King Larry by James D. Scurlock

Author:James D. Scurlock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Like most enemies, Theodore “Ted” Mitchell began as a friend. “When he arrived on the island,” the attorney Mike Dotts tells me over lunch at a beachside café not far from the courthouse, “Mitchell was probably the most prominent attorney on Saipan, and he was Larry’s favorite.” Dotts is a junior partner in Bob O’Connor’s law firm. During the several years before Hillblom’s presumed death, he was Larry’s personal attorney and a board member of the Bank of Saipan and UMDA, where Mitchell had been general counsel during the Continental Airlines war. “None of us liked him,” Dotts continues, “but Larry always stood by him. He’d say, ‘If you were accused of murder, who would you want representing you? Some pinstriped lawyer or Ted?’”

Dotts rolls his eyes as he takes a bite of his mahimahi burger. He’s a slight man who, like O’Connor, moved here from California seeking a more adventurous life. He had originally interviewed for a position at the CNMI Legislature until being told of an eccentric multimillionaire who needed help suing the federal government. Dotts was game, though initially he was more of a personal assistant—picking up the morning pastries and coffee, overseeing Hillblom’s failed rodeo-brothel-turned-drive-in-movie-theater, paying Josephine her monthly stipend, and fending off bill collectors, of whom there were many, since Hillblom cleared both his mail and messages by dumping them into the trash bin, unread. Another attorney who worked for Larry tells me that Hillblom referred to Dotts as “the gerbil,” but he was eventually entrusted with Hillblom’s personal checkbooks as well as some of his thorniest problems, the thorniest of which was Ted Mitchell.

In July 1991 a victorious Mitchell walked out of the CNMI Supreme Court grasping a momentous ruling. Citing a paragraph of the Commonwealth’s Constitution that prohibits nonnatives from owning land, the court on which Larry Hillblom sometimes sat had just invalidated any real estate sales to companies that had been formed by nonnative investors, even if they technically met the 51 percent native ownership requirement. The ruling was a watershed for Mitchell, who had sued Japan Airlines, the owner of Saipan’s largest and newest resort, the Nikko, on behalf of the islanders who had originally owned the property underneath the hotel. The islanders technically had sold the property to an entity called Realty Trust Corporation, but Mitchell alleged that RTC was a fraud—a “resultant trust”—that was secretly controlled by nonnatives, i.e., people with less than 25 percent native blood. Under Article XII, the paragraph of the CNMI Constitution that prevented nonnatives from owning real estate, Mitchell argued, resultant trusts like RTC were unconstitutional.

For months, Mitchell had fought virtually alone against a huge Japanese corporation and its large law firm—Carlsmith Ball—and now he had won. And, as everyone knew, the outlawing of “resultant trusts” would transform the island. Virtually all of Saipan’s prime beachfront real estate was controlled by foreign or American investors, including Mitchell’s old boss, Hillblom. By turning Article XII into an absolute, the Supreme Court had just opened the

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