The Fish That Ate the Whale (33 page)

Samuel Zemurray died on November 30, 1961. He was eighty-four years old. His fortune was estimated at $30 million, half of which was donated, per his instruction, to the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans. The rest went to his heirs, to his causes, and to the endowment of the Zemurray Foundation, which is still giving grants. His obituary was carried on the AP wire: “Samuel Zemurray, former president of the United Fruit Company, who came to the United States as a penniless Russian immigrant and accumulated a $30,000,000 fortune selling bananas, died here last night of Parkinson's disease,” it read. “In the banana belt of the Caribbean, Sam Zemurray was known as ‘the fish that swallowed the whale.'”

He was buried in Metairie Cemetery—you drive past it as you head into the city from the airport—beside his wife, son, and granddaughter Anne. It's a storied cemetery, where Zemurray lies among the most colorful figures in the history of the city. William Claiborne, the first governor of Louisiana; Richard Taylor, the son of President Zachary Taylor and a hero of the Mexican and Civil wars; Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy; Mel Ott, one of the great sluggers in baseball history. Being in this ground, among these famous dead, feels like a final acceptance of a man who was never accepted in any of the clubs, nor welcomed in society, a man who was taunted by cries of “Sam the Banana Man” as he pushed his ripes through the slums of Mobile.

 

23

Fastest Way to the Street

After Zemurray's death, United Fruit seemed like a man without a mission, wandering from here to there, having suffered a blow to the brain. The big problem, the problem that caused so many others (Panama disease), was finally solved by Standard Fruit, which took the initiative in U.F.'s lost years of overthrow and consent decree. The disease was not cured but was made irrelevant by the introduction of a banana called the Cavendish, which grows wild in Southeast Asia. Though inferior to the Big Mike in many ways—it's neither as tasty, nor as big, nor as hardy—the Cavendish is unaffected by Panama disease. It has a much higher yield, too. A Cavendish rhizome produces twice as many fingers as a Big Mike, meaning the banana companies could operate on half as much land, with obvious political implications.

A. J. Chute, a scientist who worked for U.F. before going to Standard Fruit, began to experiment with the Cavendish in the 1950s. Standard shipped the first Cavendish stems in 1953, but these reached the market bruised. Whereas the Big Mike was tough and could be stored on the deck of a ship, the Cavendish was fragile. Which is why, in the 1950s, Standard Fruit introduced the banana box. I don't want to talk too much about this—a box is a box—but it was a revolutionary development in the trade. It changed the way bananas were sorted, stacked, and shipped. Not inventing the banana box was an embarrassment for U.F. The company had lost its edge. “In place of the innovations that marked its early years, the character of the company became imitative,” explained Thomas McCann. “It merely repeated earlier moves and tactics. The company had lost every semblance of invention. In the areas of production, sales and transportation, as in politics, United Fruit was doing business at the same old stand, but in fifty years the neighborhood had changed beyond recognition.” By the early 1960s, Standard Fruit was shipping only the Cavendish. In 1962, United Fruit followed suit. The last Big Mike was sold in America in April 1965, and presumably eaten soon thereafter.

United Fruit struggled under the weight of its own history, its own image. Once considered among the most enlightened corporations in America, it came to be seen as one of the worst. Backward. Racist. Retrograde. In November 1969, the U.F. offices at Pier 3 were bombed by radicals of the Weatherman variety. Their complaint was the Vietnam War, which had nothing to do with United Fruit, but that did not matter to the bombers. U.F. had transcended its business and become a symbol of the System. That same year, Tulane Students for a Democratic Society issued a manifesto demanding the school divest of any money given it by Zemurray. “There is every reason to believe,” reads the crazed document, “that the William Gause who appeared on campus Nov. 7, 1967, recruiting for the CIA is the same William Gause who was UFCo's Southern Passenger Traveling Agent in the 1930s.”

In the 1970s, Pier 3 itself was destroyed. Torn up by giant machines and dumped into the Hudson River, it became part of the landfill that made ground for the World Trade Center. Thomas McCann remembers walking though the building before it was demolished. Zemurray's office was just as the old man left it, a shrine filled with ghosts. “He was monumental, one of the greatest people I ever met,” McCann told me, “and his furniture was huge, too. Enormous. I asked what would happen to it. They said it would be dumped into the river. I asked if I could have the desk. They were sore as hell. The thing weighed a ton. But they did it. They put it on a truck and brought it to Boston, and I've worked on it ever since.”

