The settlement conference percolated for two days. As usual, Hillblom stuck to his position—that the Continental takeover of United Micronesia Development Association was unlawful—while Donnici talked to Judge Roberts and Lifoifoi sat silently, arms crossed, chewing betel nut and gawking at the two dozen–plus corporate lawyers on the other side of the table. “Finally,” Israel remembers, “Judge Roberts said, ‘I’ve had it. This is going nowhere.’ He ordered us all to come back together and come to an agreement. We went back and forth and came to the San Francisco Accords. Everyone signed off, including the governments. I have a picture of Larry looking at the agreement and smiling.”
Hillblom would have plenty of time on the plane ride home to contemplate the deal brokered by Israel and Judge Roberts, and he would not like its end result. He would be forced to give up all of the shares of UMDA that his People of Micronesia had accumulated so far—shares that he knew were worth far more than he’d paid. Meanwhile, Continental and the governments of the CNMI, Palau, the FSM, and the Marshalls would split UMDA and its cash cow, Air Mike. Whether Hillblom really intended to be cut out and return his shares is doubtful. What is certain is that his mind was racing every bit as fast as the Continental jet whisking him back to Saipan. He was not retreating. He was plotting his next move.
Eighteen
War
“I created Potawatomie for Larry!” Bob O’Connor exclaims at the mention of the unusual name that Hillblom used for a condominium complex he built near the top of Mount Tapochau—Saipan’s highest point. “The Potawatomie are the Indians in my little island in Michigan where I went to camp as a kid.”
O’Connor, UMDA’s attorney and Larry Hillblom’s former law partner, sinks back into his leather chair, the crows’-feet on both temples creasing tanned skin. He has been coming to this office for the better part of two decades, having arrived on-island only a few years after Larry himself, whose former office across the hall now belongs to the island cable television company. Directly above us, on the third floor, lie the remains of the old federal courthouse, now located a mile north in a newer building, and several floors above that, an abandoned Chinese restaurant that once occupied the building’s crown: a circular space with a revolving floor that features 180-degree views of the western side of the island, as well as Tinian and Managaha. A marquee in the parking lot announces the Marianas Business Plaza, but everyone still calls it the Nauru Building, a sentimental nod to the glory days, when the building was full and its owner, the Republic of Nauru, boasted the highest per capita income in the world.* I am told that there is still an empty ten-room suite on the seventh floor reserved for Nauru’s king, though he has never slept there.
“When I arrived,” O’Connor remembers, “there were only two hundred to four hundred alien workers on the island, mostly Korean construction workers. . . . There were no apartment buildings and no streetlights. There was one KFC. The governor’s salary was $8,000 a year. One year later, the last patrol car broke down. Prisoners showed up in casual clothes with no handcuffs. Once, I got a job prosecuting a drunk ax-murderer/sailor. I ended up taking the guy to lunch when he showed up early to my office for a deposition! Prisoners would often sneak out of the jail and get a drink at a bar. There were no laws on incest or cruelty to animals. The culture also had a system of apology: if a perpetrator apologized and the family accepted, then there would be no prosecution. At the time, eighty percent of children were born out of wedlock, so kids got traded around a lot. For example, if you accidentally killed a kid, then you gave that family one of your own children, or you gave yourself.”
O’Connor had almost exhausted his sabbatical from the Ventura County DA’s consumer fraud unit when he encountered Saipan’s most famous resident by chance in a local snack bar. He and his girlfriend were celebrating his passage of the CNMI bar exam—what he assumed would be a pointless achievement—with a cheap breakfast. Hillblom and his girlfriend of the moment were seated at a nearby table. (“We were both cheapskates.”) When she heard that O’Connor had passed the bar, Hillblom’s girlfriend turned to Larry and said, “You should hire Bob.”
Hillblom didn’t skip a beat. “Yeah,” he replied, sipping a mug of coffee, “I’ve got a big case against Frank Lorenzo coming up. I’ll pay you five thousand dollars a month for half of your time and give you a free office.”
