On July 15, the FILC’s messiah landed on Guam to as large a media storm as is possible on a small island. Jack Avery threw him a cocktail party that night at his home. Lujan’s cell phone filled up with voice mails imploring him to attend, promising that no business would be discussed—just a social get-together with a celebrity attorney! or so a succession of the FILC partners’ voices chimed in his mailbox—but Lujan was unmoved. He decided to go to Hawaii rather than stick around for an audience with Johnnie Cochran. At least he’d get a lot of work done on the long flight.
The next morning, Cochran, Avery, and Ferrer descended upon Saipan. Cochran gave an impromptu press conference at the airport. His quotes in the following day’s newspaper were beyond inflammatory: “It’s totally unconstitutional and against public policy,” Cochran said of the Hillblom Law in his now famous staccato delivery. “We’re gonna turn it around because it’s outrageous,” he continued. “We’re gonna take it all the way to the Ninth Circuit of the Supreme Court and it’s gonna be overturned, you can count on that!”
Froilan’s reply was terse, almost amused. “We’ll see if he has as much luck here as he did in California,” the governor was quoted beneath the same headline. Lujan’s and Israel’s worst fears were thus confirmed: the evangelistic Cochran had just made Froilan more stubborn.
Sensing a crisis, Joe Hill, Junior’s local counsel, reached Lujan in Hawaii. Johnnie was starting to sniff about Lujan’s “childish behavior,” Hill told him. He wanted to work things out. But Lujan was enraged by Cochran’s grandstanding. He’d even heard that, at Avery’s cocktail party, Ferrer had bragged that Cochran’s name alone would double any settlement offer from the estate. Utter bullshit, he said.
“What does he bring to the table that I don’t already have, anyway?” Lujan asked, a rhetorical question he’d been posing to the FILCers for weeks. Like them, Hill did not have a good answer. Nor could he tell Lujan what Cochran’s record was, or how many cases he had actually litigated. But Hill did have some good news: Cochran and Ferrer were leaving Micronesia that day. And when Hill added that Ferrer had requested to meet with him in Honolulu, during his layover from Guam to L.A., Lujan seemed agreeable.
But when Cochran’s law partner arrived in Hawaii the following day, Lujan did not answer his phone. He’d come down with the flu and was suddenly unavailable. Ferrer waited three days for Lujan to feel better before returning to the airport. On the long ride home, Cochran’s partner wrote Judge Castro an affidavit memorializing Lujan’s failure to show. Castro would ignore it. So would Lujan. The judge didn’t need a celebrity attorney in his courtroom, and Lujan had recently met someone far more useful than Johnnie Cochran.
To many New Yorkers, Myron Farber is one of those instantly familiar names whose relevance is not easily recalled. His byline has appeared many times on the front of the New York Times. A series of Farber’s articles investigated President Ford for corruption; before then, he’d spent a year on the drug beat in 1970s Manhattan—the crime-addled Gotham of Midnight Cowboy.
The diminutive Farber had become a national sensation in 1977, when he was convicted of criminal contempt of court and confined to the Bergen County, New Jersey, Main Jail for forty days. The conviction arose from a two-part series that Farber had written on a surgeon named Mario Jascalevich. Farber’s reporting had revived a twelve-year-old investigation into whether Jascalevich, the chief of surgery at a small New Jersey hospital, had secretly murdered a dozen of the hospital’s patients using an exotic South American drug called curare. When Jascalevich’s criminal attorney, a relentless African-American named Ray Brown, had subpoenaed all of Farber’s notes and documents, Farber had refused to turn them over, citing the First Amendment and a New Jersey law that shielded journalists from such requests. Egged on by Brown, however, the judge had thrown Farber in prison and fined the New York Times $5,000 for every day that he refused to reveal his sources. In the end, Jascalevich was acquitted, but Farber was also exonerated. He was pardoned by New Jersey’s governor, who concluded that the journalist’s intent had not been “to insult or frustrate the judicial process, but to stand on a noble, if sometimes imperfect principle.” The New York Times was refunded $101,000 in contempt fines. Later, when the New Jersey Legislature passed a bill expanding on the earlier protections of its so-called shield law for journalists, it would become known as the Farber Law.
