DENNIS ODA / DODA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Chris Hemmeter with his wife of 25 years, Patsy Hemmeter, are visiting friends in Honolulu on time Chris was not supposed to have according to doctors treating him for cancer.
Hemmeter
still fightingThe one-time Hawaii resort
developer has come back
to town to see friends
and speak his piece
Former Hawaii developer Chris Hemmeter has battled prostate cancer and Parkinson's disease and is now dealing with a killer cancer affecting the bile duct. For Hemmeter, it's a liver transplant or death and his doctors told him he wouldn't make his 64th birthday.
But in a visit with friends in Honolulu this week, which included a party for that birthday, Hemmeter said his biggest trial was dealing with corrupt politicians in New Orleans.
Hemmeter -- who developed King's Alley and the twin-tower Hyatt Regency Waikiki, as well as luxury resorts such as the Hyatt Regency Waikoloa on the Big Island, now the Hilton Waikoloa Village, and the Westin Maui -- said in an interview that he was upset about the way Louisiana reporters picked on him over his grand plan for a $1 billion casino in New Orleans.
The bottom line to Hemmeter is that while the casino plan failed, it also put Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards in federal prison a year ago, to serve a 10-year term for extortion.
And Hemmeter said the luxury resorts he built in Hawaii made real money for him and his family and are now doing well again, despite setbacks under mostly Japanese owners following the burst of the late 1980s Japanese investment bubble.
DENNIS ODA / DODA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Former Hawaii governors John Waihee, left, and Ben Cayetano posed for a photograph with host Chris Hemmeter at Hemmeter's 64th birthday party Wednesday. The state's only other living former governor, George Ariyoshi, also was in attendance.
Hemmeter sold those resorts at big profits, but when he stepped into the murky waters of Mississippi politics he ran aground, leading to the filing of personal bankruptcy by Hemmeter and his wife Patsy in 1997.
It began with the award to the Hemmeter group 10 years ago of a lease for a property designated to house the city's first land-based casino. The 60-year ground lease, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was awarded because "we had the best plan," Hemmeter said.
Enter Edwards, a keen gambler and, according to Hemmeter and other critics, a corrupt politician. Edwards wanted a piece of the action for himself and his cronies and relatives, Hemmeter said. "He let me know in no uncertain terms that he expected his boys cut in on the deal. We said, no way we could do business like that," Hemmeter said. That's when the rot set in, ending with Edwards ignoring the law that said the land owner, in this case Hemmeter's company, would choose the gaming operator and simply telling Hemmeter that his choice of Caesar's as an operator was not going to be approved.
In the end, Edwards forced through a deal with three companies sharing the business, leaving Hemmeter with about a third of it.
"I ended up as a minority investor and watched my investment go down, down, down," Hemmeter said.
Hemmeter, who had kept his Hawaii developments as individual entities, ended up breaking that rule in New Orleans and consolidating several of his companies and pledging several multimillion-dollar homes as collateral for loans. The first casino, on a temporary location intended to get the business started while a new one was built, closed a few months after it opened in 1995, with Edwards' pick Harrah's going bankrupt and bond-holders unable to recover the $400 million they had invested.
That was about the end of the saga, except for the corruption and extortion federal case against Edwards.
During the selection process, Hemmeter paid for Edwards and other Louisiana officials to make luxury trips to Hawaii.
Hemmeter maintains that was all part of the shakedown and said he was vindicated when it was revealed that federal investigators had bugged his phones for 2 1/2 years and in "tens of hours" of tapes and they were unable to show one incident in which Hemmeter did anything wrong. The experience certainly soured him on the location. "I've never set foot in New Orleans, even to change planes, since 1995," he said.
For now, Hemmeter is looking after his health. He hopes for a liver transplant in the next month or so. He and his family have embarked on a new business, a Western-style restaurant called Saddle Ranch Chop House. The first unit is up and running next to the Universal Studios theme park in Los Angeles and is doing well, particularly late at night when the mechanical-bull rides, music and bands are in full swing, he said.
"We're doing just under $1 million a month in revenues" and that works out to about $250,000 in profits. Planning for four more restaurants in the next two years, Hemmeter said he hopes for eventual profits of more than $10 million a year and a number of potential buyers are paying attention.
"We should be able to get 10-12 times earnings when we sell," he said. The restaurant business is headed by Hemmeter's oldest son, Mark.
Hemmeter is also working on a golf project on the mainland. He said his family businesses have lined up some 400 pay-for-play golf courses that are interested. The idea is to have a couple of holes at each golf course wired for video with half a dozen cameras at each hole. Golfers can turn it on by dropping a $2 token in a slot and later they can go to a Web site and watch the video along with an analysis of their swings.
There will also be a $10,000 prize for a hole in one and the cameras won't let anyone cheat, he said.
Meanwhile, Chris and Patsy Hemmeter are living in a gated community near Bel Air, outside Los Angeles. Second son Chris graduated from Harvard business school and went into a dot-com business. When that failed, he got into the food and beverage distribution business and started a credit card for restaurants, but he wants to get a doctorate and may end up teaching.
Daughter Katie is doing well as an actress and playwright and makes money buying and selling residential real estate, Hemmeter said.
The Hemmeters had a "reverse surprise birthday party" at the Kahala Avenue home of lingerie multilevel marketing moguls Walter and Tiffany James Wednesday night, with a short but elite list of guests invited for what they thought was going to be a video-conference with Hemmeter speaking from the mainland.
Present were three former governors -- George Ariyoshi, John Waihee and Ben Cayetano -- former Mayor Frank Fasi and an array of other Hemmeter friends representing much of the long-time business leadership in the islands.
Guests were delighted when Walter James, who runs UndercoverWear with his wife, confessed that Chris and Patsy Hemmeter were in the house. Hemmeter was welcomed warmly and he said doctors had told him and Patsy that they should not expect him to be around for a 64th birthday party.
One who was completely taken by surprise was Larry Johnson, former chief executive officer of Bank of Hawaii, who had arrived only half an hour earlier on a flight from New York. Johnson said he hadn't showered but his wife Claire told him not to worry because the video link would not detect any body odor.
Thos Rohr, who headed the group that developed the Waikoloa Resort, said the best thing about Hemmeter was that he started at the bottom, as a trainee with Sheraton Hotels here in the early 1960s, and rose to the top, handling deals with hundreds of millions of dollars in the same gracious way he always acted.
Tim Guard, a longtime Hemmeter friend and president of the stevedoring company McCabe, Hamilton & Renny, called the reunion "an evening of smiles."
