There’s a lot of money in the yachting world, and with that money comes a lot of opportunities for abuse. Sometimes, that’s just how the rules are made, and you have to live by them, even if you don’t agree with them. Sometimes, you make a stand against it because that’s your code. That’s how I live my life. You only have one shot at integrity, and you can’t blow it all just to make a couple of dollars. Some do, as is their right, but those aren’t the kind of guys I choose to work with. Just because someone’s not going to miss a dollar bill, or a stack of them, doesn’t mean it’s okay to steal. The line is clear to me, but I can see how some people find it, to their eye, a bit more fuzzy.
I didn’t come from a lot of money. My first car was a 1955 Chevy Bel Air that I bought for $50 when it was twelve years old. You could see through the floorboards because the body was all rusted out, and it belched smoke like it was on fire, but it got me to my job at the bakery where I was glad to earn 75 cents an hour. A four-hour shift would get me a shirt soaked with sweat and a nice $3 for the day. So that car, even though it was a piece of shit, still cost me seventeen days of scrubbing caramelized sugar off some seriously pre-Teflon pans. In the most basic and honest definition of the word, I earned the money for that car. Back in the good old days, when things weren’t always good.
It’s with that perspective that I would marvel at what some people might label the excessive, or opulent, or pampered lives of some of the people in the yachting world. To afford a yacht in the first place, you had to have some deep pockets. With pockets that deep, some people are just never going to fish around in them for a lost quarter.
One time in Baltimore, I got a call from an owner who wanted a suckling pig for his dinner on New Year’s Eve. No problem—it was a specialty request, but not tremendously exotic. But wait—there’s more. It couldn’t just be any suckling pig, it had to be the same kind that they’d had for the first time visiting New Zealand. Only a New Zealand suckling pig would do. And this request came down the pike on December 30.
“Can do,” I said.
I’d have to find a way to make it happen, but who’s got that number in their Rolodex? The contact for acquiring delicious pigs in New Zealand? That’s just the nature of the beast. I’d figure it out, but it was going to cost. Specialty requests cost money. Rush requests cost extra. And guarantees for all the above just add to the tally. But it was important for the man to get what he wanted, and it was my job to do exactly that. My thinking generally is that very difficult jobs I do immediately, and the impossible jobs just take a little extra thought. Especially when working for people that live by the motto “No is never a word I want to hear.”
Now, if you buy a suckling pig from a butcher or specialty purveyor, you could probably get one on the low end for about $150. If you go for something a bit higher in quality, the price jumps to maybe $400. But if you want something of high quality, and you want it from the other side of the world, and you want it fast, the costs are going to go up. How much did we end up paying to get what the owner wanted?
About $4,000.
And we did it. We got exactly what he wanted, we got it delivered on time, and it was delicious, or so I was told. It basically cost the amount of booking a couple of seats on a commercial airliner, but for a guy with millions or even billions to spend, four grand to him is what I spend on bubblegum, and I don’t torture myself over how much money I’m going to spend on a pack of gum.
Another owner had a special project that would have made a normal guy flinch but didn’t make him bat an eyelash, nor should it have. He wanted to get a new dining room table, and for the material on top, he wanted a single, solid slab of onyx.
I didn’t even know you could buy an onyx slab for a dining table. I knew you could buy wood, or glass, or steel, and if you wanted to do stone, maybe someone could do marble or granite or soapstone. But onyx? I’d only heard that as a material people used in jewelry, not furniture. If I wanted to buy some onyx earrings, I could probably find some at Macy’s between $100 and $1,000, depending on how flashy I was feeling. But an entire table? A table that was supposed to seat twelve people? That was a lot of onyx. And it wasn’t just the raw weight—this guy wanted it to be in a single slab. So even though it might have been easier or cheaper to find two or more pieces and then just glue them together, the owner didn’t want any seams to mar the table’s surface.