Farber had written a book about the Jascalevich case in 1978 titled Somebody Is Lying. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. When, nearly twenty years later, an editor at Vanity Fair magazine learned about the billionaire whose plane had disappeared in the Western North Pacific and the children suing for his estate, he contacted Farber to cover the story. But then Dateline NBC had hired him on as a producer of their own piece. One of Farber’s first calls had been to David Lujan, who had agreed to interviews of himself, Junior, and Kaelani. But the more Farber talked to Lujan, the more Lujan began to interview Farber. The journalist knew how to track down witnesses in small towns, gather evidence, and work with forensic pathologists. Moreover, the key to the Jascalevich case had been the testing of preserved human tissue for curare, identical in principle at least to the testing of the mole for DNA. Finally, Farber had demonstrated extraordinary loyalty and discretion, rounding out all of the talents that someone would need to research—and win—a complex paternity case like the Hillblom probate.
After Dateline wrapped, Lujan asked Farber to lunch on Saipan and suggested that he join Junior’s legal team. Lujan and Israel needed someone who could move between all of the warring factions and produce at least the outlines of a settlement. But the journalist was on his way to a small village in France in less than a week, to spend the summer with his wife’s family. Lujan pressed him, but Farber demanded the summer to think it over. Lujan seemed to give in, but almost as soon as Farber arrived in Europe the little village’s only fax machine began to purr with daily missives addressed to Myron Farber. Lujan was more convinced than ever that he needed a mole himself.
Forty-Nine
Press
It’s time for [David Nevitt] to prostrate himself before this Court and beg forgiveness for all the sins he has committed and helped to commit against this Court and this Estate. . . . Waechter and Nevitt would be well-advised to acknowledge and atone for their transgressions. In this, they may find their salvation and be saved from the fires of Hell. Repent, sinners, lest your souls be lost!!!
—David Lujan, in a pleading to Castro, March 20, 1996
Anyway [sic] you slice it, they’re farther from the money now than they’ve ever been. Worst of all, Larry’s name and reputation are being trashed.
—Joe Waechter, The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 1996
“Anything’s possible!” scoffs Peter Donnici on Farber’s Dateline NBC episode, which finally aired in November of 1996. It was his retort to the interviewer’s question: Was it possible that Larry had slept with Kaelani Kinney? When the reporter follows up with whether or not Donnici thinks that his old friend slept with Junior’s mother, Donnici shrugs his shoulders. “She doesn’t seem like his type,” he finally offers. And by then, of course, Kaelani Kinney was definitely not Larry Hillblom’s type. Kaelani, though not quite thirty at that moment, looks many years older—decades beyond Hillblom’s age limit. Fat hangs from her arms in thin brown hammocks; her cheekbones are invisible behind swollen skin and her once-radiant smile has sunk to form a permanent scowl. But the eyes are by far the saddest feature—dull as a drug addict’s, yet paranoid.
Cut to painfully shy fifteen-year-old Mercedes Feliciano, whose braces and pageboy haircut make her seem even younger. In a barely audible, pubescent voice, she tells the same reporter that she thought Larry loved her. Smash cut to a montage of dancing islander girls in matching bikinis, then off to commercial. Painful stuff for a stateside audience but also hard to turn off. Is that what American men do out there? a lot of women must have wondered. But plenty of men, particularly those who’d served in Asi
a, would have recognized themselves in Larry; those watching the program with wives or girlfriends were probably compelled to do some denying of their own.
What effect, if any, the prime-time airing of Hillblom’s dirty laundry had on the case is difficult to say. Over the summer of 1996, Castro had suspended the Bank of Saipan as executor and fired the Carlsmith firm, exiling Donnici and Waechter. The judge had appointed a CPA from Texas named William Webster to perform the duties of the executor—at $70,000 a month—and hired a giant law firm out of San Francisco called Morrison Foerster, aka MoFo, to represent the estate. They did not come cheap. “These are not boney [sic] dogs that wander in free,” Lujan squealed when MoFo’s first seven-figure invoice arrived. “They are extraordinarily expensive hybrid, pureblooded dogs with an insatiable appetite for money.”
