Background and career
Larry Lee Hillblom (May 12, 1943 – May 21, 1995) was an American businessman and, alongside Adrian Dalsey and Robert Lynn, co-founded the shipping company DHL. After his disappearance in 1995, his estate paid $360 million to four impoverished children whom he had fathered as a result of "sex safari" trips in Southeast Asian countries, where he allegedly had sex with teenaged virgins.
Larry Hillblom was born on May 12, 1943, and raised in Kingsburg, California. During his youth, he went to the Concordia Lutheran Church and attended Kingsburg High School. He attended Reedley College and Fresno State, eventually earning a law degree at the University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and briefly clerked for San Francisco based attorney Melvin Belli.
In December 1969, Matson Navigation Co. introduced new container ships (Hawaiian Enterprise Class) into its Hawaii cargo service. They were considerably faster than the older ships they replaced, and they saved several days off the crossing time from the US west coast to Hawaii. But with these faster vessels, the shipping documents could not be delivered by U.S. Postal Service to their Hawaii customers before the arrival of the goods. Hillblom approached Matson and told them that he could get their documents delivered in time. He did so by purchasing tickets for airline passengers who could take 350 pounds (160 kg) of accompanied baggage, and sending the Matson shipping documents with them. Other Hawaii companies with time-sensitive documents learned about and started to use the service. In 1969 Hillblom co-founded DHL; the company was later transformed into a general air courier, and Hillblom's wealth expanded to several billion dollars. In the 1980s he moved to Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) where he started several businesses and development projects in Hawaii, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
In Vietnam, he spent US$40 million to restore the Dalat Palace Hotel and its golf course. Other investments included the Novotel Dalat, Novotel Phan Thiet, Ocean Dunes Golf Course, and the Riverside Apartments outside Ho Chi Minh City. The investment was made via an overseas holding company to avoid an American embargo against Vietnam. The Dalat Palace Hotel opened in 1995 under Hillblom's and his Vietnamese partners' ownership with management personnel provided by Accor.
In 1993, while flying his vintage plane near Saipan, Hillblom's plane crashed. Due to his serious injuries, he had facial reconstructive surgery.
Hillblom was an aircraft enthusiast and owned a number of vintage planes. His seaplane crashed on May 21, 1995, on a flight from Pagan Island to Saipan. The bodies of the pilot, Robert Long, and a business partner were found, but Hillblom's body was never recovered. Around a quarter of the plane was recovered.