So, I made a few calls. Eventually, I found a stone purveyor who was able to find the slab I was looking for, but it wasn’t cheap. The slab alone cost $25,000. If we were going to install the slab into a house with a wide-open front door, then maybe the costs would have ended there. But on a yacht, everything is more complicated. Unlike a mansion, the roads for a yacht go to the marina, not to the numbers on a mailbox. In order to get that slab in the boat and set it down nice and gentle, we needed to commission a crane and the personnel capable of using it. We needed to hire craftsmen who could install it properly. At the end of the day, that tabletop ended up costing the owner $50,000.
And hell, it looked gorgeous.
Though one of the big questions was always, How long is that going to last? Even though a lot of owners visit their yachts only a few times a year, they’re remarkably susceptible to environmental fatigue. One time, an owner came on board, looked around for a bit, gestured at the dining room chairs, and said, “I’m sick of looking at these—let’s change it.” And it wasn’t like the guy was pointing to chairs with warped wood or couches in the salon with red wine stains on the upholstery. He just got bored with seeing the same thing. And this boredom could set in quickly—often in under two years.
So, these gorgeous dining room chairs had to go. “I hate them—go buy new ones,” he said. And that was that. No discussion, no auction, just make them go away. But the chairs were new. No one had ever sat in them before. “Just get rid of them,” the owner said. Those chairs cost about $1,000 each, and we ended up just asking the crew if they wanted to take them home. It was that or give them to the Salvation Army. Here’s a pro tip if you want to become a professional furniture flipper: follow the stuff that comes flying off a yacht. It’s a good way to buy a thousand-dollar chair for $50.
One of the biggest drivers of change on a boat would be a change in the owner’s personal life. If the guy got a new wife or a new girlfriend, it was time for a makeover. The new girlfriend didn’t want to sleep on the same linens as the old girlfriend. Or she didn’t want to use the same towels. Or she didn’t want to sleep in the same bed. Or eat off the same table. Or be cooled by the same generators. Whatever might cause her emotional distress or mental anguish, that would just have to go, even if that change meant replacing all the carpets or the upholstery or the navigation system (not typical, that last one).
It wasn’t always big-ticket items like 50K tabletops. Sometimes it was something as simple as linens. But even then, simple doesn’t mean cheap. Sometimes, we’ll be told to get bedding for all the cabins. But they don’t just want sheets from JC Penney. They want 1,200-thread-count sheets, and those sheets need to be Egyptian cotton. Because, they say, it’s the best. And that’s an easy get.
They’re not always so easy.
Just about everyone has sheets, but not everyone has rare art.
One time, an owner looked at a space on the wall and said, “I’ve got to fill that with something.” But he didn’t plan on just slapping up a poster from the movie Donnie Darko or Einstein sticking his tongue out. This wasn’t a college dorm room. He wanted Art with a capital A. He wanted a Pollock or a Warhol or a Kandinsky. For his boat.
It should be noted that one doesn’t just purchase an original Jackson Pollock and that’s the end of it. A Pollock can cost up to $200 million, and that’s without the frame. Even a lesser Pollock, at $50 million, is both a lot of money to spend and just the first stage in an elite art purchase. After all, news of an art sale of that magnitude will be reported. That’s, to a large degree, one of the key factors motivating the purchase in the first place. People will know. People will be impressed. So, in addition to the art itself, the owner also had to purchase security.
In order to protect the owner’s purchases, we installed a top-flight security system. It had pressure-sensitive pads on the deck to alert us if anything larger than a hedgehog tried to get on board. To monitor all the public spaces in the boat, we also had closed-circuit TVs equipped with night-vision lenses, and these were complemented by heat sensors in the gangways. Nobody was getting on the boat without the security detail being aware of it.
But that wasn’t all.
After buying the painting, after installing the $100,000 security system, after all of that, the owner still had one more purchase to make.
He had to buy a duplicate of the painting.
