Lujan wondered if Castro knew any of this. The judge certainly did not know who CHC’s shareholders were, because Waechter had never told anyone. To the contrary, in open court, Waechter had implied that CHC was owned by the estate, which Lujan now knew was not true.
As Lujan made his way through more papers, he discovered more evidence of insider dealings that troubled him. There was, for example, a “right of first refusal” agreement that gave DHL’s existing shareholders a short window of time in which to purchase Hillblom’s shares in the event of his death at fair market value—but that window began only after notice of Hillblom’s death was served on DHL, whose executives claimed that notice had not yet been given. Considering that Hillblom had been declared dead for nearly six months now, and that DHL itself had hosted one of his memorial services, it was hard to imagine why not—unless that too was part of the conspiracy. DHL was apparently being given plenty of time to raise cash to buy the shares.
Also, several hundred shares of DHL stock were missing from Waechter’s inventory of the estate’s assets. Waechter had simply deducted shares that Donnici, Pat Lupo, and others claimed Hillblom had promised them in exchange for work dating back to the Continental Airlines/UMDA litigation without telling Castro. But the transfer of those shares required approval by the court. Instead of standing in line with the other claimants, Hillblom’s friends appeared to have simply taken what they thought was theirs. (Ultimately, their receipt of the shares was approved by the court.)
Finally, Po Chung, the head of DHL’s Asia operations, claimed that he owned 10 percent of Danao, Hillblom’s Vietnamese holding company. But there was no written evidence that Chung had contributed anything to Danao. Hillblom, meanwhile, had invested close to $70 million and received no stock certificate. At best, Chung seemed to be hiding the fact that Larry had been operating in Vietnam illegally since at least 1991—three years before the U.S. embargo was lifted—a clear violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act.
As Lujan pushed his chair from the polished table and stood up, grabbing the yellow legal pads that he’d filled with notes, he wondered what else Hillblom’s friends were hiding. Almost as an afterthought, he grabbed a stray piece of paper and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. This scrap had nearly been lost amid the volumes of more important correspondence. It was a cash receipt for several containers of muriatic acid, paid for by Hillblom’s estate and approved as a household expense by Judge Castro.
Forty
The Pilot
As Lujan prepared an emergency pleading late that night, the bustling expat bars and strip clubs hummed with answers to a singular question: Why had the SeaBee crashed to begin with? FAA inspectors had come and gone, expressing doubt that the cause would ever be known for certain, but the question lingered. For some it was a night’s entertainment; others had a more personal connection. Hillblom had invited at least four friends to ride with him that day; only one had gone. The rest considered themselves wise or lucky. One had averted death because he did not have Hillblom’s cell phone number; another had received Hillblom’s voice-mail invitation too late. Others, like the widows of the two men aboard the airplane, had financial motives. So too did DHL’s insurance company, which still refused to pay out Hillblom’s life insurance policy, for months citing uncertainty as to whether Hillblom was, in fact, deceased.
Speculation as to what had transpired aboard the plane increased as a few small parts of the SeaBee began to wash up on the shores of Anatahan. Most people assumed that some type of mechanical failure had crippled the plane, but alternative theories abounded. Sam MacPhetres thought that Hillblom might have detonated an explosive shortly after parachuting out of the plane to be rescued by an awaiting submarine. A member of the search team doubted that Hillblom had been on the plane to begin with. Lujan theorized that Larry had been illegally flying the plane, citing as evidence the fact that only the pilot’s seat had a seat belt and only Hillblom’s body was never found. Therefore, Hillblom’s seat must have sunk with him in it. According to Lujan’s reasoning, the estate had Bob Long’s and Jess Mafnas’s blood on its hands.
The flaw of (most of) these theories is not their implausibility but that they are all based entirely on circumstantial evidence. As of today, the largest piece of Hillblom’s plane to be recovered is a tiny pontoon that washed ashore and is now displayed on the wall of a Guam steakhouse. The only eyewitness was World War II hero Guy Gabaldon, now deceased, and Gabaldon only saw the SeaBee take off. His affidavit expresses little more than his opinion that Hillblom’s plane was an antique and might have had trouble gaining altitude.
