The Billionaire Who Wasn't (3 page)

Japan was in ruins after the war, but life was not hard for a young serviceman. “Duty there was considered a sweet tour by American soldiers,” wrote David Halberstam.
¹
“American dollars went far, the Japanese women were friendly and ordinary enlisted men lived like aristocrats.” Staff Sergeant Feeney, however, spent a lot of spare time learning Japanese to improve his intelligence skills. He took lessons at the U.S. military language school and read Japanese comic books, much to the amusement of Japanese children.

When the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, Ashiya Air Base became a staging post for F-80 fighter jets and C-119 planes that dropped supplies to U.S. soldiers on the front line. Feeney's tour was extended from three to four years. He wasn't sent to the fighting, but his desk job turned more serious. His squadron's task was to intercept radio communications used by the Russians flying sorties over the Sea of Japan. Soviet pilots would pick up the frequency of aircraft the United States sent up from Ashiya. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union would become a local hot war if a line in the sky was crossed, and the American planes could only go so far before entering hostile air space. One new pilot, just out of his teens, flew across the line for five minutes, enough time for the Russians to scramble. His plane was shot down and he was killed, along with two Russian language specialists on the flight who had been on the shift with Feeney two nights before. He heard their screams in his earphones. When he returned to the United States, Feeney visited the family of one of his fallen comrades in the Bronx district of New York. He didn't know what to say. “They were dead because this guy didn't follow orders which were very clear—don't go over the line.”

Throughout his four years of service in Japan, Feeney did not return home once. He was on the other side of the world, and there was a war on. “When he called at Christmas, we'd all sit in the kitchen and wait for the phone call,” his sister Arlene remembered. They would accept charges. “We didn't have the money, so it was always—‘Don't talk too long!'” His family never saw him in person wearing a uniform. However, the
Elizabeth
Daily Journal
published a photograph of Sergeant Feeney and Corporal Costello, both in U.S. Air Force uniform, hair parted and Bryl-Creamed, enjoying a three-day furlough together in Tokyo. Costello was less fortunate than Feeney. He was sent into combat in Korea as a ground radio operator, though he survived the war and fathered a large family. The caption quoted Feeney saying, “It takes more than a war to keep Jack and me from getting together.”

In his letters home, Feeney wrote that he was not allowed to disclose what he was doing. “Maybe that's where he got some of the secrecy from,” said Arlene. “When he got out and came home he'd be sitting there doing that”—she rapidly tapped the kitchen table—“
tap, tap, tap:
then he'd say, ‘I'm sorry, Morse code, used it in the service.' I don't know whether he ‘thought' in it, but he kept on doing it every once in a while, going like this,
tap, tap, tap.”

CHAPTER 2

The Sandwich Man

While still in Japan in the spring of 1952, Chuck Feeney began to think of how he might take advantage of the GI scholarship he was entitled to after his discharge. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1944 GI Bill of Rights, money was made available to returning World War II veterans to go on to higher education, and the scheme was renewed for Korean War veterans. It changed the lives of many Americans who served in the armed forces, such as Donald R. Keough, who went on to run Coca-Cola, and Bob Dole, who became a U.S. senator. Skip Downey suspected that his old school friend had his eye on a GI scholarship all along. The family didn't have the money to send him to college, but “in his mind he
knew
he was going to college and he went to the Air Force to be eligible for the GI Bill.”

Feeney went to the base library and began to read up on universities. He found an article in the
Readers' Digest,
entitled “A School for Cooks,” which featured Cornell University's School of Hotel Management. “I sort of thought, I could do that, I could look after people.” The course offered an outlet for his entrepreneurial bent. Cornell, located in the town of Ithaca in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, was the first university in the world to establish a bachelor's degree in hotel management. Feeney had never set foot inside the two grand hotels in Elizabeth, the Winfield Scott and the Elizabeth Carteret, since defunct, but he liked the idea of “travel, elegant surroundings, people serving you.” He applied for admission and was called for an interview in Tokyo with a Cornell recruiter. The woman who
ran his Japanese language school knew the interviewer, and “she looked over the guy's shoulder to see he wrote only nice things about me!”

