and rick has, of course, caught fire in the republican primaries, but when he was a senator from pennsylvania, rick wanted to put forth a vision of conservativism. that wasn't just about economics, but it was about how to make economics work for families. >> one more book i want to ask you about, and that is "the closing of the muslim mind." >> so this is a very important book by robert reilly. he just spoke on this topic two nights ago, and this gives, i think -- you know, everyone talks about, you know, what the conflict is between the west and islam, but people really don't know what are the fundamentals of the faith. so his argument is that there was a time when islam was open to intellectual ideas, but then there was a point where especially when the ottoman turks took over when there was a receding of intellectual fervor in the islamic world, and at this point, especially today, there's kind of a discouragement

and be a fear of intellectual inquiry, and that's his basic thesis. >> we've been talking with richard brake of the intercollegiate studies institute. >> up next on booktv, james secure lock, author of "king larry," recounts the life of larry hill blom, cofounder of the shipping company dhl. he disappeared in 1995 in the western pacific. this is just over an hour. [applause] >> thank you very much. thank you to book people and c-span, and thank you all for coming to talk about "king larry: the life and ruins of a billionaire genius," which "businessweek" has compared both to an elle more leonard caper and also called a trashy analog to walter ice actson's biography of steve jobs.

king larry begins on may 21, 1995, which if you were in the states was about halfway through the o.j. simpson double murder trial. but on saipan it was a very beautiful sunday morning, and a small plane, a vintage cbc plane took off from the airport there with two very important people onboard. one was the speaker of the house of the commonwealth of the northern mariana islands, and the other was larry hillblom who was better known as the h in dhl. the plane was going to one of the northernmost islands, and nobody was really quite sure why they thought hillblom was interested in building an eco-resort there. regardless, the plane never returned, and this wasn't a particularly big surprise because hillblom was known to buy really crappy airplanes and not maintain them. in fact, one of the islands they'd flown over on their way

had a crash, an airplane that hillblom had crashed about a year and a half before and nearly killed himself in. so a number of his friends had declined to make the trip with him that morning, and no one was terribly shocked that this plane had also gone down. however, it was a real shock that larry hillblom was suddenly gone. he'd arrive inside saipan 15 years before, and he'd become a larger-of than-life character in the mariana islands. he'd bought the bank, the airline, the television and radio stations, he'd built dozens of businesses including a pawnshop and been a bartender. so he was very well known, and there was a sort of my those about hillblom that was incompatible with him being dead. when they went to search for him, they found the pilot and the speaker of the house, but hillblom's body was never recovered, so this sort of

furthered the sense of disbelief. but they had to presume him dead. he was lost at sea. and a few days later, hundreds of people flocked to kingsburg, california, to pay their last respects. it's a little town in the central valley of california, it's just south of selma which is the raisin capital of the world and about 20 minutes south of fresno. it's a little peach of farming town. but hundreds of people including members of the saudi royal family and bahraini princes and ceos of of major corporations and billionaires as well as normal citizens, dhl drivers and friends from college descended on this tiny little lutheran church to pay their respects. and they're really surprised because what they all start to find out talking to each other is that larry was not at all who he said he was. he had, for example, told people that his father was a bank robber who was electrocuted at san quentin, and now they find out talking to his high school friends that larry's father

actually with was a roofer who died of heatstroke when he was 2 years old. larry had told them he was the captain of the football team in kingsburg, and they find out he was not the captain of the football team, but he was a 130-pound linebacker who got his contact lenses knocked out so frequently that the picture in the senior yearbook is of the football team on their hands and knees on the field searching for larry's contact lenses. they find out he wasn't this jock and this ladies' man and this sort of brilliant, charismatic person that they'd assumed he would be, but he was actually a very awkward kid who was raised in the church and obsessed with how'd hughes. howard hughes. as one of larry's friends back there told me, this guy is somewhere out there where the buses don't go. that was their impression of larry. he furthered this impression by saying really odd things to people, like his best friend he told he was going to make a lot of money and move far away and never talk to him again.