In fact, the only evidence are two cell phone calls from that afternoon, both of which occurred shortly before the SeaBee was to return. Jess Mafnas had phoned his wife to tell her that they had been unable to land on Pagan, as planned, due to a storm and that they were headed back to the Saipan airport; Mafnas had added that he was presently staring down at Anatahan’s crater. Not long afterward, Josephine had received a call from Larry himself. Neither Hillblom nor Mafnas had mentioned anything out of the ordinary.
But to Bob Christian, a straight-talking former marine and Vietnam veteran who runs Saipan’s only FAA-certified shop, even eyewitness accounts and phone calls are beside the point. What matters, he tells me during a long-distance conversation, is the location of the crash, the condition of the plane, and the mentality of those on board—one in particular. “Larry had a tendency to read the two first pages in a book and think he knew the rest,” Christian sighs. “He kind of marched to the beat of a different drum. He didn’t do it if he didn’t think it was necessary.” And by “it” Christian means that Larry didn’t maintain his aircraft.
Christian was never interviewed during the NTSB investigation, nor was he deposed in either Bob Long’s or Jess Mafnas’s wrongful death case—odd because he is uniquely qualified to comment on the crash. He is one of the few men besides Hillblom and Long who actually flew the SeaBee. He’d even piloted the plane on one of the test runs to Pagan—the same route that Hillblom had been flying when he disappeared. Christian had done some mechanical work on the plane, too, including installing a much larger oil cooler to prevent the propellers from feathering. He says he repeatedly warned Hillblom that there was a fine line between an antique and a piece of junk. “Things were constantly falling on and off the airplane!” he groans. When Christian refused to fly the plane any longer and Hillblom became too cheap to use his shop, Christian had looked the other way as Hillblom’s pilot would “borrow” equipment from Christian’s hangar to do Band-Aid repairs. One area that got a lot of attention was the SeaBee’s tail, which Hillblom eventually replaced with another that was just as old.
Christian, however, tells me that the tail was not the problem per se. The SeaBee’s fatal flaw, he says, was that the transfer line to the auxiliary fuel tank in the tail didn’t work. In a plane like the SeaBee, the auxiliary fuel tank is extraordinarily important. To land on water, the tank needs to be full in order to balance the plane; otherwise, the nose will collapse into the water—catastrophic at 120 miles per hour. On the other hand, if you’re flying from Saipan to Pagan and back, you’d need to transfer the fuel into the main tank at some point in order to make it all the way home.
When he’d heard that Hillblom’s plane had gone missing, Christian says that he had immediately thought of the auxiliary fuel tank. But, he continues, two equally serious problems had also come to mind: Bob Long and Larry Hillblom.
Long, he says, had come out to Saipan from the western United States with an inspector authorization for airframes and power plants, meaning that he could sign off on the annual inspections of aircraft. Christian had hired him, but let him go in 1990 when it became clear that Long did not possess the attention to detail required of a certified shop mechanic. Christian thought Long might have more luck as a pilot, so he had hired an FAA observer to do a check ride that would certify his fellow Vietnam veteran to fly commercially.
The check
ride, Christian recalls, should have been a formality considering the numerous combat missions Long claimed to have flown over Southeast Asia. But once he was up in the air with the FAA observer calling out procedures, Long froze. He couldn’t even follow instructions. When they returned to the hangar, both Christian and the FAA observer agreed that Bob Long wasn’t cut out to be a pilot. So to make ends meet, Long started freelancing as a mechanic. One of his first clients was Larry Hillblom.
By then, Christian was familiar enough with Saipan’s wealthiest citizen to think he was full of shit—the type, Christian recalls, who wants people to think he’s a pilot, but Hillblom sure as hell didn’t know about flying. Hillblom claimed, for example, that he’d soloed in Hawaii, though he didn’t have the records. And it only took one flight for Christian to realize there was no way in hell that Hillblom possessed the skill level he claimed. He figured that Hillblom would keep his distance from someone who knew his little secret, but an arm’s-length friendship developed based on Hillblom’s need for Christian’s skills.
