Now, as he listened to one of his high-priced DNA experts telling him how the august Davies Medical Center in San Francisco had fumbled the mole, Lujan was reminded that anything was indeed possible. But the boonie dog would not be tricked. Nor would he run home with his tail between his legs.
Lujan said good-bye to Neufeld and dialed another room in his hotel. When a man’s voice answered, Lujan said they needed to talk. Immediately.
A few minutes later, Lujan walked past his unmade bed, turned the knob, and ushered in a small, rather excitable middle-aged man: Myron Farber, the New York Times reporter he’d wooed for months. Lujan motioned for him to sit at the suite’s dining table, then told him about the mole. He was ready to make Farber an offer he couldn’t refuse.
“Let’s face it,” Lujan began, “I need you.”
Myron Farber’s first few missions had been diplomatic in nature. He’d introduced Lujan to Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, and he had flown to San Francisco to convince Peter Donnici to accept a neutral mediator—the former dean of Berkeley’s business school. (Donnici had declined.) Then Farber had traveled to the settlement talks in Hawaii after months of venomous pleadings had further frayed the communications lines between the estate, the California Attorney General’s office, the trust, and the children’s lawyers; no one person involved in the Hillblom probate was on speaking terms with all of the parties.
Lujan sat down at the table. He still believed that Junior was the only heir, he said, but the emergence of the “phantom children” and now, the possibility that Davies had switched Hillblom’s tissue sample with someone else’s, necessitated a major strategy shift. They would need to gather overwhelming evidence for a prima facie case—photos, affidavits from people who had heard Hillblom acknowledge Junior, and so on. But also, the journalist would have to go to Kingsburg, California, to find photographs of Hillblom at Junior’s age, films too if possible, and hire forensic experts to do it the old-fashioned way—to hold up Junior and Hillblom side by side. He hoped that the resemblance would be evidence enough.
That was part of Farber’s new mission, Lujan explained, though not all. Due to both its importance and the depth of Farber’s experience, the journalist’s fee would be $1 million, minimum. But there was another, more discreet task . . .
Lujan had not yet given up on DNA. When he returned to Guam, he announced that he had had a change of heart: He was ready to accept Randy Fennell’s offer of one year ago, though he would reframe it as his own. “An obvious solution to dealing with these other three children,” Lujan wrote the Nonans, “is to test them in order to determine if they have the same father among themselves or with Junior, Cuartero, or Feliciano. Kinney will be putting on evidence that it is simply not credible that Hillblom fathered three children by the same woman. A man who seeks out young virgin girls and demands abortions when they get pregnant is not likely to be fathering children repeatedly with the same woman. . . . Here is the real problem: If the phantom children are forced to test, no bluff will exist for whomever plans to assert these rights, or for the Trust to insert an interest in the Estate through them. . . . One way to demonstrate paternity in the absence of a reliable DNA sample from Hillblom will be for these children to cross-test DNA against each other.”
Fifty-One
Kingsburg
Beneath the Mayberry sheen of Kingsburg, Helen Anderson had not, as the farmers say, had an easy row to hoe. But how much of her own struggle she had managed to hide from her eldest son is impossible to know because Helen passed away several years ago. What is common knowledge in “the Burg” is that Larry was an extremely bright, curious child who saved much of his adolescent resentment for his mother. Larry had easily fulfilled every expectation of hers, becoming the best piano player, the smartest student, and the most devout churchgoer—playing the organ, teaching Sunday School, and even delivering sermons when the preacher was out. What he could not do, of course, was replace the man she’d loved, whose name he and his brother, Terry, would keep for the rest of their lives. Helen had a good man now, but he had married her out of obligation. Larry was her flesh and blood. After he’d gone to law school, she’d kept his bedroom like a shrine, often sleeping there rather than with her husband.
