David H. Murdock
Real estate mogul saved
By Russ Lynch
Castle & Cooke
Star-BulletinUNTIL the mid-1980s, Flexi-Van Corp. was an unknown name in Hawaii. Suddenly, in March 1985, it hit the headlines, as the "white knight" riding in from the mainland to save one of Hawaii's oldest companies, Castle & Cooke Inc., from bankruptcy.
It was, of course, David H. Murdock who mattered, not the company he used to gain control of the "Big Five" company. Murdock, a California real estate multimillionaire who owned one-third of Flexi-Van, had his eye on Castle & Cooke's real estate -- not as a raider wanting to sell it off but as someone who knew he could enhance its value.
The company had 150,000 acres in Hawaii, including almost all of the island of Lanai.
Castle & Cooke had just paid more than $70 million to buy off a "green mail" stock market raider and had piled up huge losses. It had no capital to develop its properties and would have filed for bankruptcy in weeks if Murdock had not come to the rescue.
Murdock brought what one analyst called "a confidence factor" to the ailing company. He left existing shareholders with most of Castle & Cooke's stock but put his people into a majority of the seats on the board.
In the years since, he did shut the Dole Pineapple factory in Iwilei and close Waialua Sugar Co., leaving hundreds of islanders jobless. But before doing so, Murdock poured millions into these firms, keeping them going years longer than they would have without his intervention. On Lanai, he shut down pineapple, the island's only industry, but developed luxury hotels and homes.
Murdock fell in love with the Dole products, the fresh fruits and vegetables grown and sold around the world, proudly showing them off at shareholders meetings. In 1991, he changed the company name to Dole Food Co. and in 1993, spun off the real estate business and Lanai operations into a separate publicly held company, a new Castle & Cooke Inc.
