The Space Barons

by Christian Davenport

  “We need to get out of here on account of the wind,” he’d said. “You can’t fly these helicopters up here with the wind.”

  Now the helicopter was in trouble. And Cheater, the pilot, was frantically trying to gain control, working the controls as if he were riding a bucking bronco at a rodeo. But there was little he could do. Best just to hold the reins and brace for impact, Holland thought. The helicopter slammed down hard and one of the landing skids caught a mound of dirt, toppling it over. The chopper’s blades crashed into the ground, splintering into shards that could at any moment slice into the cabin.

  Outside, the world turned upside down as the helicopter toppled into a lonely ribbon of a creek that just happened to be named “Calamity.” Inside the cabin, the passengers were jostled around like pinballs, ricocheting from the force of impact, then lurching sideways as the helicopter flipped over.

  The chopper’s cabin lay partially submerged in the shallow creek, and water was beginning to gush inside. Somehow Holland ended up swallowing a mouthful. He did not want to survive a harrowing crash only to drown in a creek. He yanked desperately at his seatbelt. But somehow the mayhem of the crash coupled with the panic-fueled adrenaline made it impossible to undo. The seatbelt that had just saved him was now strangling him, pressing down on his chest and hips, ever tighter.

  Bezos looked into the back of the helicopter to make sure Korrell was okay, but she had disappeared.

  “Where’s Elizabeth?” he asked, frantically.

  There was no response. Then, they saw a hand rising from the water underneath Holland. During the crash, he had pinned the attorney underwater without even knowing he was on top of her. They scrambled to get her out of her seatbelt and her head above water. She gasped for breath. Her lower back was in intense pain. But she had survived. Miraculously, they all had.

  They climbed out of the helicopter, one by one, gathering on the bank, taking stock. Bezos and Cheater had nicks and bruises from hitting their head against the dashboard. Korrell had broken her lower vertebrae. Holland’s arms and shoulder hurt like hell. He must have torn a muscle in the crash or the scramble to get that damn seatbelt off.

  Looking down at the totaled helicopter, they realized how lucky they had been. The crash had amputated the rear tail boom. The chopper lay on its side in the creek, its top rotors scalped. Fuel had spilled out everywhere, so even though Korrell had nearly drowned, the water prevented the helicopter from catching fire. Nearby, the trees were mangled as if chopped by a gardener’s shears, the soil butchered—a scene altogether different from the serenity Bezos had been enjoying just a few moments before.

  “It was harrowing. We were very lucky,” Bezos said later. “I can’t believe we all walked away from it.”

  FROM THE START, Holland had thought flying in a helicopter was a bad idea. Not just because he had never been in one. Or that they’d be flying into some rugged, isolated country. Holland believed that the best way to look at property in the backcountry was by horseback, his preferred means of travel. “You can get a better idea of the country by riding on horseback than flying over it in a dang helicopter,” he thought.

  But Bezos and his attorney “were in a big rush,” Holland recalled. The trip by horse could take days. They only had a few hours.

  Holland had gone on this excursion as a favor to a friend who was a real estate broker. Bezos was looking to buy a ranch, and the broker had asked Holland to show him around. No one knew the country back here as he did, and he was happy to oblige. Holland figured that Bezos, now thirty-nine years old, was looking for a place to relax on weekends, run a few cattle, and pretend to be a cowboy. Maybe relive the childhood memories of summers on his grandfather’s ranch in South Texas.

  Holland didn’t own a computer, let alone go on the Internet. “I knew exactly nothing about him or Amazon or Internet or any of that stuff,” he said.

  Nearly a decade after Bezos had quit his job on Wall Street to sell books on the web, Amazon was starting to take off. In January 2002, the company had posted its first quarterly profit, $5 million. And it had continued to grow, branching out from books to music, toys, clothes, kitchen supplies, and electronics, as customers became more comfortable with using their computer to buy almost anything. In 2000, Amazon had sold 400,000 copies of the Harry Potter book released that year. Three years later, it had sold 1.4 million copies of the next installment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

  Amazon was thriving at a time when many others had collapsed in a stock market swoon that claimed countless so-called dotcoms.