O’Connor was shocked. He had just been offered a job in the most cavalier way imaginable—and that job was to sue Frank Lorenzo, one of the most feared businessmen in the world. The next day, he drove to Hillblom’s modest house across from the beach, where Larry plied him with coffee and fed him the details. O’Connor left discombobulated. “I couldn’t get it,” he recalls, “I just couldn’t understand how Hillblom intended to beat the Goliath.”
Larry had told him not to worry, that he never lost a case, but O’Connor wondered how that could be true. Hillblom clearly wasn’t a good writer or a good speaker—he might even be dyslexic. Hillblom, he realized, couldn’t even spell the word maybe.
Yet, the next month, O’Connor found himself calling his boss at the DA’s office in Ventura and hearing the words depart his lips as soon as his boss answered the phone: “I’m staying.” By the time he hung up, the security of his life was gone. No paycheck. No career path. No bureaucracy. Just Larry Hillblom.
Their first office was a tiny house buried in jungle, not far from Saipan’s only quarry. As O’Connor remembers, it had a tin roof, no air-conditioning, no water, no telephone, and an electric typewriter. “Clients would have to find us, we were so hidden.” He didn’t know that hiding was an essential part of Hillblom’s MO. At first, Joe Lifoifoi’s wife typed up their briefs. Within forty-five days, however, O’Connor had hired an assistant. Two months after that, they opened an office on Olopai Beach, not far from the Nauru Building. In addition to the Continental suit, O’Connor and Hillblom filed numerous actions against the State Department on behalf of CNMI citizens who had been refused U.S. passports. A typical case was Joeten’s wife, who had been born on Fiji. When the federal judge on Saipan, Alfred Laureta, issued a blistering opinion ordering the State Department to treat the islanders as citizens rather than subjects, Hillblom printed T-shirts emblazoned with the judge’s order and distributed them among the locals. He was now like a rock star on Saipan. His biggest fan may have been his law partner.
As O’Connor spent more time with Hillblom, his boss’s confidence seemed less like arrogance and more like the natural by-product of a relentless work ethic combined with the most formidable intellect that O’Connor had ever encountered. “When he’d walk out of the room, I couldn’t figure out, ‘How could anybody be so smart?’” O’Connor gushes. “As a lawyer, I would ask his advice on cases, but before I’d ask it, I’d have a pad and a pen ready, so that I could write down, as fast as I could, the ideas that he would give me. Because if I didn’t write them down, he would forget what he told me.”
O’Connor’s praise of Hillblom is as limitless as a groupie’s. He tells me how Larry could listen to a piece of music, sit down at a piano, and play it note for note—like Mozart, I guess—how he had an encyclopedic knowledge of any given subject despite the fact that he never seemed to read. But he also admits that his friend was often inaccessible. He distrusted people’s motives. He made sure that no one saw the whole picture. He kept you guessing.
Nineteen
The Bachelor
Continental is currently engaged in a massive unlawful scheme to permanently take control over Air Mike. The sinister nature of this scheme is of the same magnitude of the white missionaries: exploitation of the Hawaiian. We implore this court to learn from history and prevent Continental’s duplicitous scheme to permanently deprive Micronesia of this most valuable economic entity.
—From People of Micronesia v. Frank Lorenzo et al.
“Larry sounded like he was calling from the moon and he spoke very fast,” the litigator Parker Folse recalls of the phone call that changed his life and
launched a career that most lawyers would envy—a career that has led up to this corner office in a posh downtown high-rise overlooking Seattle’s Puget Sound. “I had to really struggle to understand what he was saying. Typically, a client in his shoes would have handed the task to an underling, who would have researched the case and found an attorney who knew the judge involved or at least who had distinguished himself or herself in the kind of case at issue. I still don’t know why he cold-called me, why he didn’t go the normal route.
“In fact, the receptionist had only forwarded the call to me because she liked me and she knew that I needed the work. I believe I was the youngest and least experienced of the attorneys in our office, and we were really just a boutique litigation firm in downtown Houston. I don’t even know how he got our number.