Since then, Christian had flown with Hillblom in several planes to various islands in the Northern Marianas. He’d offered his help and advice on all but one occasion: a month before the SeaBee crash, Long had asked him if he would do some touch-and-gos—quick landings and immediate take-offs—in the lagoon. Christian had refused for two reasons: first off, the lagoon was too rocky; second, in order to land the plane on the water, you needed to take off from the water to know the proper attitude.* Unlike a land plane, where the pilot normally turns off the power before the wheels hit and catch the nose, a seaplane needs to land with the same power and the same configuration with which it took off. Then the pilot starts to ease back, as with a boat, to bring the plane to a stop.
Long didn’t seem to understand the principle of attitude, nor did he have any experience with water landings. Worse, Hillblom had more than once pontificated his bullshit theory of water landing: if anything went wrong, you just land it on the water. “That’s true, Larry,” Christian says he deadpanned, “but it doesn’t mean you’ll live to tell about it. You’ll hit the ocean at 120 miles per hour and the plane will disintegrate.”
“Did he listen?” Christian asks rhetorically. “Probably not. Did Bob Long have the personal fortitude to stand up to someone like Hillblom when he told one of his whoppers? Definitely not. Long was hiding his own ignorance.” So, in the fall of 1995, when Long’s widow, a pretty Filipina, showed up in Christian’s office at the Saipan airport to gather evidence for her wrongful death claim, Christian says he sympathized with her but not enough to ignore the obvious. Given the amount of fuel in the main tanks, the SeaBee would have had enough gas to get to Pagan, make a U-turn, and reach Anatahan before dropping out of the sky. Even if the plane’s notoriously faulty instruments had alerted Long to trouble, Christian doubted that Hillblom would have interpreted the lack of fuel as dire. Instead, he speculates that Hillblom would have instructed his pilot to glide down and land her on the ocean, even if their only chance was attempting a power-off landing on land. The easily intimidated Long, he reasons, would have complied with the know-it-all billionaire’s fatal orders.
Christian tells me that he declined to reveal any of this to Long’s widow because he was unwilling to help her squeeze money out of Hillblom’s estate. It was Long’s job to know his airplane and its capabilities. If the maintenance log was a series of blank pages—and Christian says that it was—then Long had no business flying the plane to begin with. But he had, of course, killing himself and two other people with him. When Long’s widow asked him what he thought might have happened, Christian bit his tongue.
“I wasn’t on the airplane,” he told her. “I just don’t know.”
Forty-One
Emergency
Hearing their version versus the reality is like reading Bambi versus a novel by Stephen King, John le Carré, and John Grisham.
—Barry Israel
Within a week of David Lujan filing his emergency motion alleging “the grand puppeteer” Peter Donnici’s conspiracy to loot Hillblom’s estate, the judge ordered up a comprehensive set of hearings to investigate further. These would be officiated not by Castro himself but by a “Special Master”—an officer of the court appointed to investigate a particular issue. Castro wanted to know which of the supposed misdeeds that Lujan had uncovered constituted conflicts of interest or insider dealings. The special master would be given sweeping powers to investigate, not the least of which was the ability to subpoena witnesses. Like a jury, he (or she) would also render judgment on the testimony of those witnesses. And while Castro reserved the ultimate power to issue findings and order remedies, the judge made it clear that he did not plan to second-guess or meddle.
Castro’s decision marked a dramatic turnaround from the first hearing, when he had asked Joe Waechter if he was doing what Hillblom might have done, then rubberstamped the executor’s to-do list—including the estate’s $3.7 million loan to CHC. Peter Donnici’s reaction to the appointment of the special master was swift and critical. Neither he nor Waechter, he asserted in a response to Lujan’s emergency motion, had done anything wrong. If there were conflicts of interest within the estate, that was Larry Hillblom’s fault, not theirs. The special master hearings, Donnici warned, would turn into nothing more than a fishing expedition for Junior’s attorneys.
