northern islands and the other was larry, better known as the agent dhl. the plane was billing to one of the northernmost island. no one was really quite sure why interested in building a resort there. regardless, the plane never returned, and this was not a particularly big surprise because he was known to buy really crappy airplanes and to not maine sen. in fact one of the islands they flew over only had a crash, an airplane that was dressed a year-and-a-half before and nearly killed himself. so a number of his friends had declined to make the trip that morning, and no one was terribly shocked that this plan had also gone down. however, it was a real shark he

was suddenly gone. he arrived 15 years before in become a larger-than-life character. he had bought the bank, the airline, the television and radio stations. t-bill dozens of businesses. he was very well-known. the myth us that was incompatible with and being dead but they found the two other bodies, the pilot and the speaker of the house. his body was never recovered. so this further this sense of this belief. but they had to presumed dead. losses seat. a few days later hundreds of people flocked to california to pay their last respects. no, a little town in the central valley of california just south of selma, though capital of the world.

a little beach farming town. hundreds of people including members of the saudi royal family and ceos of major corporations below billionaires' as well as normal citizens descended on the tiny little lutheran church to pay their respects. they are really surprised. but this tech to find out is that he was not at all heavyset u.s. he had of people that his father was a bank robber who was electrocuted sank one. there until the new is the captain of the football team. they find that he wasn't. 130 bell linebacker got his in contact lenses not done so frequently. the picture in this senior yearbook, the football team on

their hands and knees searching for his contact lenses. they find out he wasn't this chalk and ladies' man and a brilliant charismatic person that they assumed he would be, but he was actually a very awkward kid who was raised in the church and abscessed with horse use. this is one of his friends told me, somewhere out there. that was there impression of larry. he further this impression, his best friend, he was going to make a lot of money and live far away and never talked to him again. which is best friend took offense to. he just thought that this was a totally acceptable thing to say. he told them he would make a lot of money. catholics don't get divorced. he did not want to get half of his fortune to a catholic girl or to a woman. he told him he was to be an

actor. like everything from his eyes again steady have this man manipulated and hypnotized people with his eyes. he also verified -- vilify his mother. these wonderful things that his mother would do for him. she actually drove to law school his first year because he wanted to keep his job at the cannery in kings for which is about three and half hour's drive back and forth. he would say, she did all these great things. this very odd way of talking to people. in 1967, hotbed of the anti-war movement and the feminism movement and the sexual liberation movement. his eccentricity continued.

he is anti the anti-war movement , ridiculed the protesters saying that more people die on the highways in car crashes than in vietnam joy to work. he ridicules jane fonda and john baez and thinks it is ridiculous anyone would care what an actress or a singer thanks. and in class he is totally inscrutable. as professors can understand and because he believes the law should be a function of business . was to be structured to help businesses succeed. so back to the memorial service. his college and law school friends and high-school friends, people in your talking to each other. they do realize that there are a couple of common themes. very stubborn. the other is that a master at manipulating people to do what he was the to do. this is really how he made his great fortune.

he would drop them off and l.a. to less than the lead lax he realizes there is a huge market for this because of the time. really only the post office delivering mail and documents. during a very bad job of it to my very slow and very unreliable this summer after he graduates he runs into the salesman, a carrier of fit, kind of us overtimed ladies' man for 55 years old. very smooth talker. they decide they're going to start their own business and take advantage of this great

demand for express carriers. he gets another guy involved who is a real-estate investor demand is going to provide the money. they are both pretty much broke. incorporated september 1969. he drops out. they can't stand each other. complete opposites and all the dew is argue that this thing is going to be a total disaster. which it is for the first year. they don't have any money. larry is the only person available to be a career, so he is living on coffee and methamphetamines and going back and forth between l.a. and honolulu. he's either living on a porch on a friend's couch or in the station might. he is tempter diving for food, and there are just unable to release sign of the clients they need. cannot get insurance. the idea is so strong in such a

great demand for their product eventually the magic begins to work and they get bank of america, the federal reserve, shipping lines, ibm. suddenly it is just taking off because no one can believe that dhl can actually pick up the documents one afternoon and the next morning before the office across the country or cross the pacific ocean is open the documents are there. it's just mind blowing. this is five years before fedex. so word gets around. dhl and just starts to take off. and larry has this kind of on charisma that gets people to work for free and to get people to rally around the cause. he carries a little red book around with him. he is convinced he is a master at manipulating people, which he is. one year, the second your business sales go up

1,000 percent. just taking off like crazy. but that attracts attention. first to the tracks the attention of the fbi because it is hearing about all these people flying for free commanded thousand maybe there find something they shouldn't be. so the fbi sends to agents out to figure out if this is a drug ring operation is something. and image of the fbi agents become convinced and then they become carriers. ..