“I warned Hillblom that I had no experience in bankruptcy court and little experience at all as a litigator, but Hillblom wanted me anyway—probably because I was enthusiastic. I also offered up an idea that would allow us to bypass Roberts: a RICO* lawsuit. RICO is a criminal statute. Because it is typically filed against individual defendants and not enterprises, and because only Continental was in bankruptcy, I thought that such a lawsuit would be easier to remove from Roberts’ bankruptcy court.† Larry loved the idea, but he wanted to pile on four more counts: breaches of fiduciary duty; violations of the Securities & Exchange Act; the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; and fraud. He also insisted that we file the lawsuit in federal district court on Saipan.
“I didn’t even know there was a district court out there! Larry told me that he knew the judge real well. That if we could get the case removed to Saipan, we’d squash them. So the only other question was, ‘How much are we suing for?’ We finally ended up with—or Larry came up with—$149 million.”
One of the named defendants in Hillblom’s RICO case was Barry Israel, who happened to be in the FSM when President Nakigawa and one of his most important advisers, Andon Amarich, were served. “Amarich,” Israel remembers, “the man who had led the country to independence from the United Nations and the United States, had a heart attack because he was so upset by the lawsuit. President Nakigawa was beside himself.” That night, an Air Mike jet flew Amarich to Hawaii for medical treatment. Meanwhile, Israel, knowing that Hillblom would be traveling to the FSM, prepared a lawsuit against his new adversary. “We found out that Larry was at the airport.” Israel laughs. “We found him hiding under a counter and served him with a lawsuit to counteract his lawsuit. We alleged fraud, among other things.”
If the irony of being sued by Micronesians—the very people he had promised Joe Lifoifoi that he would protect—stung, Hillblom never showed it. His law office became a war room where he and Bob O’Connor trolled thick law books for cases that might be relevant. Peter Donnici and his office in San Francisco were enlisted to create arguments also. But the bulk of the work fell on Parker Folse’s desk in Houston, where Hillblom’s calls began to arrive from every corner of the globe.
“He called nearly every day.” Folse smiles. “And Larry always made me feel like kind of a wuss. I never knew where he was calling me from, but he’d always start out with ‘What about this?’ or ‘This is what we should do.’ Then he’d wait for me to poke holes in his argument. If I couldn’t convince him otherwise, he expected me to execute. ‘Don’t stop too soon in your thinking,’ he would tell me constantly. ‘And don’t tell me what can’t be done. Convince me that I’m wrong.’”
The one thing that Folse could tell Hillblom for certain was that his lawsuit was doomed in Judge Roberts’s court. But an enraged Roberts was demanding that Hillblom come to Houston and explain the RICO lawsuit, which the judge clearly found not only meritless but deeply offensive. Hillblom ignored him. Instead, he sent Folse and Peter Donnici as his surrogates, where they soon found themselves being knocked around Roberts’s courtroom on a regular basis. When more threats, delivered in an increasingly agitated if syrupy Mississippi drawl, failed to elicit Hillblom’s attention, Roberts issued an injunction for Hillblom to cease and desist suing Continental; then he entered a contempt order, fining Hillblom an eye-popping $25,000 for each day he refused to withdraw his lawsuit. But over Folse and Donnici’s pleas, Hillblom once again ignored the Houston judge. The cease and desist order, he pointed out, simply gave them an opportunity to appeal and perhaps even to have Roberts kicked off the case. (Even a federal judge cannot order a private citizen not to seek justice, after all.) But Hillblom was not so patient that he would wait for Roberts’s ouster and risk being arrested when he flew back to the States. He needed to bring Frank Lorenzo to Saipan.
“I think we’re here.”
Three boonie dogs bark expletives as Bob O’Connor suddenly U-turns the SUV around a hedge that we have passed several times in the last forty-five minutes, revealing a rusted aluminum fence camouflaged by vines. By the time he has unlocked the gate and led me into the front door of the modest cement home behind it, melancholy has softened the chiseled features just a bit. “Sad” is the only word that escapes his mouth for several minutes.