which his best friend sort of took offense to, and larry just thought this was, you know, totally acceptable thing to say. he told him that he was going to make a lot of money and marry a catholic girl because catholics don't get tworsed, and he didn't want to give half of his fortune to a catholic girl or, you know, to a woman. he told him various times he wanted to be an actor, and he decided he wanted to be an evangelist, so he would study jimmy swag earth late at night and got the pictures to black out everything but his eyes so he could study how this man manipulated and hip hypnotized people with his eyes. and he also vilified his mother for some reason. he would tell friends about all these wonderful things that his mother would do for him like hayrides. she actually drove him to law school his first, first year because he wanted to keep his job at the cannery in kingsburg which is about a three-and-a-half hour drive back and forth.

and he would say, you know, she would do all these great things for me, the bitch. he had this very odd way of talking to people. he goes to bolt school of law at berkeley which in 1967 is a hotbed of the anti-war movement and the feminism movement and the sexual liberation movement. and his eccentricity continues there. he's anti the anti-war movement, he ridicules the protesters saying more people die on the highways and car crashes than in vietnam going to war. he ridicules jane fonda and joan baez and thinks it's ridiculous anyone would care what an actress or a singer thinks, and in class he's totally inscrutable because larry believe that is the law should be a function of business. you know, law should be structured to help businesses succeed. so back to the memorial services, his college friends and law school friends and high school friends and people he knew in saipan are talking to

each other. they do, they do realize that there's a couple of common themes in larry's life. one is he's very, very stubborn, and the other is he is a master at manipulating people to do what he wants them to do. and, um, this is really how larry eventually made his great fortune. he became a courier his last year of law school with a little outfit out of l.a. called mpa, and he would fly from san francisco to los angeles every evening after he picked up documents at insurance companies and banks in san francisco and the bay area. and then he would drop them off in l.a., spend the night at lax sleeping on chairs or wherever, pick up whatever needed to go to san francisco the next morning, take the earliest flight out and be back that afternoon in time to go to class. but he realizes there's a huge market for this because at the time it's really only the post office delivering mail and documents, and they're doing a very bad job of it. they're very slow, and they're

very unreliable. so the her after he graduates -- the summer after he graduates from bolt, he runs into the salesman from this little courier outfit. he's kind of a silver-tongued ladies' man, 55 years old, very smooth talker. and they decide they're going to start their own business and take advantage of this great demand for express couriers. he gets another guy, robert lynn, involved who's a real estate investor, and he's going to provide the money because dollcie and larry are pretty much broke. they incorporate in september of 1969, and lynn immediately drops out because they can't stand each other, they're complete opposites, and all they do is argue, and it's clear that this thing is just going to be a total disaster. which it is for the first year. they don't have any money. larry's the only person available to be a courier, so

he's living on coffee and methamphetamines and going back and forth between l.a. and honolulu, and he's either living on a porch, on a friend's couch or in a station wagon. he's dumpster diving for food some of the time, and they're just unable to really sign up the clients they need. they can't get insurance. but the idea is so strong and it's such a great, um, there's such a great demand for their product that eventually dollcie's magic begins to work, and they get bank of america, they get the federal reserve, they get madsen shipping lines, they get ibm, and suddenly it's just taking off because no one can believe that dhl can actually pick up their documents one afternoon, and the next morning before their office across the country or the pacific ocean is open, their documents are there. it's just mind blowing. you know, this is five years before fedex. so word gets around, and dhl

just starts to take off. and larry's got this kind of odd charisma that gets people to work for free and to get people to rally around the cause, and he carries chairman mao's little red book around with him, and he's just convinced he's a master at manipulating people, which he is. and in one year, their second year of business, sales go up a thousand percent. it's just taking off like crazy. but that attracts attention. and first it attracts the attention of the fbi because the fbi's hearing about all these people flying for free, and it sounds like maybe they're flying somebody they shouldn't be. so the fbi sends two with agents to figure out if this is a drug-running operation or something, and eventually the fbi agents become convinced and they become couriers because, you know, they can't believe what a great deal it is. dhl gets attacked by a much bigger outfit out of seattle, by the nixon administration that says they're an air carrier, then they're attacked by the

