If not for a tree stump, the Cessna’s cockpit might have remained intact, the instrument panel in place, rather than flung forward into the pilot’s headrest. Abandoned, quarantined from civilization and cradled by dense knots of vine, the wreckage was an impressive piece of evidence by anyone’s standards. A couple of typhoons had blown through in the past year, but the interior of the plane, including the instrument panel that had crushed the right side of Hillblom’s face, had remained sheltered from the elements. As Lujan watched expectantly, Popovich crouched down to peer into the sunlit cockpit where Larry Hillblom had nearly lost his life.
Years later, according to a colleague, Popovich would recall this moment—the moment he realized that the cabin had recently been wiped clean of Hillblom’s blood. Nursing a glass of red wine, the molecular biologist would tell his friend how he’d let his imagination get the better of him as he realized that whoever was capable of tampering with evidence despite a court order was probably capable of murder as well. (And what, after all, were the chances of Larry Hillblom’s being in two plane crashes within eighteen months?) Popovich had then taken aside one of the dozen attorneys and demanded that at least two members of the estate’s team travel back to Saipan on his airplane or else he would make arrangements for himself on the ferry.
Joe Waechter declined to participate in the DNA junket, probably because there were at least a dozen crises for the estate’s chief administrator to attend to that month—most recently a letter from the CNMI Department of Finance demanding the immediate payment of more than $11 million in unpaid income taxes and a fax from the Thai contractor building Hillblom’s sprawling golf course in Phan Thiet threatening a work stoppage due to nonpayment. However, Waechter was certainly aware of what was going on in Tinian and he knew that Lujan and Co. would soon board an Air Mike flight to Honolulu, in order to inspect Hillblom’s medical records at the Straub Clinic. From there they would trek to UCSF–Davies, the site of Hillblom’s numerous surgeries, and finally to the ranch at Half Moon Bay, where Hillblom had spent the last few weeks of his recovery in bed with Josephine.
As Lujan, Popovich, and the others boarded the Air Mike flight to Honolulu, Waechter received a call from David Nevitt. At first, Waechter declined to take the call. But his secretary sounded insistent. She said that the estate’s lead attorney had some “interesting news” to report.
When he picked up the phone, Nevitt sounded excited. He’d explained how a lawyer friend had located Junior’s real father on Palau. Nevitt’s friend had refused to give a name though he’d promised that his client would submit to a DNA test as long as the estate agreed to pay him $1 million, $50,000 up front. If the man flunked the test, they would part ways and everything would be kept confidential.
“You’re out of your fucking mind, Dave,” Waechter barked. The estate wasn’t going to pay anything up front. And the notion that anything could be kept confidential on Saipan, particularly anything involving Larry Hillblom’s probate, was nuts.
But Nevitt persisted. “Even if it’s one in a million, Joe,” he implored, “why not do it?”
Waechter let out a deep sigh and promised to talk to Donnici later that night, which was early morning in San Francisco. To his surprise, Donnici agreed with Nevitt: even at one-in-a-million odds, it was worth doing the test. To maintain confidentiality, they would fly Junior’s “father” to California. Of course, they would also need Junior’s blood to test against, but Waechter suspected this would be the easiest part. One of David Lujan’s cocounsels, a guy named Roland Fairfield, had been contacting him since day one. He was desperate to settle. Fairfield, Waechter knew, would get them the blood. It would just have to be their little secret.
Forty-Two
Fishing Expeditions
Larry L. Hillblom’s wealth, his unique behavior and his prolific love life make people want to peep, poke and prod into his extraordinary life. The poor are interested in the rich, and the rich are curious about each other, making his life great fodder for any pulp novel.
—Guam Business Magazine
To ensure that no secrets escaped the special master hearings, David Lujan submitted subpoena requests for Peter Donnici, Po Chung, Bill Robinson, Dennis Kerwin, Patrick Donnici, David Jones, Pat Lupo, Steven Schwartz (Hillblom’s tax attorney), and every one of the more than two dozen estate claimants, including the Saudi prince who had sent Hillblom the DeLorean. Lujan also filed a request for estate documents listing forty-eight sections, plus subsections. Finally, he demanded Hillblom’s medical records and “any and all specimens of tissue, blood, hair and/or fingernail clippings” of Hillblom’s family members. Lujan demanded that these be produced within ten days, in time for the hearings, along with the judge’s order that approved the estate’s loaning money to the Vietnam entities—probably because Lujan knew that no such order existed.