Yet the more Larry achieved, the more distance he seemed to place between them. Before long, she was reduced to seeking out his friends around town, asking if they had talked to him, fishing for news. From 1976 until 1991, Larry did not come home a single time, and more and more she blamed herself for his exile. She confided to her best friend that she had once sent a letter to Larry asking him if he couldn’t pay his brothers more. (Grant was then developing DHL’s offices in the Middle East, and Terry was a pilot for Island Airways, one of Larry’s side projects.) Helen thought the request was modest. Moreover, she wasn’t asking for herself. She had never asked her eldest son for anything. But her friend immediately realized that Helen had done the worst thing possible. Not only had she intruded into Larry’s adult life—she’d sought to impose some authority over it.
The first week of May 1995, Helen had picked out a card for Larry’s fifty-second birthday and sent it to her son care of a PO box on Saipan. Then she’d prayed for a response. Larry had come home a year earlier, and, although he hadn’t stayed with her and Andy, they had driven out to the airstrip in Selma with Grant and his family to meet his small plane. Larry had looked terrible, of course, having lost an eye and shattered nearly every bone in his face. He wore torn jeans, a T-shirt, and large dark glasses. Clinging to his lean frame, unchanged since high school, was a very shy, young Filipina named Josephine who had stayed with him while he’d recovered at the hotel near the San Francisco Airport. Helen had visited him once there—to tell him that she loved him.
Reunited, maybe reconciled. Hillblom with his estranged mother, Helen, in Kingsburg. (Courtesy of Michael W. Dotts)
Back at the farm, they’d arranged themselves in front of a small bunch of haystacks and taken a family photograph, the first one in years, Andy in worn overalls and Helen in a cotton summer dress, squinting in the sun’s glare, everyone smiling for the camera except Larry.
Sensing a thaw in their little cold war, Helen had attached a note to Larry’s birthday card asking his forgiveness for anything she might have done wrong in raising him. All she’d wanted to know since then was whether or not he’d received the note before he’d taken off in that funny-looking airplane and been lost at sea.
In town she heard talk about the television show with the dancing girls, and she knew that people were collecting newspaper clippings of the scandal. Knowing her neighbors were whispering about her son’s “lifestyle” was painful. That wasn’t her Larry. Her Larry was her: smart, ambitious, stubborn, sometimes a little too direct for other people’s tastes, but that had gotten them through the tough times together. She still cried when she thought about him. When Helen’s friends traveled overseas, they would take photographs of the red-and-white DHL trucks and vans and send them to the farm, but that was cold comfort.
Her friends said that of course he had received her card, but Larry traveled so much, it was difficult to know. According to Joe Waechter, they’d been in Vietnam just before the crash, opening a new hotel there. Maybe she’d visit someday, or fly to Saipan to see everything that Larry had accomplished there. But as long as the estate case was open, the lawyers had warned her that it wasn’t safe. She might be subpoenaed. The children’s attorneys wanted her DNA.
Throughout 1996 and the following year, Helen had written Josephine a number of letters; at the end of the year, she’d sent a pretty Christmas card. From time to time, she even picked up the phone and called Larry’s house. Most of her letters and all of her phone calls went unanswered but Helen had continued to write to Josephine, anyhow, communicating the doings of her rather uneventful life in Kingsburg—the monotony of small town life was punctuated only by her two young granddaughters’ music lessons, a sustained outpouring of affection from Hillblom’s former
associates, and visits to the doctors who treated her arthritis—and expressing her hope that they could become friends.
Helen’s letters, nearly lost amid a sagging box of pleadings in Mike Dotts’s office, do not mention the arrival of a former New York Times reporter in Kingsburg during the spring of 1997, a small but persistent man who was going around town interviewing Larry’s friends and numerous cousins, asking for old photos, football films, and even his high school yearbook. It is possible that Helen remained unaware of Farber, though his presence certainly would have been discussed in a small, religious community like Kingsburg. When she and Andy drove up to the Fresno medical complex to finally take care of her arthritis, neither of them would have been looking in the rearview mirror; nor, as she awaited the doctor in the examination room a short time later, would she have been suspicious of a man dressed in a proper lab coat, even as he swabbed the inside of her cheek for no apparent reason.