post office not just in the u.s., but around the world because they are doing something that is really considered illegal. the post office is supposed to have a monopoly on delivering mail. but larry just wins every time, and he starts to have this kind of uncanny knack for beating all of his competitors. so, um, by 1981, 12 years in, dhl's the fastest-growing company in the world, and larry is bored out of his mind. he does not want to run a company. he wants to be howard hughes, he wants to be behind the scenes, pulling strings. he does not want to be sitting in board meetings and sitting behind a desk and doing the typical things that a business marne would be required to do. -- businessman would be required to do. and he discovers this island called saipan which is very beautiful, but it's also a bizarrely magical place in that you get 95% of your federal income taxes rebated there. and larry just thinks this is the most amazing thing he's ever

heard about in his life. so he immediately move there is and goes about becoming a citizen. he buys these businesses, he runs for office and loses. but he eventually gets appointed as a supreme court justice on the island and gets to know all the politicians and offers up his legal services for free. which means that he can write the laws on banking and real estate and all of these other really fun things. that also happen to benefit him. and now he's coming under attack from the fbi again which sees him sort of insinuating himself into this commonwealth of the united states, and they see him stirring up the islander politicians against the u.s. the u.s. has this covenant relationship with saipan and the marianas where they're supposed to really maintain control, but larry doesn't want the feds coming in and auditing his tax returns or, you know, exercising

any authority over him. he wants, he wants their hands off of his island. so now he's got a new cause which is independence for the mariana islands, and, um, he's got new enemies. there's a guy named bill millard who runs a computer land who decides to move about saipan because he's heard about this 95% tax rebate. and he holds a press conference announcing that he's going to move computer land to saipan, take advantage of the tax break and not pay any this many taxes which drives larry crazy because larry wants to keep this all under wraps, and he knows it's going to attract the attention of the reagan administration and congress, and they're going to go crazy. um, so larry just stays up all night one night and rewrites the tax code so millard has to go away, which he does. in fact, millard becomes a tax fugitive and was just captured two months ago by the fbi after

25 years on the lam. he also mixes it up with the chairman of texas air, continental airlines and eastern airlines and the most-feared corporate raid or of his day. they go to battle, and larry ends up bringing lorenzo to his knees so well that he forces lorenzo to personally give him his ps1 pass which is the card that allows a ceo to fly on any airplane anywhere in first class even if someone has to be yanked out of the seat in order for them to do so. and larry just, once again, has this amazing ability to beat these much larger, um, adversaries for reasons that are elucidated in the book. eventually, larry attracts some other enemies including a local attorney who's more, more sort

of altruistic with the islanders' cause who maybe thinks larry's not quite who he appears to be, and maybe there's a lot more self-interest going on in larry's seduction of the politicians and buying all these businesses out there. and also the owner of a tv station out in guam who gives larry the, um, title king larry and sort of ridicules his pretending to be this great person who's just writing the laws for free but is actually someone with a nefarious mode of power over these people. and finally larry attracts the ire of the state department because they hear he's started to invest in vietnam which is illegal under the trading with enemies act. and -- which he was, actually. in 1991 about ten years after he got to saipan, larry had sort of become bore with the that, and vietnam had been a naturally attractive place for a guy like him because it was illegal for him to be there which larry

loved. he loved anything he wasn't supposed to do. and it was really virgin territory because americans weren't allowed there. and he had started going there, and it had to be so secret at the time that he actually was brought in the trunk of a car across the border because it was illegal for americans to, um, to do business. so when larry died, um, there were, there were some investigations including a grand jury that was looking into his activities in vietnam. but after he died, after the plane disappeared and some people still think he's alive, so i should say he disappeared, another investigation began, and that was of larry's sex life. now, there were a lot of rumors, and it's not difficult for rumors to spread on an island like saipan. he told a friend he had slept with over 250 virgins. he had told his law school professor who is now the dean of bolt hall that he had spent millions of dollars procuring virgins because he was terrified