The estate submitted its request to call seventeen witnesses a few days later, but Judge Castro was only too happy to refer both motions to the intense young California native he had just recruited to oversee the interrogations for a fee of $195 an hour, in a vacant federal courtroom a mile up Beach Road.
Rexford “Rex” Kosack was an athlete-trim, handsome former CNMI attorney general. He could have passed for Bob O’Connor’s older brother; in fact, Kosack had taught O’Connor how to surf when they’d both worked in the Ventura County DA’s office, and it was Kosack who had recruited O’Connor to Saipan. But where O’Connor seemed laid-back, Kosack had earned a reputation as a meticulous taskmaster who gravitated toward the strictest interpretation of the law. The Carlsmith firm’s primary defense would be that Waechter, Donnici, and Lifoifoi had simply acted as Hillblom would have—however unconventional such behavior might appear from the outside. Yet by choosing Kosack to investigate the CHC deal and the two loans that DHL had made to the estate, Castro had sent a clear message: The “What Would Larry Do?” defense would no longer hold.
They used it anyway, with the inevitable result. Waechter’s first deposition was such a fiasco that the minute he left the stand he told his attorneys that the estate had lost. “Nonsense,” David Nevitt assured him in his folksy twang. “As long as you acted in good faith, you have nothing to worry about.”
Peter Donnici only made matters worse. Dragged before Kosack, Lujan, and Israel a few weeks later, Hillblom’s former consigliere contradicted Waechter’s version of Hillblom’s investing in Vietnam, which now seemed clearly illegal, and denied that he had any knowledge of Hillblom doing anything in Vietnam before 1994. (This from the man who had assured the court that he knew more about Larry’s business than any living person.) Under a blistering cross-examination, he admitted that the CHC deal—“original sin,” as it was now known among some Bank of Saipan directors—had not passed the smell test. “I can see how,” Donnici said, “Mr. Lujan could look at this and say, wait a minute, these guys went out and used estate money to buy shares in their name. That stinks! And, maybe, if I had to do it all over again, now, you know being able to be a Monday-morning quarterback and looking back and say, well, maybe I wouldn’t have done that.”
Things went no better in Brussels, where Pat Lupo was deposed in his office at DHL headquarters, along with the company’s chief financial officer, Geoffrey Cruikshanks. Cruikshanks admitted that Junior’s inheritance of Hillblom’s DHL stock was their “nightmare scenario” while Lupo struggled to convince Kosack and Lujan that Peter Donnici was doing the best he could under very trying circumstances: “Pete was just really trying to do what he knew Larry would have done and he was just absolutely hammered as a consequence of that.” Lupo uses a single word to describe his deposition: disastrous.
By the time Kosack wrapped up his hearings after Thanksgiving, Po Chung was probably the only one of Hillblom’s former associates who emerged unscathed, largely because he did what Larry might have done: he never showed up.
If only that had been the only disaster that winter, or the special master hearings the only fishing expedition.
But in late November, with the special master hearings winding down, a Saipan attorney named Randy Fennell walked into the Superior Court Building and filed a lawsuit on behalf of one Baby Jane Doe—the infant daughter of a young bar girl who alleged that Hillblom had met her at a dance club in Manila, taken her back to his condo at the Chateau de Baie, and raped her on an air mattress. When Hillblom subsequently learned that she was pregnant, the mother claimed, he had given her a few hundred dollars and ordered her to get an abortion. Instead, she had fled to a relative’s house in the provinces and had the child.
Fennell was a well-respected attorney and dealmaker. He had known Hillblom personally, though he had never been part of his inner circle. Like Hillblom, he had tried to bring casino gambling to Micronesia, had dabbled in banking and real estate, and had been the target of one of Ted Mitchell’s Article XII lawsuits. But when Fennell had heard of Hillblom’s disappearance and his outdated will, Fennell had sensed an even more lucrative opportunity. He’d flown to Manila, hired a private investigator and an attorney, and posted signs around the local strip clubs Larry had frequented with a photo of Hillblom’s face and a local telephone number to call. Fennell’s flyers were not unlike the “Wanted” posters that one sees in the post office, except what was wanted in this case were girls who had slept with Larry Hillblom—and who had then either given birth or were now pregnant.