>> larry is bored out of his mind. 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 businessman would be required to do. and he discovers this island in the western pacific which is very beautiful, but also a bizarrely magical place in which you get 95% of federal income taxes rebated every larry just think this is the most amazing thing that he has ever heard about in his life. so he immediately moves their and thinks about becoming a citizen. he buys a business and runs for office and losers, but he eventually gets appointed as supreme a supreme court justice on the island against the politicians and offers his legal

services for free, which means that he could talk about the laws of real estate in all these other fun things that happen to benefit him. now he is coming under attack from the fbi, which he insinuated himself into this commonwealth of the united states. and they see him stirring up the island of politicians against the u.s. the u.s. has this relationship where they are supposed to really maintain control, but larry doesn't realize that the fed is coming in and auditing his tax return. he wants their hands off of his island. he has new enemies. there is a guy that and it is named bill villard who has one of the fastest-growing companies

in the world. he has heard about this 95% tax rebate. and he holds a press conference announcing that he's going to move to the island and not pay income taxes, which is really crazy because larry wants to keep this under wraps and he knows that it will attract the reagan administration and congress and they will go crazy. so he stays up late all night. he also mix it up with the most feared corporate leader of his day when folks want to buy micronesia, which is the local air carrier there. larry ends up bringing lorenzo

to his knees that he forces lorenzo to personally give him his past, which is the card that allows the ceo on any airplane, even if someone has to be a senator intent of your seat, to go and find her place. he had this amazing ability to beat these much larger adversaries. for reasons that are related in the book. eventually he attracts a local attorney. he is more altruistic with the islanders costs, and maybe there is a lot more self interest going on in their seduction of the politicians and vinyl these businesses out there. also, the owner of a tv station in guam who gives larry the

title, king larry. someone in a nefarious mode with a great deal of power over these people. finally, they attract the state department because they started to invest in vietnam. when she was in 1991 about 10 years afterwards, he became bored with that. vietnam had been a naturally attractive place for him. it was illegal to be be there, because he looked you of anything that he wasn't supposed to do. it was really virgin territory because americans were not allowed there. he started going there and had to be so secretive at the time that he was actually brought in by truck or car to the border because it was illegal for americans to do business.

so when larry died, there were some investigations, including a grand jury that was looking at his accounts in vietnam. another investigation began and that was in larry's sex life. there were a lot of rumors. larry had told people, he told the french that he slept with over 250 virgins. but he had told his law school professor that he had spent millions of dollars giving virgins because he was terrified of aids. he had a surgeon come over while the rest of us to take a girl that he -- you know, he just did this all the time and would actually take the border continental airlines and send some of them on a tour of

extracurricular activities coming spring that he could tell if girls were virgins if you took him into the shower and they knew how to use the shower because these girls were so poor that obviously they knew how to use indoor plumbing, they had been in the hotel before. or they had been with the westerner before. why did the investigations of his sex life matter? his will is a lawyer and account as a lawyer was saying don't pay taxes and preferably at the university of california. did my research to them. because there was no allowance for children. if you could prove that larry hillbom had a child, you would inherit the state, which at the time which was most of dhl, and close to a billion dollars.

now the stage has been set and larry's friend, who in theory wants to honor his final will and testament and wishes. and a bunch of prostitutes from southeast asia and their very young children. one of whom is actually in the room. who under the law, are entitled to take this man to state and dhl -- so potentially there is a child whose mother is an exotic dancer. that is what the stage is set for. these lawyers knew him and started going to manila. in other parts of the coast,

looking for children. they make these pamphlets with larry's photo on it that says, if you luck with this guy, call us. if you got pregnant and had a baby, you are worth a lot of money. and it turned out it's not that hard to find these women. there was a woman who has a boy and filed a paternity suit. they find a couple of young girls in manila. one of them was just 15 years old. fourteen at the time she was impregnated. and it becomes a battle fought with this former police officer who is now his judge. it is also a battle for larry's legacy. his family and friends don't

want to believe that larry was a pedophile and have this very prolific sex life. they don't want his money to go to these women and their children who larry would've never wanted them to have a dime. on the other hand, attorneys for the children, including johnnie cochran, who insists that the children are his legacy. not only that, but he didn't change as well because he wanted them to be included and he must have known and his friends had tried to get him some changes done and he didn't. this was his final practical joke to set up a battle over these kids he fathered, versus his old friends. and also family. this became a huge battle. there is a lot of talk about what larry would've wanted and

what he would've done. the irony was that he told his best friends that he really didn't care what happened after he died because he would be dead. but the end of the probate, i won't reveal -- i will say that going back to the top of the conversation, steve jobs has been compared to larry quite a bit. and i didn't realize how similar they were until i started reading more about steve jobs. they were both brilliant. larry had created one of the first word processors in existence from which a lot of people didn't know. they were both flawed, but visionary, revolutionary. they were both antisocial man who also really have an interest in connecting the world. steve jobs legacy was pretty well decided at this point. larry continues to be a source of much debate and controversy.

