G. Bruce Knecht - Grand Ambition: An Extraordinary Yacht, the People Who Built It, and The Millionaire Who Cant Really Afford It

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For Andrew

T HE ALARM clock next to Gale Tribbles bed came alive with a blast of country music at 4:15 a.m. An ashtray holding the remains of the previous nights final cigarette was balancing on top of the clock, so he was careful as he reached to turn off the radio. Then came a more insistent alarm, his cell phone, programmed to ring at 4:16. Hoisting himself from the bed, Tribble shuffled across the cluttered bedroom and opened a door that led directly into the kitchen, where he switched on a coffee machine he had loaded the night before.

It was a cold January morning, so he started to get dressed with a full-body layer of long underwear. Then jeans and a blue shirt that carried the name of his employer, Trinity Yachts, just above the left breast pocket, followed by wool socks and gray sneakers that were reinforced with steel to protect his toes. Returning to the kitchen, he reached into the refrigerator to remove a fried-egg sandwich his daughter had made, along with a Coke and a sticky bun. Once he had packed the food, his breakfast and lunch, into a cooler, Tribble filled a nonspill metal cup with coffee. His fire engine red pickup trucka meticulously maintained eight-year-old Fordwas just a few steps away. Switching on the headlights, he commenced his twenty-mile commute by igniting a Camel Light and adjusting the volume of his radio, which was tuned to the same station as his alarm clock. He could shorten the travel time by taking the highway, but that would mean six additional miles and more gasoline, so he generally stuck to back roads.

Fifty-nine years old, Tribble is a wiry man whose five-foot-nine frame carries just 135 pounds, his weight ever since he graduated from high school. His black and silver hair is longish but neatly trimmed. His eyes are blue and deeply set, and his cheeks are also sunken, hollowed out because he had lost all his teeth many years earlier. He relies on dentures to eat.

Tribble lives in Pass Christian, Mississippi, a Gulf Coast community midway between New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama. He has never lived anywhere else, and his house, a compact, single-story, rectangular structure, is the one in which he grew up. Elevated above the ground by cinder blocks, it looks like a mobile home, but it was actually built by his father back in the 1940s. It is set on thirty-eight acres, most of which are overgrown, although Tribble had cleared out patches here and there to grow vegetables and raise chickens. He has never had much money, but his expenses are similarly modest. There is no mortgage on the house, and the annual real estate taxes are $659.

Back when he was in high school, Tribble wrote soulful songs that were inspired by the country ballads he started listening to with his parents. He also played the saxophone, and he sometimes thought about becoming a professional musician. But he ended up learning how to weld metals and went to work at the shipyard where his father had been employed for almost two decades. Tribble had been with several shipyards over the years, and he joined Trinity in 2006, not long after it moved from Hurricane Katrinaravaged New Orleans to Gulfport, Mississippi. Forty years after he began his career, his hourly wage had gone from $2.50 to $18.50, but he said the buying power of his earnings was unchanged. I used to be able to fill up the car with groceries for twenty dollars, he remembered, and gas cost twenty-eight cents a gallon.

Tribble is a shipfitter. He has helped build everything from barges and oceangoing cargo vessels to naval destroyers and aircraft carriersmore than one hundred vessels in all. He has always worked in open-air sheds where the conditions are often challenging, particularly in the summer when the temperature regularly rises above 100 degrees. But he almost never complains, not about the heat or the humidity, the early mornings or the tedium of his work, not even the gum disease that, by the time he was thirty, led to the loss of his teeth and the end of his saxophone playing. It just isnt in his nature. Unlike many of his colleagues, Tribble has never seriously considered finding a different kind of job, and he was not eager to retire. I like what I do, he said. And what would I do if I didnt work?

Gale Tribble, a shipyard laborer for forty of his fifty-nine years.

T HAT MORNING, Tribble was about to begin the construction of Lady Linda, a 187-foot yacht. In a different era, this dayJanuary 7, 2008would have been one of special significance, witnessed by everyone who was playing a role in the massive project. But with many of the participants communicating with one another electronically from distant locations, the only people who would see the process get under way would be Tribble and another laborer, William Packer.

Lady Linda was to be one of the largest American-made yachts since the Gilded Age, a gleaming symbol of its owners participation in a quarter century of unprecedented wealth creation. The owner, a private equity investor named Doug Von Allmen, had committed himself to its building in 2006, not long before the booms peak. By global standards, Lady Linda would not be among the very largest of the burgeoning fleet of seagoing palaces, but Von Allmen had vowed that it would be the best of those made in the United States. He wanted to disprove the conventional wisdom that America did not know how to build things anymore, as well as the long-held orthodoxy that domestically built yachts are necessarily inferior to those from Europe. Nothing would be ordinary: interior walls would be made from rare species of burl wood, floors would be paved with onyx and unusual types of marble, the furniture would be bespoke, and artworks would be commissioned on the basis of the spaces they would fill.

But the creation of Lady Linda would be far from glamorous, and the uncertainties that lay ahead would affect hundreds of people whose lives and livelihoods were bound up in the project: Von Allmen and Tribble, as well as a former army sniper who was now working as a pipefitter, and an illegal immigrant from Honduras who would give a lustrous finish to the yachts exterior by sheathing it with an array of poisonous compounds. For Von Allmen, Lady Linda was supposed to be the ultimate embodiment of his success. Instead, he would come to question whether he could actually afford to be its owner. For Tribble and many others, the impact of the changed worldand the construction itselfwould be even more profound.

W HEN T RIBBLE reached Gulfport, he turned onto Seaway Road, a heavily trafficked thoroughfare where the air smelled of petroleum. Signs pointed to a variety of manufacturing and distribution operations as well as A-1 Bailbonds and a prison. Trinity was the only one of Seaway Roads businesses that had a Help Wanted sign out front, evidence of the still-soaring demand for very large yachts.