The duplicate itself wasn’t cheap. This had to be convincing. It couldn’t just be some print he bought at the Museum of Modern Art’s gift shop, mass produced and printed by some high-end laser printer. This had to really look like the original, it had to be oil on canvas, it had to have three-dimensional layering of paint, and be produced by an actual painter intimately familiar with the original artist’s work and techniques. That alone cost a pretty penny. And it was well spent.
After all, he was spending $50 million on a work of art—who’s going to hang that on a wall? Things happen to walls. But for an investment like that, he put the painting in a vault.
But if the painting was in a vault in some bank, then why the need for all the security?
Because the painting was purchased as a way to impress. It’s part of how the owner tells a story. The story is “I’m important, I have great taste, and I have quite a bit of money.” That story isn’t going to be convincingly told without a few props. One doesn’t just put an original Pollock up on a bulkhead and call it a day. To really sell that story, you need the additional security, all the technical tools, and staff. If you’re going to spend $50 million to tell a story, you can spend a million more to sell it.
This is all to say that where there’s a lot of money, there’s a lot of money to spend. And where money can flow, corruption has a way of working its way into the picture.
Refits are expensive. This provides opportunities both legitimate and illegitimate.
When a boat gets a refit, it means getting a tune-up to the hundredth degree. It means fixing, restoring, cleaning, modifying, customizing, or otherwise improving a boat, exterior and/or interior. For big boats, this can require a lot of work.
There are lots of people who can do the work. There are different contractors who would love to resurface the decks or paint the superstructure. There are plenty of interior decorators who would love to throw out hundreds of thousands of dollars in furniture and replace it with brand-new cabinets, tables, and art. The captain holds a great deal of power in making these decisions. He’s the one who solicits bids and talks to the specialists who could do the work.
There’s a lot of money riding on those kinds of decisions. Enough money, in fact, that a few thousand directed to the right person might not be seen as an expense, but as insurance to guarantee a high-paying job. Some people call it “perks,” but I call it what it is: a kickback. Sometimes, an owner will take the boat into the yard for a refit, and before the work even starts, the crew might notice that the captain is now driving around in a brand-new pickup truck. These jobs could cost millions of dollars, so someone giving the captain a bag with $20,000 in cash might seem like a real bargain.
Not to me.
I’ve always felt that a captain should make decisions like that based on who can do the best job, not who can be the quickest to fill a gym bag with twenties. I’ve been in those situations. On more than one occasion, I’ve been handed an envelope with a bid in it only to find out there’s more in that envelope.
“There’s a twenty-thousand-dollar check in there for you, too, Cap,” the bidder said.
“Why don’t you just take the 20K out of the bottom line for the boss,” I replied.
“We really want to win this bid,” he said.
“You have a better chance of winning the bid by thinking about the owner’s financial situation, and not mine,” I said.
Not everyone agrees. One owner I knew just felt that this sort of thing was a kind of bonus for the captain. He thought that there were lots of good companies out there, and if soliciting a bribe got his captain a new truck or a down payment on a summer house, then what was wrong with that? But that’s just never the way that I’ve seen things. I’m paid to do my job by the owner—I’m not paid by a contractor with his own agenda. If you keep the conflicts of interest to a minimum, your life gets simpler and easier.
Captains aren’t the only ones targeted for this kind of scam. Chefs wield remarkable power on ship as well. If an owner decides that he wants to modernize or upgrade the galley, he’ll seek input from the captain, but he’ll lean heavily on the expertise of the chef to make many of those decisions. And those kinds of decisions can prove incredibly lucrative to a company selling ovens, walk-in freezers, grills, cooktops, and any other appliances that could be on the acquisition to-do list. As a result, a kitchen supply company might offer a chef a few thousand dollars to steer business its way. A good chef should simply make the decision based on what’s best for the boat, but some put their own pocketbooks first. If a chef switches all his knives from Crate & Barrel to Wüsthof right after a big upgrade, it might be a sign he took a kickback.