  “We’ve seen the worst of the shakeout,” an analyst told the Washington Post, after the company posted another profit in early 2003, a couple of months before the helicopter crash. “Now there are some behemoths starting to emerge.”

  Amazon’s strategy was “get big fast,” luring customers with the convenience of the Internet and the low prices that the site was becoming known for. Despite the get-rich-quick hype that had surrounded so many Internet startups, Amazon took a slow and steady approach, keeping its prices low, offering free shipping, even while critics said it would never work.

  In headlines during the late 1990s, Business Week had derided the company as “Amazon.Toast,” and Barron’s called it “Amazon.Bomb,” with an unflattering photo of Bezos, who showed it to an audience and said, “My mom hates this picture.”

  But by early 2003, with sales in every major segment growing by double digits, Bezos was as confident as ever in the company’s approach. “It’s working,” he said. “It’s the right investment to make, and it’s in the long-term best interest of shareholders and our customers.”

  The iPhone was still four years away from its debut, but he was confident that the Internet was really only just getting started. In a TED Talk weeks before the West Texas helicopter crash, he compared it to the early days of the electrical industry. The web in 2003 was about where the electrical industry was in 1908, he argued, when the electric socket hadn’t yet been invented and appliances had to be plugged into light sockets.

  “If you really do believe it’s the very, very beginning,” he said, “then you’re incredibly optimistic. And I do think that’s where we are.”

  With Amazon’s success, Bezos’s wealth was growing rapidly. Fortune magazine reported in 2003 that with Amazon’s stock price tripling, his net worth grew by $3 billion to a total of $5.1 billion. He vaulted to number 32 on the list of wealthiest Americans, ahead of New York media titan Michael Bloomberg and the Koch brothers, who ran a vast manufacturing and investment empire.

  March 2003 was, then, a good time to go looking for real estate. To allow himself a measure of freedom to indulge his true passion, even if he rarely spoke of it.

  BEZOS DIDN’T SAY anything about why he wanted to buy land in this hideaway corner of Texas, full of rattlesnakes, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and not much else. Holland, a stolid, soft-spoken rancher who spent as much time around cattle as people, didn’t ask. Bezos struck him as a “different breed of cat,” one he couldn’t relate to.

  Suspicious as Holland was about the helicopter, he was also wary of its pilot, Charles Bella, who was something of a legend in his hometown of El Paso. He had a handlebar mustache and a penchant for fistfights and profanity. His nickname, “Cheater,” came from his days of racing cars: sore losers had accused Bella of cheating and the nickname had stuck. “It turned out to be a compliment,” he told a magazine in 2009. He’d been hired by Hollywood to fly in several movies, including Rambo III and a Chuck Norris flick called Lone Wolf McQuade. In addition to his work as a helicopter pilot, he kept a gaggle of exotic animals—including a bear, timber wolves, mountain lions, and an alligator—at his home. The local game warden would call on him from time to time, once telling the El Paso Times that “Cheater has a way with animals. He can go into a cage with injured mountain lions, and they turn into pussycats.”

  What he was best known for, though, was the prison break. In 1988, he had flown his Gaze
lle helicopter—incidentally, the same one he flew in Rambo III—into the prison, freeing three inmates. After a two-hour chase, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy. But F. Lee Bailey, the famed criminal lawyer who would go on to be part of O. J. Simpson’s defense, represented him and mounted a vigorous defense that led to his acquittal.

  The morning of the prison break, Cheater claimed, a woman had hired him to look at some real estate, just as Bezos later would do. She was dressed in bright red pants and a floral print shirt. That morning, she had taken several guns from a roommate, leaving her a note that read, “Katie, I’m taking your guns because I need them more than you do.”

  Soon after they took off, she took out one of the guns, a .357 magnum, pointed it at Cheater’s head, and demanded he fly into the prison to free her boyfriend, a convicted murderer serving a life-plus-sixty-years sentence, and two of his friends.

  She was obese, Cheater recalled, about 250 pounds. “I’m thinking I’m in deep shit because if this ol’ gal thinks that guy loves her, she won’t stop at nothing, because she’ll never find another guy,” he told Texas Monthly years later.