maybe we will resolve it tonight, i don't know. with that, i will take your questions and talk about king larry. >> [inaudible question] is there any thought to be [inaudible] >> it is like the rest of the country or world. and that i went there and talk to, for example, a woman and she said this is the only place in the world where the law letter content library is named for a pedophile. understandably, she was upset. on the other hand, friends think that was just larry. during his lifetime, i think it's worth mentioning that larry got away with a lot.

this was not a secret. it was was an open secret. you have the border continental airlines seeing him at these places. you have the bishop of saipan call him his favorite heathen. people were aware what was going on. a lot of people knew that larry had a son. the first child was 11 years old. his mother would come to larry's house and then on the windows at 3:00 a.m. and demand money. then she would come back next year. people were aware of what was going on. larry was not the only man to indulge in a kind of activity in a part of the world. he just did it a lot more. it became a huge issue after so much money involved. but there is a cultural acceptance of men sleeping with

much younger women. a cultural acceptance of polygamy and, you know, the legitimate children. it is a rude awakening to see the larry hillbolm lob content library. if you accepted the culture and you were there, it wasn't really that big of a deal. >> [inaudible question] >> larry's vietnam holdings, to the take on larry as a businessman from a with the acceptance of dhl company was always 20 years ahead of his time. he got into vietnam early. he wanted to. he wanted to be the first and i think he really got off on the fact that he was getting there in the trunk of a car and set up his holding company and he was

there and the state department was going crazy and he was going to outsmart them. you know, it became this cat and mouse thing with larry. the great thing is that it allowed him to buy incredible properties in vietnam. some people say will never be purchased again. the bad thing is his 20 he is 20 years ahead of the time. you have hotels that he built, for example, where people couldn't stay because they were scared they would do things that would, you know, would be found in the local culture. but you can have people in a 300-dollar room at the palace hotel. he put in over $100 million before they were ready for business and sold a few years later for 15. they lost about 90% of their value. 90% of their value in five

years. 90% really killed him. there was a huge strain on larry and he had set up such a complex in a weird way, it was almost like michael jackson. he was a lot more work dead than alive. there was no way to untangle everything that he created. and support an investment like vietnam. some people speculate that the vietnamese were coming after him. they were very upset that he was late on his payment and so forth. it was a disaster, basically. >> how did you get interested in his stories? >> i read about larry hillbolm's obeyed and wall street journal in 1997. there was an article about the strange life of a shipping magnet or something. something about the article in

frontpage, what this journalist had done is go to vietnam and manila and go to fight in and start interview people -- he was german public and very wealthy, his honda civic had busted up or blowers and dirty t-shirts and flip-flops. ripped jeans and a certain shirt. he was just a totally bizarre individual. and yet, this reporter -- he finds three kids that are said to be larry's. it was just, you know, kind of fascinating. not only why would this guy become hugely successful. would mark zuckerberg moved to

tonganoxie can start up an espresso café? this is someone becoming superrich, and he moves to a little island to become a a bartender? there was something weird and compelling about telling that story and finding out who this guy is. >> clearly, it started in the united states. larry took on office, like you said. and yet, dhl is not really very clear on this market. why is that? >> well, there's a number of reasons untrained dhl didn't succeed like they did overseas. one is that larry really took an interest in the u.s. market and he was not necessarily a great businessman. he was terrible with details a terrible manager. in the international growth was handled by other people.

larry had all these crazy ideas about everything. and the u.s. was sort of his incubator. they definitely pay a price for that. you know, larry hired a grocery store executive and then he hired larry roberts that invented packet switching, which was a disaster. they lost ground. when fedex came in a few years later with their own airplane, they ate their lunch. they took dhl leiby and what they would've had in the u.s. then the u.s. cities to speaking gateways for their international business. but a lot of people don't realize. >> thank you very much for coming. i appreciate it.

>> tonight in prime time on booktv, wall street journal reporter kiersten brian talks about her book, the lost bank, detailing the collapse of washington mutual in 2008. >> the crisis, they say it happens slowly and then quickly. it was absolutely the case. it began to get very bad. all other issues internally, internal controls had just fallen apart. at one point they were making mortgages on 12 different systems. they had grown so fast that there was just no control internally. ..