Its hard to imagine that something as common as document couriers were only a few decades ago illegal. Larry Hilblom, or as he was more widely known - The 'H' in 'DHL' pioneered an industry.
From a humble beginning DHL grew to become an enormous global empire, enriching Hilblom beyond his wildest dreams, but it was a success that he had to fight tooth and nail for. When the US Postal Service challenged his legal right to compete against their government granted monopoly and threatened to shut down DHL, Hilblom's tenacious scrappy genius led him to victory and subsequently opened the doors for companies such as Fedex to compete with DHL, which in turn would build an industry that today generates around 59 billion dollars annually.
For all Hilblom's business genius and vision their also lurked a dark side. His penchant for the seedier side of life coupled with a move to Saipan allowed him to become a real life King amongst the regions poor. His disappearance in 1995 led to a protracted legal battle over his estate and multiple paternity cases from the Philippines, Vietnam and Micronesia, all of which implied statutory rape and pedophilia was something not unfamiliar to Hillblom. James D. Scurlock wrote Hilblom's biography in 2012, some seventeen years after his disappearance. The biography serves to remind us that disrupting industries isn’t a new phenomenon but rather something that’s been going on for years, it also serves as a cautionary tale on many levels and the ruination that financial success come sometimes bring. I had the opportunity to discuss Hllblom and the book 'King Larry' with James D. Scurlock.
IBR: How did you ever come across such a story of a man like Larry Hilblom
James D. Scurlock: The story was the subject of two front page articles in the Wall Street Journal in May and June of 1995. It was so compelling that I just never forgot it and couldn't believe that a book hadn't been written ten years later.
IBR: Do you still surprise people with his story, or is it widely known story in the US.
James D. Scurlock: It's not that well known here. Everyone in Micronesia knows it, of course, and Larry Hillblom is probably the third most famous American in Vietnam, behind Bill Gates and Barack Obama. Larry was very good at keeping himself hidden, even in death.
IBR: Do people in the business see Hilblom as the founder of modern day courier services or do you think in some ways he was very much underappreciated as a pioneer of a service we very much take for granted these days?
James D. Scurlock: He's very much under-appreciated. At the time, no one thought that you could compete with the post office. Anywhere. Fed Ex began several years after DHL and even then they were only transporting computer parts. They were terrified that if they transported anything that looked like a letter, the post office would go after them. The post office (and larger competitors) went after Larry as well but he had the foresight and scrappiness to realize that he could win on an economic, if not a legal, argument. So he was a pioneer not only in the express mail industry but much more so in the field of what is commonly now referred to as the economics of business, ie crafting a legal/policy argument based on the economic benefits.
IBR: Would he have really cared what people or how people remembered him?
James D. Scurlock: Not in the least.
IBR: How far into your research did you know you had an amazing story, or did you know from day one?
James D. Scurlock: I knew that this was a special guy from day one. Here's someone who invented an industry, became the king of an island, was an unabashed pedophile and the FBI's most wanted man in a shady part of the world, the largest shareholder in a major American airline and he's virtually unknown. What I underappreciated starting out was how smart he was. Off the charts. I remember a Continental airlines executive telling me that Larry wasn't interested in showing people how smart he was but rather how stupid they were. He was very very good at that.
IBR: All three of the founders had interesting lives; I understand Dalsey's son was implicated in a murder?
James D. Scurlock: The L disappeared almost immediately. He decided early on that Larry could never be successful, which was a pretty justifiable assumption when you looked at this gangly hippie would did drugs and was completely shy and terribly neurotic. With the L went their investor. So Larry and Adrian Dalsey really scrambled. Dalsey was almost a cliche, a Mad Men-era guy who wore silver suits and brought his mistress home and double-crossed his own partner. His son, by a Filipina mistress who later became his wife, clearly had his own demons and is in jail for murdering his mother's second husband.
IBR: It could be argued that the revelations of Hillblom's personal life had a negative effect on the brand of DHL, why do you think Deutsche Post went after it?