Big-ticket items like pricy name-brand appliances aren’t the only way that a chef could wield the power of the owner’s black card. Stocking up on booze for the season can be an incredibly hefty bar tab. We never want to run on empty at the bar, and so we’ll often buy up to $100,000 worth of alcohol to top off before the season starts. With those kinds of numbers, a less ethical chef might ask around for $5,000 in “consultation fees” before deciding on which distributor will satisfy his needs. From my perspective, you just never want to be in the position where you’re stocking cheapie Popov vodka instead of Grey Goose or Hamm’s beer instead of Guinness because that’s how the distributor was able to fill the order while still affording their payoff.
Some people think they’re entitled to dip in. After all, the owner isn’t the one who has to pay for it, right? But the thing is, any time you’re making decisions based on something other than “What’s the best way to do your job,” things can get missed.
And that’s where you can run into big trouble.
I was working this one boat when things didn’t go the right way. I’m not saying that this was necessarily because of bribes or kickbacks (though I’m not saying that wasn’t a factor). I’m just saying what can happen if people don’t keep their eyes on the ball at all times.
I was going to be taking charge of the boat, a 165-footer, once it finished its refit in Europe. The refit was pretty pricy—about 4.5 million euros ($5.5 million). We could probably have done it in the US for maybe $2 million, but the owner wanted it done in Europe, and the owner gets what he wants. Part of the refit was that we were going to get the boat painted, which ended up costing the owner 1.7 million euros.
It certainly seemed like a high price tag, but keep in mind that painting a boat of that size isn’t a simple job. You don’t just call your friends over to the marina, get a few rollers, and spread a coat or two of True Value Navajo White all over the hull. Painting is a very technical, precise job. Before you even get to the painting, a painter has to do a ton of prep. They erect massive scaffolding around the boat, then construct a tent over the scaffolding. Either that, or they dock the boat inside a big shed. Not only does that protect the boat from rain and wind, but it also protects people from the boat. Often, there’s a lot of scraping and sanding when a boat is prepped for paint, and that residue can be inhaled, so the tent or shed keeps all that in, and the air is filtered before it can be released outside of the tarp.
The prep team goes over the hull, and if they want a new coat of paint, they sand off the old one. Then they search the hull for any dings, dents, or abrasions before sanding or pounding or polishing them off. This all takes thousands of hours, and the paint hasn’t even been applied yet!
As part of the prep, the painter needs to remove every bolt and screw that covers the deck plating. Every screw, every doorknob, every cleat, everything that isn’t the superstructure needs to be removed, marked, and catalogued. For that boat, it was about 100,000 screws. And before the screws could go back in, they all had to be coated, individually, in Tef-Gel. This gel allows someone to insert and remove screws from a hull. Often, different things on a ship are made from different materials. So, the hull might be steel, the screws might be stainless steel, and the superstructure might be aluminum. When you have two different materials interacting with each other, it can cause electrolysis, which can create bubbles in the metal. Not a desirable outcome. All 100,000 screws had to have Tef-Gel applied with a toothbrush. If each application of Tef-Gel just took a single second, and the guy coating it never took a break or slowed down, it would take about twenty-eight man-hours just to coat every screw on the boat.
Then, finally, came the paint. But . . . not quite. First, the workspace needed to be adjusted to the right conditions. The temperature had to be kept constant, at about 65 degrees, so there wasn’t any expansion or contraction of the materials. The interior walls were washed with cascading water so that even minuscule contaminants were kept away. Even the air was accounted for—inside that tarp, the air pressure was kept higher than the outside air pressure. That meant, even with people coming in and going out, the air on the inside pushed out that contaminated outside air. Just walking in to work on the job, people felt a slight punch of air against them.