*   *   *

On September 24, 1969, someone began buying stock in United Fruit. By the end of the day, 733,000 shares had been purchased, the third-largest transaction in the history of the New York Stock Exchange to that point. At first, no one knew the identity of the buyer, though his purchase made him the owner of the company. The next morning, he called Boston to introduce himself. His name was Eli Black.

Black was a Polish immigrant descended from ten generations of rabbis and was a rabbi himself. He led a congregation on Long Island for three years, before quitting the pulpit, changing his name from Blachowitz, and enrolling in Columbia Business School. He took a job on Wall Street after he graduated and made millions in investment banking. He was forty-eight when he purchased United Fruit. He merged the company with others he already owned and called the conglomerate United Brands, which he ran from an office in the Pan Am Building above Grand Central Station in New York. He was touchy about his previous life as a religious leader. When McCann mentioned Black's background to a reporter, Black took him aside and said, “Forget the rabbi business.”

Black paid around $540 million for United Fruit, which many suggested was far too much. (He overpaid, according to experts, by perhaps $200 million.) He must have had plans to overhaul the company, add value, resell it, but he was like a man who has caught an anvil. Down they went together. According to McCann, the company lost $24 million in 1971. Black slashed budgets, sold land, cut divisions. In 1973, OPEC embargoed oil to the United States, driving up United Fruit's shipping costs, further cutting into the company's profits. Several of the nations of the isthmus—emulating OPEC—then formed a cartel of banana-producing nations called UPEB (Union of Banana Exporting Countries). Members pledged to tax the banana companies a dollar per box. It would destroy United Fruit. Black made his case to leaders of the member states, paying special attention to the president of Honduras, Oswaldo López Arellano. It was a bleak time for the storied company.

On Monday morning, February 3, 1975, Eli Black filled his briefcase with heavy books, told his driver to take him to the Pan Am Building, rode the elevator to the forty-fourth floor, locked his office door, removed his overcoat, hat, and scarf, smashed a window with his briefcase, cleaned up the shards of broken glass, tossed his briefcase through the broken window, then followed it out. The police said he was in the air for six seconds. The towers of Park Avenue sped past, the concrete rose to meet him. He was traveling a hundred miles per hour when he hit the street. According to a report written by Detective John Duffy, “the head had been split, it went from front to back, right down the middle.” He landed in rush-hour traffic. A beat cop bitched to a reporter on the scene—his words can stand as a critique of the banana men in general—“It's a hell of a thing to do. Jumpers don't care. They don't think of anyone down below.”

No one could make sense of the suicide. Why would he do it? Eli Black seemed wealthy, popular, loved. More than five hundred people attended his funeral. The eulogy was given by Rabbi Leonard Rosenfeld, who had flown in from Jerusalem. “How many persons pushed Eli to a desperate option?” the rabbi asked. “How many contributed to his untimely tragedy—and who called on Eli to choose the wrong door?”

The mystery was resolved that April when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges against United Brands, which, according to the complaint, paid the president of Honduras $1.25 million to reduce the banana tax and destroy the cartel, with another $1.25 million to be paid later. “Black knew he had fallen far short of success in every area that mattered to him,” wrote Thomas McCann. “The former rabbi was embroiled in bribery and corruption. The great achievement of his business lifetime, United Brands, was struggling to stay afloat in a sea of debt. His directors were in revolt, his management had lost respect for him, his friends had deserted him, his personal finances were at least as bad as those of the company, his ability to win people's confidence disappeared, and he had nowhere left to turn.” The scandal, which came to be known as Bananagate, drove the president of Honduras from office. Trading of United Brands was suspended for a week on the New York Stock Exchange. The share price plummeted when it resumed, hitting a low not seen since Zemurray made his trip to Boston in 1932. The company admitted wrongdoing to the SEC and agreed to pay a $14,000 fine. $14,000! Eli Black killed himself for what, in the world of bananas, seemed like a minor bit of skulduggery, business as usual on the isthmus.

That's the end of United Fruit. I mean, yes, more happened, and happens still. The company bounced from owner to owner. After posting a $200 million loss in 1983, it was taken over by Carl Lindner, a billionaire investor who began his career in his father's ice-cream shop. Lindner moved the company to Cincinnati and changed its name to Chiquita Brands International, Inc. In 2001, the company declared bankruptcy. It came out of it a year later. Lindner had retired by then. Ice-cream men get old, too. More recently, Chiquita was accused of paying protection money to FARC, the Colombian terrorist organization, buying immunity for its executives, endangering the nonprotected executives of other companies. But for me, the story of U.F. ended when the rabbi hit Park Avenue.

