As Hillblom and his companions discussed Cowtown, the rodeo-brothel on the northern tip of the island that Blair had started and Hillblom intended to finish (he had already promised Joeten the enviable job of recruiting long-legged cowgirls from Brazil*), the bar owner summoned a couple of pretty waitresses to their table. Although he was notoriously cheap, Hillblom was known around the bars as a generous tipper, meaning that he had an unwritten first-look deal with respect to new arrivals. Tonight, a shy, slight eighteen-year-old Filipina with big black eyes, smooth skin, and full lips caught the intense gaze behind the oversize plastic sunglasses. Like all of the women who work at such establishments, euphemistically known around Asia as waitresses, dancers, models, or GROs (guest relations officers), the girl could be taken on a “date” outside of the bar for an additional fee, called a “bar fine.” Provided that she was amenable, of course. But before negotiating the bar fine with Poppy’s owner, protocol required that Hillblom signal his interest by buying her the requisite “lady drink”—tonight, grape juice poured into a wineglass but costing about the same as a premium cocktail. When he signaled for it, the shy Filipina then introduced herself as Josephine and sat down next to him.
She was pretty if not stunning. Saipan did not get its pick of dancers, even back then. The A list were sent to Tokyo, the B list to larger vacation spots popular with wealthy Japanese and Russians; Saipan, and other, lesser-known destinations got whatever was left. But Josephine was pretty. And despite her shyness, she was, like most of her compatriots, ambitious. She had come on a worker’s visa to support her family back in the Philippine provinces, to make money with her body though she did not consider herself a prostitute any more than the bar owner considered himself a pimp. Josephine lived in barracks attached to the restaurant and was paid a small percentage of the lady drinks that her customers bought. To make serious cash she would have to incur plenty of bar fines and perhaps even a “cherry fee” if she was willing—or still able—to lose her virginity. But in order for Larry to “table” her (“table” being the unlikely euphemism for taking a girl out of the establishment), Josephine would have to consent.
But every time Hillblom asked, Josephine’s answer was no. Nor did she make eye contact. Her stubbornness captivated him, hinted at a kindred spirit, a strong will. She made him work for her affection. Finally, Hillblom got to the point, offering her a better life if she came home with him. When she asked what that meant, he lamely replied, “Better food.” Eventually, she agreed to go.
“He was just instantly smitten with Josephine,” O’Connor recalls of the first meeting. “I couldn’t see why, because Josephine didn’t speak much English, and all she said was ‘no, no, no.’ Every question: ‘No!’ And I thought, ‘Geez, Larry, why are you wasting your time with this girl? She’s not very interesting and she just says no . . .’ But there was something about her that just struck him and there was something about him that struck her, and they were inseparable from the moment they met, and he just took her into his life without telling his previous girlfriend that he was going to do it. She just had to sort of notice it, because, when you come home from dinner tonight, there’s Josephine sitting at the table. She just sort of had to figure out that this was the way it was going to be and she had to just leave without there being any discussion about it.”
O’Connor thought Larry was being cruel, but eventually he would come around to like Josephine. He even became convinced that Larry might have opened up the narrow compartment he’d reserved for women into something much broader, perhaps even love—if it was possible for Larry to be in love, of course. But Hillblom was incapable of monogamy, and he had no plans to remain faithful to her outside of the island. A few years before, on a visit to Palau, Peter Donnici had watched Hillblom table a young islander after a long night of partying and dancing to the Police’s “Every Breath You Take”—Hillblom’s favorite song. Walking on Fifth Avenue after a session at the UN, Professor Sam MacPhetres had seen Hillblom climb into the back of a limousine with two strippers—or, as he calls them, “lovelies.” Once Josephine got her CNMI driver’s license and Hillblom bought her a sporty lipstick-red Toyota MR2, Josephine would search the bar parking lots for his tiny Honda. If she found it, Hillblom’s entourage learned to expect a scene.