At that point, the painter could apply a show coat. This was not “show” in the sense of a show pony, but in a “show me what’s wrong with this picture.” The show coat, usually blue or green, helps reveal any flaw or irregularity on the hull. Those were fixed by using a fairing compound, then re-sanded and primed, and finally the finish coat was applied. Another inspection would take place, maybe it passed, maybe it didn’t. If it didn’t, then they would re-sand and reshoot the boat again until it was right. Then all the screws were reinserted and the doorknobs replaced. If everything was done right, the exterior paint would be so brilliant, it would literally reflect the water.
Problem was, for me, that this particular boat had orange peels in a lot of places. Orange peels happen because the paint was applied improperly so that the exterior wasn’t smooth and uniform. As a result, you get the subtle dimpling of an orange peel.
I didn’t oversee the refit and painting of the boat. It was just a delivery job for me, bringing the boat to the owner. That said, even if you’re just the messenger, you do not want to be the guy handing over a boat covered with orange peel that just got a 1.7-million-euro paint job. Especially when it should have cost only about a million euros at most. You shouldn’t do a crap job, and you shouldn’t overcharge, but you sure as hell shouldn’t do both and not expect someone to notice.
You get that orange peel by someone screwing up, usually when a painter uses incorrect technique on the job. For instance, he might use too much paint in a single coat, or he might spray at an angle rather than perpendicular to the surface, or he might not have enough pressure in the spray gun, etc. I saw it and thought, No way. You pay a lot of money for a job, you want to see perfection. Someone put on that orange peel finish, and that was a mistake. Not smoothing it with some fairing compound was a second mistake. Someone else checked it, saw that it wasn’t perfect, and said, “Eh—good enough,” and that was a third mistake. I said they should sand it down and try it again. And there were a few other things, problems with the boat that I pointed out to the owner, signs that someone either let something slip or was trying to pull one over on him. I thought they should try again. The owner, on the other hand, disagreed.
See, the owner had been without his boat for a year while it was getting the refit. And after a year, he didn’t want to hear that the boat was going to need to go back to the yard, get sanded down, get looked over, have all the screws removed, get repainted, have all those screws covered in Tef-Gel again, and everything put into working order. That’s another three months to a year of work. Who had the patience for that? Instead, he said, “Let me just take it, and we’ll have them redo it the next time we’re in the yard.”
Suuuurrrre. Of course, they’ll hop to when we come strolling in, in another year or two. They were happy enough to agree to such a proposal, because they knew they’d never have to follow through with it. And sure enough, when he did bring it back, they told him it had been out of the yard too long and that they couldn’t really guarantee the work at that point. And why would they? If you buy a car and see a scratch, that’s on the dealership. You buy a car, see a scratch, then drive it around town for a year, and then bring it back? Good luck getting the dealer to pay for it.
This is to say that even when there’s a lot of money on the table, and even when you go to a reputable professional who has performed work at a very high level for many years, there’s still room for error and corruption. Why open the door to crippling conflicts of interest by allowing kickbacks and bribes? The guy offering the kickback isn’t doing it because you love money—he’s doing it because he loves money. Once that payoff is made, he’s not just going to see that kickback as a gift to a capable businessman—it’s a loss that needs to be recovered. And where’s the first place he’s going to try to make up that loss? On the job he just paid the kickback for. He’ll try to cut corners, hire less qualified people, buy sub-prime materials, pad the billings. When someone’s getting a little extra, someone else is sure as hell getting shortchanged.
Do your job and demand others to do the same, and you’ll do all right.
Of course, it can go the other way, too. Money doesn’t always flow from the vendors to the captains or the chefs. Sometimes, the owners like to get in on that kind of action. If bribes are a way to grease the skids, owners aren’t immune from wanting to get a little greasy every now and again.
One time, I saw an owner come to visit his boat while it was getting a refit, and as a way to encourage everyone’s best efforts, he handed out one hundred dollars to every painter, electrician, and carpenter working his boat that day. And it worked. Those guys really wanted to put in a top effort for that owner. Added to that, news spreads fast at the docks, and lots of other painters and electricians and carpenters heard about the high-roller who liked throwing out bonus money.