  He said he tried grabbing at the gun, but his hand was sore from a fistfight days before and he couldn’t wrest it free. They landed on the prison ball field near first base, where the three prisoners were waiting. They scrambled aboard, one hanging on to the helicopter skid, while guards fired from the prison tower. Cheater wasn’t sure what to do.

  “Her boyfriend is slapping me on the head with a gun saying he’s gonna blow my head off if I don’t get going,” he recalled. “The engine is already up to the max. I’m pulling it all the way through the temperature range. It should have exploded. And finally they shove this one guy off the skids and one of the guys in the helicopter jumps off and runs alongside it and he climbs back in when we start to take off.”

  The chopper barely cleared the fence, and they were off. Soon they had bigger problems. The feds were in pursuit, chasing them down in a Black Hawk helicopter for nearly two hours until it was clear there was no escape. Cheater finally landed at the Albuquerque airport.

  Now, with his helicopter lying broken and submerged, he was in another big mess. He had just crashed in the middle of nowhere with one of the world’s richest people on board.

  Bezos’s entourage was wet and stranded, miles from civilization, with no service to call for help on their cell phones. Still, it could have been much worse. They were alive, and as they stood on the banks of Calamity Creek, a modicum of relief settled in. Bezos looked at Holland and smiled.

  “Maybe you were right,” he said to the cowboy. “Maybe horseback was the way to travel into the backcountry after all.” A weird, full-throttle laugh boomed through the canyon from the man who had cheated death.

  “He let out that goofy laugh,” Holland said. “He thought it was funny as hell. I didn’t think it was funny.”

  Cheater set off the helicopter’s transponder, hoping rescue crews would pick up the signal. And Holland took off on foot to look for help at a house a few miles away.

  They didn’t have to wait long. Soon, helicopters from US Border Patrol appeared overheard, and then the Brewster County sheriff’s deputies showed up with a backcountry rescue group.

  Sheriff Ronny Dodson surveyed the scene. The chopper was a red carcass, slumped in the creek. The scarred ground that had been plowed by the helicopter’s rotors. Then this curious quartet. As a lawman, he was familiar with the infamous Cheater Bella. And he recognized Holland as one of the local ranchers. But the short, quirky-looking fellow seemed out of place. Friendly as Bezos was, Dodson couldn’t place him.

  It wasn’t until paramedics showed up in a pickup truck and one was amazed to see the 1999 Time magazine Person of the Year at the crash site that Dodson was clued in.

  “Don’t you know who that is?” said one paramedic to the clearly oblivious sheriff. “It’s the founder of Amazon.com.”

  Amazon? Yes, Dodson had heard of it, though he wasn’t a customer.

  “I didn’t do much business with Amazon,” he said, years later. “I thought Amazon was just books, and I read about none. So, why would I look?”

  The paramedics took Bezos and Korrell to the hospital: he was treated for minor cuts; she, for her broken vertebrae; both were released. Holland’s arms were still hurting from trying to rip off the seatbelt. “I lived in pain my whole life, and knew something was wrong,” he said. The doctor said he’d need to see a specialist. But he’d had enough for the day.

  “I got my shirt on and left,” he said. “And went to the bar.”

  AS WORD OF the crash spread, Amazon downplayed it, declining to comment except to say that Bezos “is fine. We’re business as usual.” Years later, Bezos would admit that the crash was far more severe, but still made light of his brush with death.

  “People say that your life flashes before your eyes,” he told an interviewer at Fast Company magazine in 2004. “This particular accident happened slowly enough that we had a few seconds to contemplate it.”

  He let out his trademark, maniacal laugh. “I have to say, nothing extremely profound flashed through my head in those few seconds. My main thought was, ‘This is such a silly way to die.’

  “It wasn’t life-changing in any major way,” he continued. “I’ve learned a fairly tactical lesson from it, I’m afraid. The biggest takeaway is: Avoid helicopters whenever possible. They’re not as reliable as fixed-wing aircraft.”

  IT WASN’T LONG after the crash that Ronald Stasny’s phone began to ring. The attorney on the phone was polite, unfailingly so, but also incredibly persistent. Every month or so, Elizabeth Korrell said she was calling on behalf of a mysterious client, one she refused to name, and every time, Stasny’s response was the same. No, he was not interested in selling his ranch.