Fifty-Two
The Number
While involved in the “fact” investigation [of Junior Larry Hillbroom’s paternity] I performed what ultimately proved to be a . . . critical service for Lujan, one that had a profound impact on both Lujan and the case. Through contacts in California who were unavailable to Lujan, I kept Lujan, Barry Israel and others on our team abreast of the movements and habits of Hillblom’s family, including his mother, Helen Anderson, who had ignored a CNMI court order to provide blood for DNA analysis. As Lujan readily acknowledged to me, this timely, highly detailed information was pivotal in achieving his key immediate objective—a genetic profile that could be matched with Junior to see if he was, irrefutably, a son of Larry Hillblom.
—From Myron Farber’s affidavit in Farber v. Lujan, 2001
Patrick Lupo empties his glass of its last sip of sauvignon blanc, sets it confidently on the table beside an empty plate, and casts a wistful glance around the dining room of the quaint pub where we have just finished our lunch. These hourlong respites are technically off the record, but I doubt that he will mind my sharing what he expresses next: a lingering anger that whoever snuck into Helen Anderson’s hospital room and swabbed her cheek had been allowed to vanish as utterly as Hillblom himself. “You’d think . . .” Lupo starts, but his jaw clenches shut. There is much about the Hillblom probate that gnaws at him, but nothing so much as what happened to Larry’s mother in Fresno.
When, in the summer of 1997, David Lujan was informed that he possessed Helen’s DNA, his response was very different. “Total victory!” he crowed into his cell phone. Finally, Lujan had the two things that he wanted: DNA that linked Junior to Larry Hillblom, and a clear advantage for his client over the other potential heirs. He dispatched Peter Neufeld to tell the estate’s attorneys that Junior’s team now had biological proof of his paternity. Of course, they were stunned. Despite all of the mud-slinging and name-calling, no one had ever expected Larry’s mother to be violated. Yet, as the news reverberated across the Pacific Ocean, only one person threatened retribution: Yeoryios Apallas. Apallas e-mailed Barry Israel that his agents were in Fresno investigating what he called “some hospital staff’s intrusion on one of the people connected to this case.” The threat might have worked had there been any truth behind it, or if Apallas had not embellished the e-mail with a threat to destroy Kaelani Kinney by forcing her to testify, as Apallas wrote, “about how many times she fucked Larry and the other folks around the same time.” Or if he had not ended with this promise: “He who laughs last laughs best my friend. It will be a cold day in hell before you and your ilk get any of the Hillblom money if I have anything to say about it.” Israel promptly forwarded Apallas’s e-mails to Castro. Shortly afterward, the deputy AG with the exotic accent was reassigned by the California Attorney General’s office, and even the estate’s attorneys refused to be in the same room with him.
The Global Settlement Conference began in July 1997 in San Francisco, under the mediation of a retired federal judge named Coleman Fannin. It was reconvened at Saipan’s brand-new oceanfront showcase, the 300-room Diamond Hotel, on August 6, just three days before the Hillblom probate would go to trial. There was still no agreement on any issue besides the obvious: that Hillblom’s fortune would be divided somehow between Junior, Mercedita, and Jellian, who had tested positive for sibship a month earlier, and the medical trust called for under his will. Adding to the tension, lab results would soon reveal that a young Vietnamese boy named Be Lory matched the three confirmed siblings, so whatever the children received would now be split four ways instead of three. At least Ted Mitchell had finally been expunged. Castro had delegated the Clash of the Titans to another court, which had promptly ended it.
“Mostly,” Mike Dotts recalls, “what drove the settlement from then on were the tax issues. Everybody hired their own tax attorneys to try and advise them on what to do about the tax problems. And it just kind of reached a point where everybody understood how taxes were going to affect the estate and that the only solution was a settlement, and also I think MoFo really did help out in the settlement because their billings were so high, and nobody liked seeing them get paid so much money, and that was a motivation to settle—just to wean them off the tit, basically.”