of aids. he had told his surgeon and his wife, kind of a larry thing to do, that he, you know, just did this all the time, and he'd actually flown out the board of continental airlines of which he was the major shareholder to seat that many and manila and took some of them on a tour of his extracurricular activities explaining that he could tell girls were virgins if he took them into the shower and they knew how to use the shower because these girls were so poor that, obviously f they knew how to use indoor plumbing, they'd been in a hotel before or they'd been with a westerner before. why do the investigations of his sex life matter? well, larry's will -- although he was a lawyer and he was surrounded by lawyers -- was 11 pages long double-spaced, and all it really said was don't pay any taxes and set up a trust and give my money to medical research, preferably at the university of california.

so because there was no allowance for children, if you could prove that larry hillblom had a child or you were his child, you would inherit his estate which at the time included most of dhl and assets variously valued at close to a billion dollars. now the stage has been set for a battle between the state of california which thinks that it's going to get hundreds of millions of dollars for medical research and larry's friends who, in theory at least, want to honor his final will and testament and his wishes and a bunch of strippers and prostitutes from southeast asia and their very young children, one of whom was actually still in the womb, who under the law are entitled to take this man's estate and dhl which admits at the time, like, the nightmare she scenario for the company is that it will now be owned by, you

know, potentially a infant from southeast asia whose mother is an exotic dancer. [laughter] so that is the battle that his disappearance in the plane sets the stage for, and these lawyers who knew larry from saipan primarily start going to manila and other parts of the philippines and vietnam looking for children. so, you know, they make these pamphlets with larry's, these flyers with larry's photo on it that say if you've slept with this guy, call us. because, you know, if you got pregnant or you had a baby, you're worth a lot of money. and it turned out it's not that hard to find these women. and as well they find a woman who has a boy, and she files a paternity suit, and they find a couple of young girls in manila, one of whom is just 15, who was

14 at the time she was impregnated, and it becomes, it becomes a real battle to be fought in this tiny little courthouse on saipan in front of this former police officer who is now a judge. now, it's also a battle for larry's legacy. his family and friends don't want to believe or anytime that larry -- admit that larry was a pedophile and had this very prolific sex life, and they don't want, you know, his money to go to these women and their children who they think, clearly, well, larry never would have wanted them to have a dime. on the other hand, their attorneys for the children including johnnie cochran at one point who insist that the children are larry's legacy, and not only that, but he didn't change his will because he wanted them to be included, and he must have known, and his friends had tried to get him to change his will many times, and larry had said no.

so this was, in fact, larry's final little practical joke to set up a huge estate battle with these kids he'd fathered versus his old friends and family. this became a huge, huge battle. it was called the world cup of probate at the time. and there was a lot of talk about what larry would have wanted and what larry would have done. and larry's legacy. the irony was that he told his best friends that he really didn't care what happened after he died because he'd be dead. but the end of the probate i won't, i won't reveal. i will say, though, going back to the top of the conversation steve jobs has been compared to larry quite a bit now in the reviews, and i didn't realize how similar they were until i started reading more about jobs. they were both brilliant, they were both obsessed with technology. larry had actually created one of the first word processers in existence which a lot of people didn't know, it's still used in the middle east, the dhl-1000.

you know, they were both flawed but visionary revolutionary, and they were both anti-social men who also really had an interest in connecting the world. but while steve jobs' legacy, i think, is pretty well decided at this point, larry's continues to be a source of much debate and much, um, controversy. and maybe it is unresolvable, but maybe we'll resolve it tonight. [laughter] i don't know. with that, i'd love to take your questions and talk about king larry. >> um, if you say his legacy is up for debate, is there any thought as to what it is within saipan right now? >> yeah. saipan is really much like the rest of the country or the rest of the world in that, um, i went there, you know, to talk to, for

