James D. Scurlock - King Larry: The Life and Ruins of a Billionaire Genius

Advance Praise for

KING LARRY

Larry Lee Hillblom (19431995) does not have the immediate
name recognition of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Howard
Hughes, but the enigmatic founder of DHL has a story that
is just as fascinatingand more mysteriousthan any of
these genius entrepreneurs... a gripping account of the mercurial,
visionary, complicated billionaires life.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Praise for

MAXED OUT

Fiendishly clever... After reading Maxed Out, youre going to want to shed
your creditors and reacquaint yourself with the concept of cash.

BARBARA EHRENREICH

Hes right on the money. THE WASHINGTON POST

Astute indictment of the credit card industry... Smartly written
and by turns funny, irreverent, serious, and angry, Scurlocks
book is well timed... he builds a persuasive case that
deserves serious attention.

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Debt is most certainly a taboo subject in our culture, which
makes Scurlocks movie and book that much harder to eyeball.
Do. Both, if possible. Its scary stuff, and oh, so real.

USA TODAY

James Scurlock... is an engaging guide to the
corporate numbers games and the personal side of financial ruin.

MOTH ER JONES

The bone-chilling, bloodcurdling, hair-raising story of a country (guess which one?) thats up to its eyeballs in credit card debt.

NEW YORK

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When globalization pioneer and reclusive billionaire Larry Hillblom disappeared in 1995, he left behind an international fiasco that is still unraveling today.

King Larry is a three-part journey, beginning with the early years of a mercurial young man who grew up fatherless on a peach farm outside of Fresno, California. Months after graduating from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1969, Hillblom cofounded DHLthree years before FedEx was formedand it quickly became the fastest-growing corporation in history.

Hillbloms expatriate life began twelve years later, when he retreated to a small tax haven in the Western Pacific. There, James Scurlock reveals, Hillblom led the resistance to American meddling in the Mariana Islands, rewrote the tax code and real-estate laws, and became a Supreme Court justiceamong other unlikely exploits.

Hillbloms voracious appetite for underage prostitutes is another facet of his convoluted story, illuminating the realities of the sex and human-trafficking industries in Southeast Asia. But Hillbloms amoral, thrill-seeking nature finally caught up with him when his vintage seaplane disappeared off the coast of Anatahan in May 1995, and he left behind an estate worth close to a billion dollars. Weeks later, five impoverished women and their attorneys came forward to challenge Hill-bloms will, his former business partners, and his alma mater, provoking a legal battle that has raged for over fifteen years.

From Howard Hughes to Mark Zuckerberg, the public has always been fascinated by larger-than-life entrepreneurs and their eccentricities. Now, James Scurlock engages us with the riveting story of one such man, who dressed in rags and lived in relative obscurity, but who has had a profound and lasting influencea pioneer who shrank the globe, toppled the postal monopoly, anticipated electronic mail, and, most important, envisioned a world driven by economics rather than by laws.

JAMES D. SCURLOCK studied at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His first film, Parents of the Year, won numerous awards and was an official selection of more than twenty-five film festivals. His first feature-length film, Maxed Out, was named one of the top ten films of 2007 by the Washington Post . His previous book of the same title was awarded the 2008 Ridenhour Book Prize.

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Also by James D. Scurlock

Maxed Out: Hard Times in the Age of Easy Credit

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011019548

ISBN 978-1-4165-8922-8 (print)
ISBN 978-1-4165-9394-2 (ebook)

For my mother, Marianne Scurlock

Contents

I had not heard the name Larry Lee Hillblom until his eulogy appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, above the fold and under the headline Heir Freight: How the Strange Life of a DHL Founder Left His Estate a Mess. In my two decades as a Journal devotee, Id never read any article more than once, but the moment Id finished the last word of that piece, I started again from the top. Here was the tale of an eccentric multimillionaire who had disappeared in a small-plane crash one year earlier and of the already epic battle for his fortunemoney that he had not seemed to care very much about in his lifetime. The reporter had woven the various aspects of Hillbloms convoluted life into a narrative but had failed to resolve its glaring contradiction: Why would a hugely successful entrepreneur exile himself to an obscure island in the middle of nowhere at the dawn of his career? Imagine, for example, Bill Gates moving to Bhutan after the release of Microsoft Windows, or Henry Ford heading into the Alaskan tundra after the first Model T rolled off the assembly line at River Rouge.