back here in ten minutes.”

  While Duane was downing a cup of java and getting presentable, I made a call to Harry to let him know that we were about to be one chef light.

  “What’s the story on this Duane guy? Seems like a total zero,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s colorful, all right,” Harry said. Not quite the response I was expecting.