 

Epilogue

The story of Sam Zemurray is the story of New Orleans. It was booming when he found it and it's foundered since he died. It's a body without a soul. It's a skinny man in fat-man pants. The buildings are grand, the streets are endless, but the people are gone. According to the last census, the city has fewer than three hundred thousand inhabitants—a 40 percent drop since its peak in the 1950s. No longer the world strider and shipbuilder, no longer the capital of commerce and Queen of the Gulf Ports, no longer the preferred destination of pirates, no longer the oasis of Kentucky woodsmen, it's been mummified, pickled, turned into a diorama that tells the story of its own existence. It lives on its memories, tearing off and selling pieces of its skin. Run-down, dilapidated, depleted, and yet still wonderful. Because no other city in America looks like it. Because its houses are haunted and its people are strange and its sunsets are bloody and its waters are black and its music is madness and its food is incredible. Because it was once inhabited by mercenaries and parrot kings and machine gunners and the greatest banana man the world has ever known. If New Orleans was New York, Samuel Zemurray would be John D. Rockefeller. What happens when you attach your legacy to a city and that city dies?

Saddest of all is the United Fruit Building on St. Charles Avenue north of Canal Street. You can see the entrance from a passing car. The doorway is arched, the stone etched with filigree, a frieze of tropical plenty. It's the sort of entrance that was built when this city was sure of its future and U.F. was king, the first of the truly global concerns, with a hundred ships and a million acres and a hundred thousand employees. But when you step through the arch, you find nothing but a shabby foyer, a building dumb to its own glory, its rooms rented to foreign consulates, nondescript law firms, a bank. When I went into the bank and looked at the ceiling—there was once a Diego Rivera–like mural there that showed a banana steamer coasting a palm-fringed bay—the teller seemed irritated.

“What are you looking at?”

“I wanted to see if the United Fruit mural was still up there.”

“What's United Fruit?”

Sam Z, Sam the Banana Man, El Amigo, the Big Russian, the Gringo—he was not an easy person, nor is his biography without controversy. To some, it's the story of a great man, a pioneer in business, a hero. To others, it's the story of a pirate, a conquistador who took without asking.

What does it say about America?

It's a question I have asked myself repeatedly as I researched, interviewed, traveled, and wrote. In the end, I decided that his career is the history of the nation, the promise and the betrayal of that promise, experienced in the span of a single life. It starts a hundred years ago, when America was a rising power, and ends the day before yesterday, with the confidence of the people sapped. It might look bad but, as Zemurray understood, as long as you're breathing, the end remains to be written. Sam's defining characteristic was his belief in his own agency, his refusal to despair. No story is without the possibility of redemption; with cleverness and hustle, the worst can be overcome. I can't help but feel, after all the talk of America's decline, that we would do well by emulating Sam Zemurray—not the brutality or the conquest, but the righteous anger that sent the striver into the boardroom of laughing elites, waving his proxies, shouting, “You gentlemen have been fucking up this business long enough. I'm going to straighten it out.”

 

A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments

In writing these pages, I have drawn on hundreds of books, newspaper articles, magazine stories, interviews, government documents, and corporate reports, as well as less conventional sources. Especially helpful was the work of the beat writers and war reporters who covered these events as they unfolded, including writers from
The New York Times
,
The New Orleans Statesman
and
The Daily Picayune
,
The Times-Picayune, The Wall Street Journal
,
Time
,
Forbes
,
Fortune
, and
Life
. Also helpful were unpublished dissertations archived at various libraries, as well as diaries, collections of letters, and personal correspondence at Tulane University and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The letters of Lee Christmas were especially illuminating on the early years in Honduras. Also thanks to people at great research institutions, public and private, where material relating to these years is collected: the Library of Congress; Harvard Library, which has a collection of United Fruit photos; the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University, which keeps the entire run of
Unifruco
, United Fruit's magazine, regularly published for more than forty years; the Securities and Exchange Commission's digital archive, where I found documents concerning antitrust investigations of United Fruit and the banana trade, as well as legal filings concerning Bananagate; the archive of the U.S. Congress, where I found transcripts from subcommittee hearings on the proposed “banana tax”; the U.S. Army websites; and the Ellis Island archive. Through the U.S. Customs Department and
Ancestry.com
, I was able to trace the comings and goings of Sam and Sarah and look at nearly every passport and manifest filled out by the Banana Man.