King Larry

  Osborn objected again. Overruled.

  “I don’t know whether you can or not,” Waechter mused. “I’ve never bought property in the Philippines. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what their law is about buying property. Mr. Hillblom owns two condominiums there, owns two golf course memberships there. I don’t know what their law is, if that’s the question.”

  “You don’t know,” Mitchell thundered, “anything about the Philippine law with respect to alien ownership of real property in the Philippines?”

  “I’ve never bought property there.”

  “That’s not my question, Mr. Waechter.”

  “Well,” Waechter admitted, “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know anything about their law.”

  Mitchell started to ask the question again, but he had exasperated the judge every bit as much as the witness. “Asked and answered,” Castro interjected. “Next question.”

  Thirty-Eight

  The Rooster

  “You know how they did it in the old days?” David Lujan asks rhetorically, raising his hand above an empty coffee mug and making a forward motion with his index finger. “They brought you before the judge for a good look. Side by side with your father. That’s how the judge made his decision.”

  Lujan, ensconced in a less than comfortable chair in the atrium restaurant of a Guam hotel, has already spoken for more than two hours, filling my head with useless factoids and opinions: Hong Kong is his favorite city; he gets more work done on the Air Mike flight between Honolulu, where he owns a second home, and Guam than any time else; his father, a judge, would disappear every weekend but Lujan and his mother knew that the old man was at the cockfights; he considers the Northern Mariana Islands to be American colonies; Patrick Lupo and Peter Donnici are worse than rapists and murderers.

  The rapid-fire delivery has allowed him to steer the conversation, though every now and then, his cell phone interrupts and he leans back, barks a few sentences in Chamorro—a language that splits the difference between the indigenous tongue and Spanish—and then picks up wherever he left off.

  At the moment, Lujan, who wears a military haircut and lots of gold jewelry, is explaining how he decided to take Junior Larry Hillbroom’s case. First came the call, from a small family law firm called the Family and Immigration Law Clinic. The FILC consisted of four American attorneys, one of whom had been the attorney general on Guam. They represented the mother of Junior Larry Hillbroom, the only known child of Larry Hillblom. But to take on Hillblom’s friends, the FILC needed a fighter and they needed someone with cash, because they had none. Lujan was Guam’s most successful criminal attorney. He’d built a thriving practice representing local drug dealers, murderers, and rapists.

  The prospect of representing Larry Hillblom’s son intrigued Lujan immediately. But before committing any of his own time or money, he had remembered his father the judge, and he’d had the boy brought before him for a good look. Junior was a handsome, barely adolescent young man with the skin of an islander but the smooth features of a Caucasian: big ears and a button nose. Lujan thought that the boy looked like Hillblom; in order to be certain, he had called the clerks at CNMI Superior Court, where Junior had made an appearance a couple of weeks earlier. The clerks all said the same thing: Junior looked just like Larry. Spitting image, in fact. So Lujan had agreed to spend a quarter of a million dollars of his own money to establish Junior Larry Hillbroom’s heirship. In exchange, he would receive 8 percent of Junior’s inheritance—nearly half the contingency fee that FILC had negotiated with Junior’s mother, Kaelani Kinney.

  On his native Guam, Lujan is still known as the lawyer you call when you can’t win. He has litigated hundreds of cases, mostly small-time criminal matters, and one of the first things he tells me is that he has never lost, though one of his clients had been forced to pay a $1.5 million settlement just before Hillblom’s disappearance. Defeats, however rare, are taken personally and hard-fought. Lujan is famous for his exhaustive cross-examinations. Opposing witnesses, even if victims of serious crimes like rape, are interrogated ruthlessly, sometimes tearfully.

  Lujan tells me that he learned how to fight in the underground gambling dens on Guam. As a small kid, he dealt cards for poker matches that often turned violent. Sometimes the cops beat him up, but he was tough. He did time in juvie, which he considered the best education a young man could have, then he became a bill collector, which he considers the second-best education. In his thirties and married, he decided to change his life and put himself through Notre Dame Law School by playing professional chess. Lujan claims he never studied, and still feigns near ignorance of the technicalities of the law. What he knows is how to win and how criminals think. His first client, Lujan tells me, was his cellmate from juvie, who had been indicted for the murder of his other cellmate.