But Hillblom was just as jealous. He recruited his friend Sid Blair to collect Josephine from Poppy’s after work and bring her to his house, making certain that she was not “tabled” by anyone else. Then he hired her as his maid, which removed her from Poppy’s entirely. He also hired her brother, Bautista, as a handyman. In time, she would bring him to visit her family in the provinces south of Manila; she would convince him to buy her several cars and a couple of pieces of land there; she would try several times to make him change his will; she would also try to make him her husband, but Larry Hillblom had extended that invitation to only one woman in his life. He would not do so again.
Twenty
The Legislator
All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. . . . Immediate steps shall be taken, in Trust and Non-Self-Governing Territories or all other territories which have not yet attained independence, to transfer all power so the peoples of those territories, without any conditions or reservations, in accordance with their freely expressed will and desire, without any distinction as to race, creed or colour, in order to enable them to enjoy complete independence and freedom.
—United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514XV
When Hillblom decided to run for the CNMI Congress in the fall of 1984, he shrouded himself in the same David-versus-Goliath persona that he’d adopted for his ongoing fight against Continental Airlines. The locals thought it was hilarious.
“He was giving a speech one night on the beach,” O’Connor remembers, “and he stood up with the microphone. He was speaking in English and he had a man standing next to him with a microphone interpreting what he was saying into the vernacular. Of course, I could hear the English of what he was saying. When people started laughing I asked my friend, ‘Why are people laughing?’ And he said, ‘Well, because the guy who is interpreting is just saying, ‘Well, I don’t understand what this guy’s saying but you all know Larry, he’s a nice guy and he’s rich, so vote for him!’”
One local who failed to see the humor in Hillblom’s political ambitions was a crusty former marine named Lee Holmes, who’d moved to Guam with his wealthy wife after the war. The Colonel, as he liked to be called, owned the cable television stations in most of Micronesia, including Saipan. Although he had never run for office himself, Holmes had become one of the region’s most influential residents by virtue of weekly video editorials broadcast at the tail end of his local news shows. The editorials were known both for the personal nature of their attacks and for their effectiveness. Holmes considered himself something of a crusader against corruption, and there were plenty of crooked deals in an area where hundreds of millions of federal dollars flowed through a small number of local agencies staffed by a handful of families.
Maybe Holmes saw Hillblom as competition. Maybe he suspected that Hillblom was using his wealth to exert undue political influence. Regardless, as soon as Hillblom ran for office, the Colonel nicknamed him “King Larry” and recorded a series of broadsides. Hillblom countered that Holmes’s TV stations were guilty of a number of insidious practices, not least of which was jumbling showtimes so locals would be forced to buy his weekly calendar of the listings; Hillblom even threatened to start a rival network.
Unbowed, a few weeks before the election, Holmes flew to Saipan to sabotage King Larry’s candidacy. “Mr. Larry Hillblom,” he bellowed, “is a Democratic candidate, a founder of DHL Courier Services, one of the wealthiest men in the Marianas. We oppose him for his arrogant behavior. . . . We should warn everyone that he is not fit for public office. He [has] proposed to start his own ca
ble TV system, which is fine with us because we will beat him.”
Hillblom was furious. He sent his law partner, O’Connor, across the street to file a fair use claim based on the Equal Time law, which mandated that opposing political views be given equal time on news shows. “I went to Judge Hefner at the CNMI Superior Court,” O’Connor recalls, “basically arguing that Larry had the right to respond in kind. Hefner declined to hear the case so I went to District Court, where Hefner was also the judge that day because the acting judge was off-island. So after Superior Court Judge Hefner had tossed me out, District Court Judge Hefner granted my temporary restraining order. Larry and I rushed to Holmes’s TV station and filmed the rebuttal that night.”
After that, however, while Hillblom and O’Connor remained in the studio, the Colonel suddenly appeared, reclaimed Hillblom’s still-warm seat, and filmed a rebuttal to Hillblom’s rebuttal. “There was nothing we could do,” O’Connor sighs. A week later, the results were in: Hillblom had placed fifth in a field of nine. Had he garnered a few hundred more votes, he would have been elected.