For the first time, David Lujan happily agreed with him.
Before choosing a special master from the CNMI Bar Association’s abnormally thick directory—“Litigation is our biggest industry,” Mike Dotts cheerfully informs me—Castro ordered up another fishing expedition. On October 4, the judge subpoenaed Hillblom’s medical records from Davies Medical Center, the Straub Medical Center, and Douglas Ousterhout’s office. Then he ordered Junior’s attorneys and the estate to sign a stipulation providing for the search of Hillblom’s residences in Saipan and California, as well as of his Cessna 182 Skylane, which was apparently still impaled upside-down in the Tinian jungle, barely touched since Bruce Jorgensen had reluctantly dragged him from it two years earlier. Each side was to hire biologists for a DNA-gathering junket that would last several weeks and be overseen by a clerk of the court; that way, neither party could dispute the DNA samples’ authenticity. For several weeks, Roland Fairfield, the FILC attorney who was handling the DNA portion of Junior’s case, skirmished with Carlsmith’s big guns in Los Angeles over the extent of the search, as well as the schedule. The estate’s attorneys did not want Hillblom’s medical records inspected, nor did they want the junket to begin in early October, as ordered by the court. But at eight o’clock on the morning of October 11, on court orders, a team from Carlsmith arrived at Hillblom’s front door in Dandan to begin the quest for a piece of Larry Hillblom. They were greeted by David Lujan, Roland Fairfield, and two DNA experts, including a young Canadian molecular biologist named Bradley Popovich. Popovich was paid large sums of money as an expert witness in criminal cases, most famously the double-murder trial of football star O. J. Simpson. Popovich had vouched for the integrity of the DNA samples gathered by police at Simpson’s home, but the famed running back had just been acquitted by a jury in California anyway.
As Junior’s team moved about Hillblom’s empty home (at Mike Dotts’s behest, Josephine had moved back to the Philippines for a few weeks) they were followed closely by the estate’s attorneys. Popovich’s companion, a quirky lab technician from California named Peter Barnett, immediately noticed something odd. “It was pretty apparent that the house was either not in a condition that somebody would have lived in or the person that lived there was a very strange person,” he says. “There weren’t a lot of clothing and toiletries and the stuff you’d normally expect to see in a house.” In fact, there wasn’t anything of Hillblom’s at all. When Barnett examined the drains in the master bathroom, they were spotless. Finally, he opened the cabinet beneath the sink, knelt down, and unscrewed the U-shaped trap, which was sure to have gathered some hair, skin flec
ks, or, at minimum, saliva.
Nothing. The trap was as clean as the day it had been purchased, as though someone had flushed it with acid.
“You know when you stay in a luxury hotel and go in the bathroom?” Barnett remarked to a grim Lujan, standing over him. “Well, this bathroom is probably cleaner than that.”
A moment later, they walked out the open front door, empty-handed, and hiked down the long driveway to Hillblom’s garage. But the invalid DeLorean and the Civic and even Josephine’s MR2 were clean, too, and despite the basketball court and the swimming pool and the tennis court and scattered hand weights, there was no trace of a sweaty gym sock or used towel anywhere on the grounds. For the scientists, who had been flown six thousand miles and were being paid a generous stipend, the search must have been almost as frustrating as it was for David Lujan. But these were not amateurs. They still had their backstop, their sure sure thing; the day before, Popovich had sent a pilot to Tinian to confirm the existence of dried blood on the Cessna’s instrument panel. Neither of the two passengers in the crash had bled. So by default, the dried blood had to be Hillblom’s.
Each of the teams boarded a chartered prop plane at the Saipan airport an hour or so later, lifting off from the same runway that Larry Hillblom, Robert Long, and Jess Mafnas had used four months before. Ten minutes later, they landed at Tinian’s tiny airport and migrated toward a macabre crimson sculpture embedded in the jungle just west of the runway.
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