  From his father, the judge, he has inherited a gambler’s intensity. His mother taught him about money. One of them blessed him with a photographic memory. Lujan favors suits in very bright tropical hues, apparently because islanders like bright colors. (Today, he sports a pastel aloha shirt and white slacks.) Like Hillblom, the man is intensely competitive and unpretentious. He has likened himself to Guam’s ubiquitous boonie dogs, of which he has adopted many. In a rare interview with the men’s lifestyle magazine GQ, Lujan accused his stateside opponents of dismissing him as a “brown nigger.” The assistant U.S. attorney on Guam likes to call Lujan the Rooster but, having spent the past couple of hours with him, I think that Shark might be more apt.

  Weeks before the SeaBee crash, Lujan tells me, he and his wife had accepted an invitation from Larry to stay at his new hotel in Vietnam. The two men had become friendly several years earlier when the assistant U.S. attorney, a former marine named George Proctor, had indicted Jesus P. Mafnas, former speaker of the CNMI House of Representatives, for corruption. United States v. Mafnas was the first case that the U.S. attorney’s office tried on Saipan, which had established such a dangerous reputation that FBI agents refused to stay overnight. Money laundering was rampant; a police informant had been murdered on the beach shortly before a trial; Chinese triad gangs and the Japanese Yakuza were expanding highly profitable trades in forced prostitution and drugs; and politicians were selling everything from jobs to choice apartments and accepting everything, including sex, for payment. Convicting Mafnas of bribery was meant to send a clear signal about who was in charge and what would no longer be tolerated.

  During high school, Mafnas had lived at the Lujans’ home in order to attend school on Guam, and he had become Lujan’s brother’s best friend, so Lujan did not hesitate to defend him against the feds. During the trial, Lujan would become a frequent visitor at Mafnas’s house on Saipan, where, he tells me, a cartel of the island’s political elite gathered every morning before dawn to talk over the issues of the day: the soaring real estate market, Willie Tan’s garment factories, the proliferation of video poker dens. The only haole was a well-known businessman named Larry Hillblom, who would sneak into the kitchen before Mafnas’s wife and children were out of bed and make coffee for himself while he waited for someone else to show. During those early-morning sessions, Hillblom had been frequently chided by his friends for being the father of “that boy on Palau.” Sometimes he would deny it. Sometimes he would just smile and take another sip of his coffee.

  Lujan tells me that Hillblom agreed to be his local counsel on Saipan—an assertion that is not verified by my research but is also not as outlandish as it might seem. At the time, Hillblom was ingratiating himself with the CNMI Legislature, but his interest in Mafnas’s case would have been even more personal. They shared an enemy. Guam’s FBI agents had told the U.S. attorney that if they did not “get” Larry Hillblom at some point, they would consider their presence on Saipan to be a failure, while Hillblom publicly characterized the FBI’s presence as an illegal invasion. When Lujan delivered his final argument in front of a jury of eleven islanders and one American housewife, he says that Hi
llblom had a front-row seat. (The prosecutor, who is now a federal immigration judge, does not remember Hillblom ever attending.)

  Lujan won Mafnas’s acquittal on an eleven-to-one vote. He says that Hillblom had been so impressed, he’d asked to hire him as counsel for a lawsuit that was percolating on Guam. Lujan agreed but the lawsuit never materialized. So in the coming years, the two attorneys would exchange greetings when fate brought them together on airplanes or at the occasional barbecue. Then, on May 22, 1995, Lujan received word that Hillblom had been lost at sea near the northern island of Anatahan, along with his pilot and one other passenger—Lujan’s good friend and former client Jess Mafnas. Shortly thereafter, Lujan got the call from the FILC.

  After meeting Junior, Lujan imagined the case would be easy. A single $10,000 DNA test would establish the young man’s heirship; a trust would be formed until he came of age, allowing him to enjoy the remainder of his youth raising his fighting cock and spear-fishing, or being sent to the best schools as Hillblom himself had once promised. Thanks to the O. J. Simpson case, everyone seemed to know just how simple establishing a “genetic fingerprint” could be. All you needed was a sweat-stained T-shirt, a comb, a toothbrush, a drop of congealed blood. Lujan worried more about finding words. He agonized over every sentence of every pleading, never sure if what he’d written was quite done. A friend had cowritten his first motion.