Alongside Baby Jane Doe’s paternity claim, Fennell asked the court to order the estate to release anything related to the Philippines in general and Hillblom’s Chateau de Baie condominium in particular. Finally, in a pointed reference to allegations that Hillblom’s associates had hidden or tampered with evidence, Fennell demanded that the estate produce anything that might establish Hillblom’s whereabouts from January 1994 until his death, as well as evidence of the cleaning or removal of bodily DNA evidence from his residences. A few days later, Fennell served deposition notices on Joe Lifoifoi, Waechter, and Josephine. Then he called on his competitor.
“What’s alleged,” Dotts tells me, “is that Randy tells David: ‘What we need to do is settle our current cases for cheap, so that we can get a war chest. Just settle the Palauan boy and this other Filipina for cheap now, because I’ve got another child that nobody knows about in the Philippines. Once we have the financial means, then we can go full tilt for the entire fortune, for this third child.’”
But Lujan rejected Fennell’s overtures. He’d convinced himself that Junior was the only heir; anyone who might take from his share of the pie was therefore the enemy. Yet, within a week of entering the case, Fennell proved that he could be an ally. A stateside attorney he’d hired made a game-changing discovery while examining Hillblom’s medical records: a tissue sample that had been cut from Hillblom’s face during one of his surgeries in 1993. The “mole,” as it quickly became known, was currently stored at the Davies Medical Center lab in downtown San Francisco. Lujan quickly drafted an agreement that would make them Junior and Fennell’s client partners—at least until Hillblom’s DNA was successfully tested. He attached three conditions. The first was that Fennell would have to immediately disclose the identity of his client and her mother. The second was that they would split the costs 50/50. Finally, Lujan wanted to be reimbursed for half of the money he’d spent on the unsuccessful DNA junket. Only a few months in, the $250,000 that Lujan had committed for the entire case was nearly gone.
The Hillblom probate was becoming a war of attrition, and that clearly favored the estate—a fact that was not lost on its lead attorney, David Nevitt. Not only did Carlsmith have access to the estate’s assets, but Pat Lupo had promised Peter Donnici that DHL would loan the Hillblom Charitable Trust millions of dollars to tag-team David Lujan and Randy Fennell. On December 1, a confident Nevitt asserted the special master hearings had proved Lujan’s claims to be “wholly without merit.” Alongside that audacious rewriting of recent history, moreover, was an uncomfortable reality: Junior’s blood had not matched the Palauan man who claimed to be his father. Further, a well-connected private investigator—the former police chief of the FSM—whom Nevitt had hired to find other potential fathers had failed to do so. And an exhaustive search for Hillblom’s vasectomy records, inspired by interviews with Grant Anderson and Carla Bostom, had turned up nothing.
By December 3, as Nevitt looked out his office window and onto the shimmering Saipan Lagoon below, he was caving in to the inevitable—a settlement offer. He knew that Donnici thought reaching out to Lujan was a mistake; he believed that by offering Junior anything, they were simply setting the bar for a protracted negotiation with David Lujan and Randy Fennell while inviting other “heirs” to come forward. Deep in thought, Nevitt barely heard the knock as his secretary walked in and deposited a fax on his desk. Her eyes told him it was urgent.
Randy Fennell was the sender. In uncharacteristically clipped sentences, Fennell excoriated Joe Waechter’s refusal thus far to negotiate a settlement with Junior and Baby Jane Doe, and then accused the executor of engineering the vanishing, and potentially the murder, of a second potential Hillblom heiress—referred to simply as “Baby M.” Fennell also alleged that Waechter had ordered him and Jane Doe roughed up by airport security on their way out of the Philippines a few days before. Of course, Nevitt would plead ignorance, but Fennell had given him an ultimatum: if the estate did not come clean on its involvement in or knowledge of “M” ’s disappearance by 9:30 a.m.—the following day—Fennell would go to the press.