He was discharged from the U.S. Air Force on July 1, 1952, with $634.33 back pay and made his way home to New Jersey to await the result of his application to Cornell. He got a rapturous reception after such a long absence, but his parents weren't happy about his choice of university. In those days, Catholic boys from St. Mary's didn't go to Ivy League universities. His father's best friend, a Catholic high school principal, John Dwyer, suggested instead that they drive up one day and take a look at Seton Hall, a private Catholic university closer to home, where Dwyer had some connections. He was nervous that the young Feeney might be aspiring too high in seeking admission to a major Brahmin establishment. The next day, however, the acceptance letter to Cornell Hotel School came in the mail. Feeney was invited to enroll in September. From his class at St. Mary's, only two boys went to university. The other got a scholarship to Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey.

The letter of acceptance was a major event for the Feeneys. No one in the family had ever been to a university. But Feeney was already showing a trait that would assert itself throughout his life: thinking big and aiming to achieve the best result, even if it seemed unattainable. “He did not believe he was ever going to get admitted to Cornell,” said John J. (Jack) Clark Jr., a past dean of the Hotel School from Boston, Massachusetts, who also had an Irish Catholic background and understood how big a thing it was for the young Feeney to cross the line. “Most of Chuck's generation and mine were the first generation that started going to college. There weren't a lot of Catholics at Cornell in the fifties or in the Ivy League.”

Of all the colleges and schools at Cornell, the Hotel School accepted the lowest SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) scores, the standard used to judge a student's potential, but consistently produced the most successful entrepreneurs, such as James W. McLamore and David R. Edgerton, cofounders of Burger King, and Michael Egan, who built up the Alamo car rental business. “The rest of the university kind of looked down on us,” said Clark. “One did not need to know the entire history of Greek culture to get accepted into the Hotel School, but it looked for a good combination of brains and physical energy.”

At first Feeney felt he had strayed out of his social depth, his sisters believed. Everyone else seemed to come from prep schools and had cars. But
he quickly adjusted to life in Ithaca. He found himself in the company of a lot of guys of like mind—budding entrepreneurs, eager to get an education, explore the world, and make their fortunes. “Once they let me in I was certainly capable of competing with the people who were in there,” he recalled. “I had to get there to figure that out.”

He soon showed just how talented an entrepreneur he was. He spotted a niche market right away. There was no Wendy's or McDonald's in Ithaca then. The students got hungry at night, and most were privileged, with cash in their pockets. Feeney began to make and sell sandwiches around the fraternities and sororities. He soon became known on the campus as the “Sandwich Man.” He needed the extra income to survive at Cornell, as his GI scholarship provided only $110 a month during each term to cover tuition, leaving him with little disposable income. At the start, he paid for the ingredients at the store late on Friday so that his checks would not be cashed until Monday. “It was my first experience of deficit financing,” he recalled. Feeney took the sandwiches to his customers in a basket, wearing an old army field jacket with big pockets for the change and blowing a whistle outside the fraternities to announce his presence. A contemporary in the Hotel School, Fred Antil, remembered Feeney coming around to his fraternity, and the running joke he had with him about how thin the sandwiches were.

Good-looking, crew-cut, and gregarious, Feeney made friends easily and was able to persuade helpers to come to his apartment to make and cut the sandwiches. “He was a hustler, he always had a smile. I figured out I made 16,000 sandwiches for him, working in the early evenings,” said a former roommate, Tass Dueland. At his peak, he reckoned that he averaged 700 sandwich sales a week. Feeney had trouble getting dates because they had to be good sandwich makers, joked Chuck Rolles, a graduate of Binghamton Central High School in New York state who became Feeney's lifelong friend and later founded the Chuck's Steak House chain—another Cornell Hotel School success story. Retired and living in Aspen, Colorado, Rolles recalled that the Sandwich Man would tell his team to make sure there was only one slice of ham on the “baloney and cheese” sandwiches so as not to cut into his profits.