  Not that Lujan was scared. His opponents—he smiles—underestimated his tenacity. They’d never expected someone to gamble everything again and again, as he would.

  Thirty-Nine

  Evidence

  Executor, its agents, employees, servants, representatives, attorneys, occupants and/or custodians . . . are hereby restrained from cleaning, disturbing, destroying, altering or removing any contents . . . or ordering any other actions which may have the foreseeable result of destroying or disposing of items which may contain body tissues, blood, hair or fingernail clippings of the decedent.

  —Order from Judge Alex C. Castro, September 13, 1995

  “I took the Junior case on trust for David,” Barry Israel says via cell phone from Ho Chi Minh City. “I crashed in David’s office. I would work on the law while he worked on the facts, but whereas I would study all night, David could look at the documents once and go to sleep.”

  Three months after Hillblom’s disappearance, Israel was named cocounsel of Junior Larry Hillbroom’s growing legal team. Lujan had met him years earlier while serving on Guam’s Political Status Commission and invited him in as an equal partner. Israel signed on after a long talk with his daughters in Santa Barbara, the wealthy coastal enclave they called home; he’d had to warn them that things were going to be different. The Hillblom case wasn’t going to be like billing a government or a corporation. There was going to be risk involved. He was going to have to invest money, maybe get a second mortgage on the house. Their comfortable lifestyle might suffer. Of course, if things went the way that he hoped, Israel would be far wealthier than most attorneys could dream of.

  Yet Israel must have wondered what, exactly, he had gotten himself into when he arrived on Guam a short time later. Legally, Junior was still a client of the Family and Immigration Law Clinic, the four-partner firm that had signed his mother to a contingency agreement. Theoretically, the FILC called the shots while Lujan and Israel were expected to do the heavy lifting. They were also expected to contribute all of the capital, assumedly because the FILC was broke. But that, Israel soon discovered, was actually the least of FILC’s problems.

  Of their four partners, one was not only sleeping with Junior’s mother but getting drunk with her in public. Two of the others simply seemed lazy or ineffective, perhaps due to illnesses. The fourth, a guy by the name of Roland Fairfield, was handling the DNA portion of the case. It was Fairfield’s job to get biological evidence so that Lujan could negotiate the settlement with the estate. Now Israel learned that Fairfield had already panicked and offered Hillblom’s brothers 40 percent of the estate in exchange for DNA proving Junior’s paternity. The offer had been promptly rejected by the Hillbloms’ California attorney, but not before seriously undermining Lujan’s trust in his partners, and Israel’s confidence.

  While Israel moved into Lujan’s spare bedroom on Guam, Lujan flew to Saipan to discuss a more promising settlement offer that the Carlsmith firm was supposedly preparing. When David Nevitt kept Lujan stewing on-island for several days with no offer, the criminal lawyer became suspicious and decided to visit Larry Hillblom’s house with his local counsel, Joe Hill.

  Hill collected Lujan at his hotel in Garapan and drove south along Beach Road toward the airport as a small storm emerged overhead. By the time they reached Dandan, the rain was falling hard, and by the time Hill found the aluminum fence delineating Hillblom’s property, the sky was unleashing torrents of water. Up ahead, past the fence, the driveway that led down to the garage and the poolhouse was barely visible. To the right, equally obscured by the rain-soaked windshield, was the upper floor of the house and, in front of that, a red Honda.

  Lujan stepped out of Hill’s car, planted a polished shoe in the muddy grass, and walked up to the fence, but it was locked. He could see that the Honda’s doors were wide open—odd, considering the storm. Even stranger, two figures were crouched in the front seats from either side while their legs and feet dangled in the rain. The howl of a vacuum cleaner could be heard above the rainstorm and the incessant barking of the neighbor’s dogs.