  It had a great view from the kitchen window of Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas, and it was surrounded by the ethereal mountain ranges of West Texas, the Sierra Diablos, the Baylors, the Apaches, and the Delawares surrounding the ranch like sentries. Stretching out 32,000 acres, it was home to quail, dove, and mountain lions. The mule deer were big and plentiful, with massive antlers that branched out like leafless trees, and fed on the protein-rich vegetation. Stasny’s grandchildren were gaining a lifetime’s worth of memories discovering the far-flung secrets of this swath of Texas plain, from the old silver and gold mine shafts to the Indian artifacts.

  No, he wasn’t going to sell. Especially not to some Seattle lawyer with a secretive buyer. This was Stasny’s retreat, a place to get away from the city life of San Antonio, where he was a lawyer himself. This was where he and his wife planned to retire.

  The old adobe house on the property dated to the 1920s, and the lineage of the land was tied to one of the great ranches in all of Texas, the Figure 2 Ranch, where the Texas Rangers had fought one of their last battles against the Apaches in 1881. The land had passed through the family of James Madison Daugherty, one of the founding fathers of Texas cattle ranchers, and James Marion “Silver Dollar Jim” West Jr., a Houston oil scion, who had a habit of flipping silver dollar coins to people on the street.

  Stasny had invested a great deal in the property, adding heat and air-conditioning to the main house. When a hailstorm left pockmarks in the roof, and he wanted it replaced, the roofer urged him not to, saying, “They don’t make sheet metal roofs like this anymore.” He put in an irrigation system and cleared some of the paths to the backcountry that had been accessible only by horseback. The hunters were grateful that he allowed them on the property, staying ten deep in the bunkhouse behind the barn, before stalking those glorious mule deer.

  But Korrell, the Seattle attorney, wouldn’t give up. Her anonymous client was very interested in the property. And as Stasny later would learn, he wasn’t the only landowner they were courting. Korrell was reaching out to several of his neighbors, offering to buy them out as well. Here was someone who could clearly afford to buy it all up—and was, judging b
y the frequency of the attorney calls, eager to do so. One by one, his neighbors sold.

  Finally, Stasny did, too. He accepted the deal in early 2004, after talking about it with his family over the Christmas holiday. The offer was just too good, more than enough to buy another ranch to retire on. Although he wouldn’t say what he sold for—he signed a confidentiality agreement—it was reportedly $7.5 million.

  The mysterious buyer was amassing an impressive collection of ranches, cloaking his identity by buying the land under corporate entities with curious names: Jolliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Limited Partnerships, and Coronado Ventures. All were named for explorers who had opened up frontiers, from the American West, to New Zealand and the Great Barrier Reef, to Mexico and Canada. All linked to a little-known corporation, doing business out of Seattle Post Office Box 94314, with an out-of-this-world-sounding name: Zefram LLC.

  Right there was a clue to the buyer’s identity and his intentions. Zef­ram Cochrane was a character in Star Trek who created the first spaceship capable of traveling at warp speeds, or faster than the speed of light. He was an explorer of another sort, a fictional one from the future, who said the warp speed engine “will let us go boldly where no man has gone before.”

  RUMOR WAS STARTING to spread around the nearby town of Van Horn that someone was out there buying up property in Culberson and Hudspeth Counties. Larry Simpson had a pretty good idea who.

  Simpson was the owner and editor of the Van Horn Advocate, the weekly newspaper that he ran out of the back of his office supply store with a handful of reporters for the town of 2,100. Simpson also worked part-time at the county airport. Word there was Bezos had been flying in on his private jet with a real estate agent in tow. The helicopter crash had gotten people wondering as well. But what the billionaire wanted the land for was anyone’s guess.

  Simpson didn’t give it much thought. “I have not been real pushy, like maybe a big-city newspaper guy would be,” he told the Seattle Times. But then one Monday in January 2005, Bezos himself stopped by the office, saying, “We want to give you a news release.” Casual, relaxed in jeans and boots. No entourage, just Bezos and a soft-spoken gentleman who let his boss do the talking.