While O’Connor fretted, however, Hillblom celebrated with his friends. “He told me that he had no expectation of winning,” remembers Roger Gridley, “but when the time came to sell DHL, he wanted it to be absolutely clear that the IRS could not challenge his residency status because he’d run for Congress. Larry’s political stuff was simply business. He had no desire to be in office.”
And for good reason: Hillblom was already the most influential legislator in Micronesia. As Holmes may have suspected, Hillblom had secretly rewritten the CNMI’s banking laws two years earlier and was advising governments in Palau and the Marshalls in their negotiations with the United States. When Bill Millard, a reputed billionaire who relocated to Saipan in 1985, invoked the wrath of the U.S. Congress, almost causing a clampdown on the CNMI’s tax policies by announcing that he planned to claim the 95 percent tax rebate on the sale of his hugely successful company, Computerland, Hillblom penned an amendment to the CNMI tax code overnight that abolished the rebate for anyone with an income over several million dollars. He sent it up to the Legislature the following morning (via Bob O’Connor), then personally took the signed bill, along with a six-pack of Budweiser, to the governor’s mansion for his signature the same afternoon. Hillblom could accomplish such feats because, Bob O’Connor tells me with a straight face, he was known to be “philanthropical.”
King Larry he was. But, like the European monarchs who had once controlled the mails, he sat uneasy on his throne, mainly because the Covenant to Establish a Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Political Union with the United States of America still provided for a much cozier relationship with the U.S. government than Hillblom would have liked. Among other things, the Covenant provided for the feds to ultimately control the CNMI’s immigration and minimum wage policies. Far worse, both the U.S. Congress and the majority of local politicians believed that the Commonwealth fell under the powers of the Territorial Clause, meaning that the Congress could legislate over the islanders, who did not have the right to vote for them or even for the president. Most foreboding of all, California Congressman Philip Burton, the chairman of the House committee that oversaw Micronesia, had made it publicly known that he did not agree with Hillblom’s income tax theories. According to Burton, the Covenant called for the full amount of federal income tax due under the “mirror code” to be paid before any rebates; moreover, said the congressman, local tax records could be inspected and even audited by the IRS.
So even as dozens of little pink slips containing messages from his investors and DHL executives around the world piled up on his various desks around Saipan, Hillblom obsessed over the wording of the Covenant, the Trust Territory mandate, and both the CNMI and U.S. constitutions. The more Hillblom studied, the more he became convinced that his leverage resided at the UN, and, in particular, at the UN Security Council, where Russia and China could still veto the Covenant, postponing America’s absorption of the CNMI indefinitely.
Since, as an American citizen, Hillblom’s interpretation of the Covenant was irrelevant, he ceased to see himself as such. Rather than live in one of the Navy Hill developments where the other expats cocooned themselves, for example, Hillblom rented a beachside cottage from a local politician and patronized local bars, where, occasionally drunk, he expounded his views of the Covenant with the same evangelical fervor that had driven his crusade against the imperialistic postal monopolies. “He believed that the Covenant gave the CNMI more power than it says it does,” one of his Chamorro friends tells me, echoing a sentiment I will hear over and over again. Hillblom, many of the locals thought, wanted to “reinvent” a done deal.
From his hot-tub perch high above the Western North Pacific, Hillblom looked wistfully toward the three other Micronesian archipelagos. The FSM and the Marshalls had both opted for more independence under so-called free association arrangements that gave them absolute sovereignty over their internal affairs while ceding only issues of foreign policy and security to the Americans. Palau remained locked in an extraordinarily contentious—and violent—internal debate but was also headed for free association. For a decade, the CNMI technically remained in limbo, awaiting a UN Security Council vote that would end Trust Territory oversight and trigger full implementation of the Covenant. But President Ronald Reagan was losing patience now. The word from Hillblom’s contacts in Washington was that Reagan would soon execute a Gipper-like end run around both the Trust Territory mandate and the UN Security Council.