But it wasn’t a popular move with everyone.
The guys who managed the yard weren’t too happy with that kind of maneuver. Sure, it improved morale for the guys working that job, but as a result, everyone else stopped their jobs and tried to get on at our boat.
“Need an extra carpenter?” someone would ask.
“No, we’ve got a full crew,” the foreman would reply.
“Okay. I’ll just hang around in case you need someone.”
These guys had other jobs they were being paid to do, and now they couldn’t figure out a reliable schedule because everyone wanted to bail on what they were doing and come help refit my boat. So, the owner ended up dropping $2,000, which was nothing to him, and set the whole yard on fire with guys thinking they were going to be courtside when he came back to make it rain. Guys should just do their jobs and not get greedy, but everyone likes money.
Some people might argue that this is just practical economics at its most basic. You make a little bribe, offer a little kickback, and you get what you want. In return, the person paying gets what he wants. Everyone’s happy, and the money helps identify how much things are genuinely worth. Adam Smith’s invisible hand in action.
But what happens when the money makes things worse?
The Eastern Seaboard is spotted with lovely towns where the rich folks like to party for the weekend during the summer.
Sometimes, those wealthy weekenders like to travel by boat. If they wanted to dock their boats at the pier, they would have to speak to the dockmaster. The dockmaster is the person in charge of the waterfront. He or she is the one who got to decide who stayed and who went. For at least one, whom I’ll call Rob, one of the things that helped him make those decisions was how amenable a captain might be to contributing to his favorite charity, which we might call the Rob Retirement Fund. It was a kind of art preservation society, for Rob was keenly interested in collecting the portraits of dead presidents. If you wanted a slip, it might cost you $1,000 in cash for a single night, plus your normal docking rate.
Some might argue that this simply clarified who wanted the dock space the most. The person who paid proved he was the one in most desperate need, and this way, the slips were allocated in the most fair and judicious fashion.
But the thing was, if Rob didn’t get the payments he demanded, those slips would remain empty. Does that seem like smart economics? The boaters didn’t benefit, since they couldn’t dock, and the town wouldn’t benefit, since now there were fewer people entering the town to eat at its restaurants, shop at its antique shops, and find other ways to spend their money. The only person who really seemed to be benefitting was Rob.
Still, his defenders would say he was just doing his job. He kept order, he discouraged the riffraff, that kind of thing. However, when Rob found himself eating at a nice restaurant and there was a captain in the vicinity, he would never have to pay his own tab. It was almost always taken care of. How does the dockmaster getting a free dinner help the town? The straight-up truth is that he ran the harbor his way because he liked money, something certainly not unique to Rob.
But, in some places, there are a few things that even money can’t buy.
Where there’s glamour, there are yachts. And there are fewer places as glamorous as Cannes, France, for its film festival or Monaco for the Grand Prix, one of the most prestigious races in all of motorsport. People come from all over the world to attend these events, but it’s not exactly open to everyone. You need to have a lot of money, and you need to have celebrity.
It’s kind of fascinating how the economies of glamour work. Take the Cannes Film Festival. If you want to dock at a slip, it’s going to cost you. You’d be smart to give the harbormaster a nice “gratuity” if you want to be able to get a plum space, a tip in the neighborhood of $100,000. A very nice neighborhood, indeed. Otherwise, instead of getting a nice slip right at dockside, be prepared to drop anchor in the bay and send an A-list passenger landward in a dingy.
But money won’t buy everything. You can’t just be rich—you have to be a celebrity. And not just some art-house darling like Darren Aronofsky or TV star like Jim Parsons. You need to be A-list all the way: George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, or Steven Spielberg. If you don’t have someone in that weight class, it’s not going to be easy.