But a magic number proved elusive. Peter Donnici thought that the trust deserved at least 60 percent of the estate—in large part because his tax experts believed that if the heirs got a majority of Hillblom’s estate, then the entire thing would be subject to the 55 percent estate tax. If, on the other hand, the trust inherited at least 60 percent, it was theoretically possible that the entire estate could avoid the estate tax. But Lujan and Israel were just as adamant that the children get at least 60 percent, and their experts thought the transaction could be structured in such a way to use the trust’s tax-exempt status regardless—by having the trust inherit Hillblom’s entire fortune and then afterward settle with the children. A compromise might have been struck, but both sides still refused to speak directly with one another. Attorneys for the trust, for the children, for the estate, and for Josephine were kept in separate rooms while an ambassador was recruited to deliver the latest offer to each room. Occasionally, Judge Fannin would show up personally in one room or another to see if he could push a concession, but Peter Donnici was so pessimistic about bridging the twenty-point difference that he’d remained in San Francisco. During the second day of the talks, one of the phantom children’s attorneys served a breach of contract lawsuit on his partner, further poisoning the atmosphere. Meanwhile, rumors permeated the hotel like viruses, including one that Mike Dotts had cut a secret deal with David Lujan—“that,” as Dotts explains, “in exchange for supporting Josephine’s claim, she would testify that Larry had admitted being Junior’s father during pillow talk.” Dotts won’t say who started the rumor, but neither he nor Lujan did anything to squash it. That the children’s attorneys had offered to pay Josephine millions of dollars from their share of the estate was by then an open secret.
Literally towering over the settlement discussions was Raoul Kennedy, MoFo’s head of litigation, and, as such, the estate’s attorney in charge of negotiations. One of the estate’s new lawyers had called Kennedy a “dog of war,” but in the flesh, the lanky marine reservist came across as a cerebral, soft-spoken preppy with a slight lisp and a fondness for plaid golf pants. By his own admission, he normally represented what he called “ultra-unsympathetic clients”: insurance companies refusing to pay claims, oil companies polluting the environment, et cetera. The Hillblom case, he would later admit, exposed an unexpectedly weak stomach. Deposing the two teenage Filipina mothers, Mercedes Feliciano and Julie Cuartero, had been deeply embarrassing for the conservative Republican. Asking fifteen-year-old girls when they’d gotten their period and if Larry Hillblom—a fellow Boalt Hall grad whom, in private, Kennedy characterizes as “utterly repulsive”—was circumcised and exactly how much betadine he had poured onto his penis after sex to protect himself from them was not palatable to a man who believed deeply in women’s righ
ts. How could men of wealth and education take advantage of poverty so sordidly and so blatantly?
Kennedy might have been a warrior but he was not, like his main opponent, scrappy. Nor, more to the point, was he a gambler. He was not inclined to roll the dice on the Hillblom Law, not with close to a billion dollars on the table, and certainly not after a well-connected local attorney had assured him that the Hillblom Law would not be upheld by the CNMI Supreme Court—perhaps because of Larry Hillblom’s own precedent. If the Hillblom Law fell, Helen’s swabbing would still not be admissible evidence, but the children’s cross-testing would, and Kennedy would have a very hard time explaining how four children from three Asian countries whose mothers were known to have slept with Larry Hillblom could have a different father—or why, despite interviewing most of the urologists on the West Coast, the estate’s investigators had never found any evidence that Hillblom had had a vasectomy.
Unlike Johnnie Cochran and Yeoryios Apallas, Kennedy maintained a sense of humor; he joked to his friends back in San Francisco that practicing law in Saipan was like eating Chinese food with one chopstick.
The Hillblom estate had to settle, Kennedy knew, which is why he had suggested his friend Coley Fannin to mediate this last-ditch effort. And Coley had certainly tried his best. He had even cajoled Hillblom’s brothers, who were furious over the swabbing incident, back to the bargaining table the week before. When they’d dug in their heels, both Kennedy and the former judge had tried to reason with them: What if they might be able to benefit from their genetic kinship to these kids one day? What if a kid in Palau turned out to be the key to healing a genetic disease, such as Terry Hillblom’s diabetes? But raising the possibility that these children might be their kin seemed to infuriate Larry’s brothers all the more. They’d burst into tears and rant that the kids would never see a dime. “The Hillblom Minuet,” Kennedy called it.
King Larry Page 32