Sensing a critical moment, Hillblom convinced his friend CNMI governor Larry Guerrero to create a task force in order to assert the islanders’ views of what the Covenant meant—naturally, they would assert that the Territorial Clause did not apply to the CNMI. As with the Covenant, the task force’s findings would be put to a plebiscite and then presented to the UN Territorial Committee.
Those who served with Hillblom on the task force tend to brush it off with a laugh nowadays. Back then, most local politicians wanted their Commonwealth to be included under the Territorial Clause for a simple reason: they wanted to keep their U.S. passports! But Hillblom managed to build a consensus for his theories anyway. He wrapped them up in an aspirational catchphrase found in the Trust Territory Mandate itself: Self-Determination Realized. And when “Self-Determination Realized” was put to a plebiscite toward the end of 1986, it sailed through with almost three-quarters of the popular vote—nearly the same percentage as the Covenant itself. Ecstatic, Hillblom stuffed a copy in his briefcase and hitched a ride with a skeptical delegation of local politicians bound for New York.
“At the United Nations,” remembers Professor Sam MacPhetres, a member of the UN Territorial Committee in the mid-1980s, “Hillblom drove up in a limousine to the delegate’s entrance in a T-shirt and shorts, carrying a wardrobe bag over his shoulder, then changed in the restroom into a suit.” Armed with “Self-Determination Realized,” Hillblom took a seat at the witness table before the Territorial Committee.
He had not been subtle in his drafting. Where the Covenant stated, “The people of the CNMI will have the right of local self-government and will govern themselves with respect to internal affairs in accordance with a Constitution of their own adoption,” Hillblom’s manifesto went much further: “Neither Congress nor any other branch or agency of the United States Government may utilize the Territorial Clause or any other source of power, for that matter, to supersede the sovereign power of the CNMI to control and regulate matters of local concern.”
“Hillblom’s bottom line,” MacPhetres recalls, “was that as long as the Northern Marianas remained a Trust Territory, then federal law didn’t apply.”
What was much less clear to his audience at the UN was who, exactly, Larry Hillblom was and why they were listening to him rather than an actual islander. As Hillblom expounded his theory of internal sovereignty, a flustered Russian committee member turned to MacPhetres and asked, “Who is he represent
ing?”
One year later, Hillblom returned to the UN along with thirty-two Chamorros. They planned to take turns reading “Self-Determination Realized” into the permanent record. “He was really relentless,” MacPhetres says with more than a hint of annoyance, “and he did have a couple of supporters: Sue Rabbit Roff and Roger Clark—a New Zealand human rights activist who was on the committee. I found them both kind of obnoxious and grating.”
Twenty-One
Brinksmanship
Larry just had a formidable intellect. I don’t think that he necessarily wanted people to know how smart he was. He just wanted them to know how stupid they were.
—David “Grizz” Grizzle, EVP, Continental Airlines
He was certainly a pain in the neck. He was obviously rich and on top of that, he was obviously smart. Loony. He was a strange person. Not your average guy but very intelligent. I had a high regard for him. That’s not to say I’d want to spend hours and hours with him. He was a very narcissistic person. He could be very boring because he talked about himself a lot, but he was also a sweet person. I didn’t think he had bad motives. I thought he was an adversary, and very creative and very determined. Formidable. As I recall, I tended to view him with respect and accept his motives as genuine. . . . I thought he was acting on principle.
—Barry Simon, general counsel, Continental Airlines
While Hillblom warned the international community of an illegal invasion by the U.S. Congress, there was one federal official whose power on Saipan he very much wanted to expand: Alfred Laureta. The judge who had written the passport opinion emblazoned on Hillblom’s favorite T-shirt was known as something of a maverick. Hawaiian-born, he was the first Filipino-American to be appointed as a federal district judge. Short and dark-skinned, he looked more like an islander than a statesider, and his opinions reflected an empathy for the locals. Indeed, Hillblom had bragged to his lead attorney, Parker Folse, that if they could just move People of Micronesia v. Frank Lorenzo et al. to Laureta’s tiny courtroom on the third floor of the Nauru Building, Continental Airlines would be brought to its knees.
King Larry Page 14