And this is where things get interesting. Hypothetically, let’s take someone like David Geffen. Geffen is one of the biggest music and film producers in the entertainment industry. In music, he owned the label that produced albums with John Lennon, Elton John, Cher, the Eagles, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, and Nirvana. In film, he founded the studio DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg (the S and the K to his G), producing such films as Gladiator, American Beauty, Shrek, and A Beautiful Mind. He has an estimated net worth of $6.5 billion. He is, to put it mildly, a pretty big wheel. But he could walk down almost any street in America and never get recognized. A gazillionaire and no one would know who he was.
And he might not stand a chance of getting a slip in Cannes.
George Clooney, on the other hand, is a big, recognizable star. You know he’s not walking down any street without getting mobbed. And he’s not doing too bad in terms of money, with about $500 million in the bank. But he doesn’t own a giga-yacht, because that would wipe out half his net worth. So, Clooney can’t get dockside because he doesn’t have a boat, and Geffen might get rejected because he’s not a big enough celebrity. So, what do they do? Geffen asks his friend George if he might want to be a guest on his boat, and George kindly accepts, and someone pays the harbormaster a six-figure tip, and they can pull right onto the dock without having to drop the hook in the harbor like some lesser-known billionaire might have to.
In a lot of ways, it doesn’t seem fair. But there’s a reason why a good number of the harbormasters in Monaco drive Ferraris and have a phone full of selfies accompanied by the world’s most famous people.
And it isn’t limited to the harbormaster. Once you’re finally in port, you’re going to want to have a good time. The owner and his guests are going to want to eat, drink, and be merry. But so does everyone else with a boat. That means that lots of purveyors are getting orders for mussels, for steaks, for wine. The chef will get a message that his order is in, but that he’s at the bottom of the list.
“I need that case of wine tonight. It’s Harrison Ford’s favorite! You can’t get it in America!”
“Oh, I understand completely. If you want to move up the list, you could pay for express service.”
It’s not the chef’s dime, after all, but it’s his job to make it happen.
“Sure. Add ten percent for yourself. But get it here this afternoon.”
“No problem.”
When you’ve got the cash, there’s never a problem.
It can be a cruel world out there. Everyone is looking to make a buck, everyone is looking to get ahead, and some things can just drive you crazy. Some folks will work their whole lives in a West Virginia coal town, digging coal and barely putting food on the table, while a few miles away, some rich kid is born who inherits a couple of billion dollars and never wears the same underwear twice. Even among the rich, there are different strata. Some guys are buying yachts and then feel insecure when they see someone else with a helipad on theirs.
It’s amazing the things people will do when they have the money. I knew one guy who owned a very nice 40-foot center console, but he didn’t want it to get polluted by people using it for a tender when they chartered his mega-yacht. So, he spent $500,000 on an Intrepid, a 12-meter tender, just to use when the big boat was on charter. That’s like buying a Lexus just to keep around for when your brother-in-law is in town, because you don’t want him driving your Bentley. He had the money, and that’s how he wanted to spend it.
Or take PJ. He would charter a boat for his friends to use, even though he owned his own boat. He’d pay $100,000 just to charter a boat so his friends wouldn’t get their Manolo Blahnik shoeprints all over his deck.
But that’s their business. That’s not something I have to worry about at all. Just because some guy has the money to spend on two boats doesn’t mean he’d be happy if I skimmed a little off him with some creative expense reports. If an owner is willing to pay a million bucks to refit his boat, that doesn’t mean I get license to pocket $20,000 in kickbacks. Someone being richer than me doesn’t mean I have to be miserable. Even with billionaires buying tropical islands and castles, you can still make a nice life for yourself. You can be happy driving a Mustang even if someone else is driving a McLaren. You can be happy eating a porterhouse steak even if someone else is chowing down on lobster stuffed with caviar. Taking a kickback might get me a hair closer to those kinds of deep pockets, but I’ll never do it, because you only get one chance at integrity. That’s worth a lot more to me than a shoebox full of cash.