Feeney was in on every move. When Chuck Rolles got the concession to sell programs in the football stadium because of his sporting prowess—despite his small stature he had set a national school record in basketball in 1952—Feeney became one of his salesmen at the football stadium. “He always
had a great wit,” said Rolles. “I remember a guy from Princeton who we were playing that day came up to Chuck and joked, ‘I don't need a program, I can't read,' and Chuck said, ‘Oh you must be from Princeton!'”

As a sideline, Feeney sold Christmas cards on campus, and during vacation worked as a trainee at Industrial Food Crafts in Elizabeth, managed the Summer Club on Fire Island, New York, and acted as a taster and tester for Duncan Hines, the bread and cake maker.

On their last summer vacation in 1955, Chuck Feeney and Chuck Rolles took a working holiday together in Hawaii, so that Rolles could spend time with his classmate girlfriend, Jean Kelley, whose father, Roy C. Kelley, owned a chain of hotels there. “We got off the airplane and went to the hotel and checked in, and all of a sudden Chuck started speaking Japanese to the waitresses,” said Rolles. “I didn't know he could speak Japanese.” They lived in a rented cottage for the summer, and Feeney worked as a night clerk in the Edgeware Reef Hotel in Honolulu, where one of his jobs was security duty—letting guests back into their rooms who had locked themselves out. Then twenty-four years old, Feeney was getting his first experience of the hotel business outside the United States—Hawaii had not yet become a state—and he loved the exotic location. He had gotten the travel bug. And though he could not know it at the time, destiny would beckon him back to Hawaii.

Feeney graduated from Cornell in 1956 with a bachelor's degree in hotel administration. He had a number of job offers from hotel chains, but he didn't like the idea of working his way up inside a Marriott or a Statler. His mother wondered how he could turn down such fine offers, but he told her he was waiting for the right opportunity. He was impatient to see the world and make his own way as an entrepreneur. He and Chuck Rolles decided to drive across the United States from New Jersey to see what California offered.

Before they left, Rolles came to Elizabeth and Feeney introduced him to some of his old pals in a New Jersey tavern. One was a U.S. Navy veteran who boasted that he had a system to beat the roulette wheel in a casino. All they needed was to make sure the wheel had only one zero. They couldn't lose, he said. The two Cornell graduates decided to try out the system on their road journey. They headed for Reno, Nevada, where they discovered there was a single zero on the roulette wheels. Reno at the time was a fast-growing gambling town with several casinos, including Harold's Club and
Harrah's. They rented a room in a boardinghouse for construction workers and started hanging around the gaming rooms to see how things worked. “We'd sit there having a beer or something, taking down the numbers for an hour or so as they came up on the roulette wheel,” said Rolles. Back in the rooming house, they studied the numbers.

After a couple of days they were ready. They figured they would need a stake of $500. Rolles had enough cash to put up half, but Feeney had to hock his portable typewriter and camera in a Reno pawn shop. Rolles took a picture of him going into the pawn shop dressed in shorts and an aloha shirt that he had picked up in Hawaii.

“We went to the casino and we started playing at 11 o'clock at night and we'd play all night, and, geez, the system worked,” said Rolles. “We'd put ten cents on a group of six numbers. And if one of those six hit, we'd get 50 cents back. We covered all thirty-six numbers. The only thing that would hurt us was a zero. Otherwise we were making money on every roll.”

Things went the way they were supposed to go, and they just kept making money. They would play for six hours, have breakfast with the construction workers, sleep a bit, play some basketball, then return at night and play six more hours. “We walked back to our apartment in the middle of the street afraid somebody would know how much money we had on us,” said Rolles. “We'd have two or three hundred bucks in winnings. We thought we were wealthy.”

In their enthusiasm, the two Cornellians fantasized about playing for a couple of years and retiring rich. “So we decided not to quit,” said Rolles. “We kept playing. Then all of a sudden one morning, about 5:30, things started going not right. We got into our trouble zone, and covered our twelve numbers and put all the money on. We went twenty, twenty-five spins of the wheel without hitting one group of twelve numbers, and we thought that could never happen. Well, it happened. We put our last bets out and the twenty-fifth spin came and they didn't hit, and so I wanted to bet everything on the next one—I was ready to bet my life almost.”