example, a woman, an attorney's wife, and she said this is the only place in the world where known -- the law library's named for a known pedophile. she was just beside herself about that. and, you know, understandably so. on the other hand, there's larry's friends there who think, well, you know, that was just larry. and during his lifetime i think it's worth mentioning that larry got away with a lot. and this was not a secret. it was an open secret. i mean, you have the board of continental airlines flying there and seeing him at these places. you had the bishop of saipan called larry his favorite heathen. you know, people were aware what was going on. and a lot of people knew that larry had a son. the first child was 11 years old, so that could have been around, and his mother would come to larry's house on saipan and bang on the windows at 3 a.m. and demand money, and his best friends would pay them off and make her go away, and then she'd come back next year and demand more money and scream and yell. so people were aware of what was going on.

and larry's certainly not the only man who indulged in that kind of activity, um n that part of the world. so he just did it a lot more. and it became a huge issue after his death because there was so much money involved. but, you know, there is a cultural acceptance of men sleeping with much younger women, and a cultural acceptance of polygamy and, you know, and illegitimate children this that part of the world that is not the case here. so if you're an american going to saipan, it was sort of a rude awakening to see the larry hillblom law library and hear people talk about larry and how great he was and, oh, larry, this and that. but if you were there and you accepted the culture, it wasn't as big of a deal. >> what happened to larry's vietnam holdings? investments there? >> larry's vietnam holdings, you

know, the take on larry as a businessman was with the exception of dhl that he was always 20 years ahead of his time. so he got into vietnam very early, and he wanted to. he wanted to be the first, and i think he really kind of got off on the fact that he was getting there in the trunk of a car, and he set up this holding company to disguise his ownership, and he was there, and the state department was going crazy about it, but he was going to outsmart them. you know, it became this sort of cat and mouse thing with larry. the great thing is it allowed him to buy some incredible properties in vietnam that some people say will never be purchased again. they're just incredible. the bad thing is he was 20 years ahead of hi r -- his time, so you had hotels he built where people in vietnam couldn't stay in them, they weren't allowed to stay, because they were scared they would try and cook in their rooms or do things that were fine in the local culture, but you couldn't have people, like, cooking in their $300 room at

the palace hotel. so the assets did not do well. he put in over $100 million before they were ready for business, and, um, they were sold a few years later for 15. so they lost about 90% of their value in five years. and during his lifetime they really can killed him. i mean, they, they were a huge drain on larry, and larry had set up his businesses in such a byzantine and such a complex and weird way it was almost like michael jackson where he was worth a lot more dead than alive because there was just no way to untangle everything that he'd created and support an investment like vietnam. so, you know, some people speculate that he staged his death because the vietnamese were coming after him, and they, you know, they were very upset that he was late on his payments and so forth. but it was a disaster, basically.

>> how did you get interest inside his story? >> i read about hillblom's, the probate in "the wall street journal" in 1997. there was an article called air freight, the strange life and bizarre death of the shipping magnate or something. there was a front page, above-the-fold article, and what this journalist had done was go to vietnam and many nil la and saipan and just -- manila and saipan and just started interviewing people. and it, you know, portrayed this completely bizarre human being. i mean, he was germ phobic, he was very wealthy, but he drove this old honda civic with rusted-out floor boards and dirty t-shirts and flip-flops, and he would show up to congress in, like, ripped jeans and a surf offing shirt and flip-flops. and he was just a totally bizarre individual, and yet this reporter just going to manila for a few days, you know, finds three of his kids or three kids who said that they were larry's.

and it was just, you know, kind of fascinating not only, like, why would this guy move to saipan if dhl is becoming hugely successful, like, would mark zuckerberg move to tonga next week and start up an espresso café? it was sort of like that. the fastest-growing company in the world. he's becoming super rich, and he moves to a little island and becomes a bartender? there's something very weird and compelling about that story and finding out who this guy was. >> so, clearly, dhl started in the u.s., the first routes were -- >> right. >> california and honolulu, what not. larry took on the post office, like you said, and won. um, and yet dhl is not really much of a player in the u.s. market. >> with right. >> it was founded