(“How do you bill a million dollars a month?” Mike Dotts laughs. “You research everything. You read everything. You send off expeditions to Vietnam to measure the bricks on the wall, and catalog everything and interview everybody and depose everybody.”)
While Donnici huddled in his San Francisco office, Waechter remained in Micronesia, where he sat for depositions and told his remaining friends that he never should have taken the job of executor. Going out, he was constantly at risk of being served with subpoenas. Lujan was already crowing that Waechter’s and Donnici’s legacies to their children and grandchildren would be a blizzard of lawsuits. (He was wrong.) But few felt sympathy for the ousted gatekeeper of Larry Hillblom’s empire. Mike Dotts smirks. “Donnici and Waechter got what they deserved. They all got caught up in their hatred of Lujan and in winning; they lost sight of Hillblom’s life.”
In December 1996, David Lujan awoke in his hotel room on Saipan to a double rainbow. He interpreted it as a sign from God. After all, his two favorite targets had been neutered, and he had discovered a giant loophole in the Hillblom Law. By disallowing DNA evidence, the CNMI Legislature had simply thrown paternity testing back to the old days, when Lujan’s father, the judge, would summon parent and child for a good look. The law’s standard that a father must have “openly and notoriously” “held out” a child “as his own,” actually gave Junior an insurmountable advantage over the other children, whom Hillblom had never met. Mercedita had not even been born at the time of his death. So all that was required for Junior to win the entire Hillblom estate was (1) find photographs or video of Larry at Junior’s age or call witnesses who would attest to the fact that the boy resembled his father; and (2) produce witnesses who would attest to either seeing Larry with Junior, or swear that Hillblom had acknowledged that he had a son. There were, Lujan knew, dozens of such people on Palau alone.
Not that he and Israel had given up on proving Junior’s paternity biologically. Upon his return from France, Myron Farber referred Lujan to two of the most respected DNA experts in the world: Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Both men had become famous due (ironically) to their success denigrating the DNA evidence collected by the Los Angeles Police Department in the O. J. Simpson double-murder trial—the same evidence that Brad Popovich had vouched for. Scheck and Neufeld were expensive, but Lujan would not allow Larry Hillblom to disappear again. He and Israel agreed to pay their expenses, plus a percentage of Junior’s inheritance, even though a $10,000 DNA test of the mole would still be sufficient to settle the matter once and for all.
In Morrison Foerster, they faced a more nuanced foe than Carlsmith. At first, MoFo’s attorneys argued that the Hillblom Law rendered DNA testing obsolete. When that failed—Israel successfully argued that, even if the law held, they should still be allowed to use DNA testing to impeach witnesses who’d claimed that Hillblom had had a vasectomy—the estate’s new attorneys submitted an impossibly long set of standards for testing, then they chose a testing method that destroyed the sample after a single test: RFLP, aka Restrictive Fragment Length Polymorphism. Neufeld and Scheck accused MoFo of being scientifically irresponsible; the small size of Hillblom’s tissue sample would mean they had only one shot. Scheck and Neufeld wanted to amplify the tissue in a thermocycler so that the results could be analyzed and verified.
But testing the mole had become a foregone conclusion. All that remained to be decided was when the mole would be transferred from the doctors to the court-appointed lab and, after that, how soon Hillblom’s genetic code would finally be known.
The answer to the first question is very cold and foggy day in mid-February 1997; the place a conference room at the Davies Medical Center facility in San Francisco—only a couple of miles from Donnici’s Market Street offices. Assembled were several attorneys and experts from both sides. Underscoring the momentousness of the occasion, Peter Neufeld had been flown in from New York City. Lujan and Israel were well aware that everything about the mole, from its chain of custody to its anticipated match with Junior, would be vigorously opposed by the estate’s new 550-attorney law firm. However, they also knew that a positive match would provide a huge psychological advantage—maybe a knockout punch would force Donnici and the Charitable Trust to the bargaining table on their knees.