James D. Scurlock: I was at a charity event in Florida several years ago and they sat me next to the head of media relations for DHL. When I told him that I was working on the book he said that he guessed his job was to convince me not to do it. They're not happy about Larry's personal life. Many of his friends, in fact, see it as a personal betrayal, though it was hidden in plain sight. But money wins out, and Deutsche Post realized the value of the network that Larry's partners, particularly Pat Lupo, had built. They got a bargain.
During the nineties when Hillblom was preoccupied with many different projects how did DHL hold together?
James D. Scurlock: DHL's hard times were in the eighties. In the early nineties, they sold a big chunk to a consortium led by Japan Airlines and just took off. Just in Time inventory methods were the rage back then and globalization was really kicking in. By then, Larry was checked out. He'd lived in Micronesia for over a decade. One of his friends told me how he would throw his mail in the trash and ignore his executives' phone calls. Larry's position was that he paid his people to think and he wasn't going to do it for them. That said, if he had a brain fart about anything, they definitely heard about it.
IBR: You spent time in the Marianas researching the book and interviewing many people in regards to Hillblom's life. Did being on Saipan give you a very different perspective about his life? Was it easier to be empathetic when you viewed his world through his lens rather than from a desk in the US?
James D. Scurlock: Yes and no. American men are used to the sex trade in Asia, particularly the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Poor women are for sale, usually by their own mothers. But no one I talked to could think of someone so aggressive and prolific as Larry. The age of the girls he went after was also shocking to a lot of his friends, even weekend warriors who spent a lot of time in the clubs.
IBR: Do you think Saipan was a made for Hillblom or did Hillblom (and some notable other characters) shape Saipan to fit him/them?
James D. Scurlock: Larry arrived like a God. These people had been decimated by World War II and then ignored. Y the US Navy, which ran their lives (along with the Interior Department) for decades. Larry came along and agitated for them to be more independent, he showed them that they could resist and negotiate with the US, even though we already had a commonwealth agreement set up. For most of the people living on Saipan, what really mattered were the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing in from the US and, to a lesser extent, the Japanese and Korean tourists. There's a lot of money flowing through a small population. Larry was there to take advantage of the tax loophole and he worked very hard to protect it for himself but that only affected a handful of people. You go there today and the only trace of Hillblom is a decaying house and the law library in the courthouse.
IBR: How uncomfortable do you think the revelations of Hilblom's paternity claims and accusations of statutory rape were to DHL?, was there ever any anxiety shown by DHL whilst you were writing of this book?
James D. Scurlock: I guess I kind of answered that above. Some people didn't want to be interviewed. Others didn't want to talk about it, at least on the record. I think there was a sense that everyone was guilty, that Hillblom's behavior was kind of a conspiracy in which all of his friends and associates would be implicated. It was hardest on his brothers, who live in a very conservative farm town in the Central Valley. I think that they still deny their brother could have done this and refuse to meet with his kids. His mother died a few years ago. Until they offered her a million dollars she refused to give any of her DNA to confirm her son's paternity and even then did not consider her grand kids part of her family. You can read into that what you will.
IBR: When you set about researching this book, did you have a firm plan and structure, or did it evolve as you interviewed more and more people that had known or worked with Hillblom?
James D. Scurlock: It evolved. I saw it as a business book, not a legal thriller or a sexpose, though you could read it as all three I suppose. What really intrigued me about Hillblom was his intellect and the myriad things he did, from being a Supreme Court justice in the Marianas to owning a pawn shop to becoming the first Westerner to invest in modern Vietnam.
IBR: Is Hillblom an anomaly or do you think there are a million stories like Hillbloms dying to be told?
James D. Scurlock: The story that comes to mind is John McAfee, whose life is now being made into a film by Warner Bros. There's plenty of wealthy American men running around avoiding taxes and treating the under-developed world as their sexual playground. It tends to not end very well for them or anyone else.
Publications
James D. Scurlock (2012) 'King Larry, The Life & Ruins
of A Billionaire Genius'
Scribner: ISBN: 978-1416589228
James D. Scurlock (2009) Hard Times, Easy Credit and the
Era of Predatory Lenders
Scribner: ISBN: 978-1416532514
Links:
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