  Lujan began to shake the fence until the figures froze. He yelled at them to stop. Hill jumped out of the car and joined him until a man and a woman, both tiny and dark-skinned, emerged from either side of the car. Lujan warned them that what they were doing was illegal. He was an attorney, he yelled, an officer of the court, and they were potentially destroying evidence. The two islanders slammed the car’s doors shut, grabbed the vacuum cleaner, and ran into the house. Lujan and Hill raced back to Hill’s office near the courthouse to prepare an emergency motion demanding that the estate not destroy any potential DNA evidence.

  Judge Castro issued a restraining order the following day. Then, as if to level the playing field after one team has made a questionable play, Castro designated Junior Larry Hillbroom an “interested party” in the proceedings. As such, Hillbroom’s attorneys were entitled to review all of the estate’s records, including legal bills.

  The Saipan office of the law firm of Carlsmith Ball is the westernmost of twin two-story stone buildings set into a hillside scattered with sugarcane as thin and precarious as errant whiskers. Oversize tinted windows peer over a two-lane cement road that winds its way from the government buildings at the top of the hill down to the island’s western flats and dead-ends into a massive lagoon where honeymooners from Japan and Korea frolic on Jet Skis, locals fish for mahimahi in knee-deep water, and a half dozen forward positioning warships anchor, each holding enough weapons in its belly to invade a small country. I have driven past the building countless times on my way to a restaurant just beyond that serves the only decent burger on the island, though I have never been welcomed inside, as David Lujan was one morning in mid-September 1995.

  Joe Hill drove him there, and both men were politely ushered to a conference room with a large table that had been buried in unmarked boxes containing all manner of files—a document dump. Document dumps are meant to overwhelm, but Lujan, armed with several yellow legal pads and a pen, approached each box methodically. He had no intention of leaving until he had reviewed every piece of correspondence, every invoice, and every receipt.

  He stayed for hours, glued to a chair as a handful of Carlsmith staffers curiously popped their heads in from time to time. Before long, Lujan was convinced that the conference room was a crime scene and that the papers splayed out before him evidenced a vast conspiracy in which Joe Lifoifoi, Joe Waechter, and Peter Donnici had illegally hijacked the estate of Larry Lee Hillblom from under Judge Castro’s nose.

  As outlined by Lujan, the conspiracy he im
agined had been set in motion less than one week after Larry Hillblom’s death, well before Lujan’s entry into the case. That’s when Donnici had gathered Waechter, Joe Lifoifoi, Ed “Champ” Calvo (a well-known Guam attorney and a Bank of Saipan director and shareholder), and a few other of Hillblom’s old associates in his office in San Francisco the morning after his memorial service. He had told them how Hillblom’s will called for the bank to be the executor of the estate, but also how, at the time the will had been written, Hillblom had owned over 90 percent of the shares. Now his estate owned only a third. Therefore, in order to keep control of the estate, they would have to buy at least 20 percent of the bank’s outstanding stock.

  But it soon became clear that one of the bank’s major shareholders, Chinese-American billionaire Willie Tan, wanted a huge premium for his stock. After a little research, the estate’s lawyers discovered the solution: a large amount of unissued shares they could buy instead. But that turned out to reveal a second problem: no one had the $3.5 million that those shares were probably worth. So Donnici, Lifoifoi, and Waechter had formed a shell entity called Commonwealth Holdings Corporation whose sole purpose would be to buy the unissued shares. To get the money, Waechter had then run to Castro’s court claiming that a financial crisis in Vietnam—along with their need for $3.7 million to buy shares in the Bank of Saipan—necessitated two emergency loans from DHL Corporation and DHL, International in the total amount of $15 million, of which $3.7 million would go to CHC.

  Castro had approved the two DHL loans, which had (conveniently) already been negotiated by Peter Donnici, even though Donnici was a shareholder in both DHL companies—and despite the fact that he and other DHL shareholders had claims against the estate for DHL stock that they said Hillblom had promised them.

  The net was this: Donnici and Co. had borrowed from the estate to take control of it. And of the $3.7 million that CHC received from the estate, only $3.5 million was paid to the Bank of Saipan for the unissued shares. Waechter had told Castro that most of the loans were needed for Vietnam, but Lujan could find no record of the estate buying stock in Hillblom’s Vietnam holding company or loaning it a penny.*