The media referred to Hillblom’s home as a “mansion,” but even if one ignores the mildewed carpets, the smashed windows, and the truncated wires poking out of huge tears in the walls (the theft of copper wire is epidemic here, as it is in most depressed parts of the United States), it is clear that this house was never deserving of such a grandiose label. The front door doubles as the kitchen door. One steps down into a small living room and ducks below an oddly placed concrete beam to reach the slightly larger den, which had been Larry’s favorite room for meetings. Just past the den, on the right, is a tiny, windowless room walled with shelves that once held Hillblom’s law books—where he crafted most of his lawsuits against the federal government. Upstairs is a modest master bedroom and bath. On the floor below is an uncomfortably small guest bedroom and en suite shower. From the top deck, reached by a rusted-out spiral staircase and home to an orphaned Jacuzzi, one can gaze at the Western Pacific Ocean, unobstructed to the horizon, or at Mount Tapochau, or the bishop’s residence, which sits just a bit higher than the governor’s mansion.
Larry and Josephine (Courtesy of Michael W. Dotts)
Directly below, overlooking the Pacific, is a giant cluster of tangan-tangan vines that eventually slopes downward and disappears into the bluff. Saipan’s landscape was re-created in the late 1950s by Navy Seabees after one of the most relentless bombing campaigns of the war wiped out the island’s vegetation, leaving its soil defenseless against frequent tropical storms. Navy engineers imported tens of thousands of the tenacious tangan-tangan, half tree, half vine, the only plant capable of growing faster than it could be washed away, in order to anchor the soil. Most of the island is now covered in the unsightly tangan-tangan, whose only asset has become a liability. Left unchecked, it can overgrow roads and just about anything else in a matter of days. While the gigantic castor bean may have saved Saipan’s soil, it has also compromised the growing of anything useful besides cucumbers, tomatoes, watery avocados, and the increasingly rare taro.
After a short tour of the house, O’Connor walks down the winding paved driveway to the garage, which turns out to be empty save for a smattering of moldy pleadings guarded by a family of freakily muscular black arachnids. Maybe a hundred feet away is the swimming pool, covered with a thick veneer of algae, where O’Connor and Hillblom used to retire at night with a six-pack of Budweiser and discuss the Continental case, among other things.
“You know,” the attorney begins, “there’s a couple things I remember him telling me. He said, ‘The first seven million is the hardest seven million to make. After that, it’s easy.’ And he also said that there was a time, when he first made money, that he started spending it. He bought a fancy car and a house and all that, and then it wasn’t any fun. He said, ‘I’ve already been through that stage and there’s nothing to it. It’s just a waste of time, a waste of energy. There’s nothing fun about it.’ He didn’t get any enjoymen
t out of buying cars and houses and stuff.”
What Hillblom enjoyed would soon become very clear to O’Connor: young girls. Dabbling in the local waters had been a favored pastime of colonists for centuries, of course. Many of O’Connor’s friends would marry young Asian women, including O’Connor himself. But there was something more aggressive and strategic about Hillblom’s approach to dating. Roger Gridley, the Peace Corps volunteer turned real estate magnate, noticed that Larry only dated women he ended up hiring; he now theorizes that Hillblom could not afford a wife. O’Connor guessed that Hillblom had lacked experience with girls in high school; he sighs, “His idea of a girlfriend was someone to talk nonsense with, to have fun with, wrestle with—not to be intellectual with. The relationships he formed out here were more compatible with his personality.”
So on a sweltering summer evening at the height of the Continental case, Larry, O’Connor, and Sid Blair, an Oklahoman two decades Hillblom’s senior whom he had hired to manage the Bank of Saipan, entered one of the bars that were spreading on Saipan like brothels in a boomtown. Poppy’s Nightclub was small and less than a block from the beach. The owner, an ambitious Korean, treated Hillblom and his entourage like VIPs, even though Hillblom was never a big drinker. He complained that liquor gave him migraines; his typical limit was two beers. (When he did get drunk, friends noticed that he became unreasonable, nasty even.) Hillblom had come to Poppy’s for something else: young dancers flown over from the Philippine provinces, perks of Saipan’s lenient immigration policies. In fact, one of the bar’s waitresses was then living with him. Tonight, however, he had left her behind.
King Larry Page 13