Nevitt called Baby Jane Doe’s attorney to buy some time. Fennell stewed for several days but then proved as good as his word. On December 8, under the headline “For Immediate Dissemination,” Fennell launched an incendiary fax—addressed not to Nevitt but to the press. First, he wrote, his office had been “led to believe” that Joe Waechter had contacted “M,” Baby M’s mother, a serious breach of legal ethics. “M,” Fennell continued, was only fifteen years old, and was only fourteen when she had been “sexually accosted and impregnated by Larry Lee Hillblom.” Waechter, Fennell alleged, may have co-opted a poor, uneducated, and vulnerable young girl and was probably steering her to use the estate’s handpicked attorneys. Why? “They know,” Fennell wrote, “the mother can testify to Hillblom’s sexual relations with minors and to Hillblom’s employees’ and business associates’ knowledge of these relations.” Not only that, Fennell wrote, but Hillblom’s employees had broken U.S., Philippine, and CNMI law by procuring minors for sex with him. Waechter and his goons, Fennell predicted, would soon launch a PR campaign to divert attention from Larry Hillblom’s criminal pedophilia.
A few days later, Fennell folded the press release’s major points into an affidavit that added a startling new accusation: a DHL employee in Manila had recently asked Waechter if he wanted M and her daughter killed. Though the affidavit acknowledged that Waechter had declined the offer, Fennell laid out the possibility of a conspiracy between the estate and M’s mother to silence Fennell’s unborn client:
On Monday, November 27, 1995, I received a telephone call from one of the Philippines attorneys who frantically informed me that M and her family was [sic] missing. The attorney told me that M and her family had left the investigator’s house the night before to see a movie, but that they did not return, leaving clothes and personal effects behind. The attorney informed me that the investigator had been to the apartment where M and the rest of her family had been living, and that the entire family was missing. According to neighbors, the entire family had left the night before and never returned. . . . My fear is that M’s mother has once again “sold out” her daughter’s interests and those of the unborn child, which is well-founded based on her actions to date. . . . I intend to utilize every effort to find out what happened to M and her family. I pray that I am not too late. . . .
Five days after the press release and two days after Fennell’s affidavit rocked Saipan, Dotts stormed out of his office in the Nauru Building and into Judge Castro’s humid courtroom to respond to both. He was joined in fro
nt of the bar by David Lujan; Kevin Moore, one of David Nevitt’s partners; and, of course, Fennell, a tall, attractive, and supremely confident man with the toned thickness of an overgrown frat boy.
The purpose of the hearing was to determine whether or not the parties in the Hillblom probate had a right to learn the identity of Jane Doe and Baby Doe Hillblom. But it was obviously going to address much more than that; it might even determine whether or not Larry Hillblom would be remembered as a criminal and whether Joe Waechter was capable of kidnapping and murder. As soon as Castro took his seat, Dotts rose abruptly from his chair. The gerbil’s anger was palpable. Although Fennell dwarfed him in size, Dotts seemed bigger as he demanded that Fennell’s affidavit be struck from the record, calling it “scandalous” to refer to his former boss as a pedophile and someone who would have been arrested on the mainland.
Moore immediately picked up the thread: “Can I just add something to that, Your Honor?” he said breathlessly. “It’s evident—from the most cursory reading in Mr. Fennell’s affidavit, it is an amazing compilation of hearsay, double hearsay, triple hearsay. Mr. Fennell’s conjecture, Mr. Fennell’s gestures, and no facts! Mr. Dotts is absolutely right. It should be struck. It is—it is one of the most incredible things that I’ve ever seen.”
Castro asked Fennell to respond. The lanky attorney uncurled his frame and explained that he’d had to rely on hearsay because the sources of his information did not want to implicate themselves in acts of pedophilia, which was, he noted, indeed a crime. As for keeping Jane Doe’s and Baby Doe’s identities secret, Fennell added, he was just trying to get everybody through this difficult process alive. The Philippines, after all, were filled with lawless elements who would kidnap his clients the moment their names became public.
Lujan rose. As usual, the only nonwhite lawyer present, he addressed the judge directly, reminding Castro that the Philippines was not the only place with criminals, that even in the United States, in Guam for example, there was “ice,” aka crystal meth. “Not a simple sweat of evidence has been presented to this court,” Lujan said, “that the lawlessness element in the Philippines is directing its attention to Baby Jane Doe.
King Larry Page 27