The Davies pathologist arrived a little late, as doctors are apt to do, wearing a white lab coat on which his name was stitched in blue cursive. For purposes of identification, the “mole” would be referred to not as Larry Hillblom but as tissue specimen number DMC-69755. (In forensic pathology, every human being, even one as complex as Hillblom, can be magically distilled into a series of numbers.) Neufeld glanced at the number attached to the specimen and then back at the number on the original pathology report, a copy of which he’d brought with him for verification. The sample number on the report was DMC-69755. But the number of the tissue sample on the table was DMC-69775.
“Excuse me,” Neufeld said, stunned. “The pathology report reads DMC-69755, right?”
“That’s correct,” the pathologist replied nonchalantly.
“This is sample number DMC-69775.”
The pathologist looked at the readout attached to his sample. “That’s odd,” he finally said. “I’ll be right back.” Then the doctor disappeared, leaving the room in a pregnant silence. Everyone was upright in their seats now, silently wondering the same thing: the Davies lab was famous for not making mistakes, so how the hell could something like this be happening?
The pathologist returned a few minutes later—an eternity. His hands were buried deep in his pockets and his gait was unflinchingly apathetic. Still standing, he casually removed a tiny paraffin cube from his right pocket, tossed it onto the conference table with a grin, and announced, “Heeeeeeeere’s Larry!”
Incredulous, Neufeld excused himself from the room and started dialing his cell phone. It was early morning in Honolulu, but David would want to know about this right away.
Fifty
The Journalist
“Don’t touch it!” Lujan snapped.
He was pacing a hotel suite in Honolulu, only a mile or so from the rat-infested loft where DHL had started twenty-seven years earlier, and several floors above the conference room where Castro had ordered the estate, the trust, and the children to reach a compromise. For the past several days, a federal judge hired by the estate had mediated discussions that Lujan found so pointless that he’d stormed out of the first morning—after telling Mercedita’s local counsel to fuck off. But if the two sides did not settle soon, he knew, the Internal Revenue Service and the estate’s law firms might end up with the entirety of Hillblom’s empire. MoFo was charging in excess of $1 million a month, and a tax expert had told them that the IRS would calculate the estate tax retroactively from the day of Hillblom’s death. Penalties and interest were already accruing. If the case dragged on for several years, whatever the estate’s lawyers didn’t take, the IRS would.
The report should have motivated the parties to compromise; instead, they flocked to the media to air their grievances. Hillblom’s brothers, who had refused to offer the DNA samples that could have quickly and cheaply settled the issue of paternity more
than a year earlier, whined about the estate’s multimillion-dollar legal bills. “The situation is totally out of hand as far as costs go,” Terry Hillblom was quoted in a Marianas Variety cover story. Echoed his half brother, Grant Anderson: “We are witnessing the destruction of the Estate, which Larry created over 25 years.”
In May, the Hillblom probate made the front page of the Wall Street Journal; the warring factions used the newspaper as an arena to threaten, cajole, and intimidate one other. A few even offered up new theories. Joe Hill was quoted surmising that Larry had purposefully left his will outdated and his estate in disarray in order to give his children a chance at inheriting it.
Oddly enough, the Journal had started one more feeding frenzy by discovering three more Filipino children who claimed Hillblom might be their father. The two girls and one boy shared the same mother, a dancer named Angelica Nonan, whom Hillblom had been obsessed with for a time. Lujan didn’t believe for a moment that Larry would have fathered three kids by the same woman, but under the Hillblom Law’s standards, she could “prove” paternity with a few photographs. Lujan dismissed the Nonans as the “phantom children” because they had not yet filed or appeared in court. Yet he worried that they might be part of a Hillblom Trust conspiracy—that Peter Donnici might have paid them a few million dollars to buy out their claims in advance. That way, even if Junior, Mercedita, and Jellian all proved paternity, the trust would still take half of the estate.
King Larry Page 31