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Jeeps, Pretty Ladies & Wine
Don St. Pierre Sr.
Verlag BookBaby, 2018
ISBN 9781543940923 , 262 Seiten
Format ePUB
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CHAPTER 11:
TEHRAN, IRAN (WHAT MEANS THIS WORD, BULLSHIT?)
We built CJ-7 Jeeps in Tehran with Jafar Akhavan, a billionaire who owned Sherkati Sherami Jeep. It was Pete Noonan’s account, a potentially lucrative one, but with lots of problems that necessitated Pete and I to visit often from 1975 until 1979 -- just before the revolution that threw the Shah’s ass out. We built CJ-7’s on an assembly line right next to another line that produced all gold General Motors Cadillacs for the Shah and his friends. Yep, fucking gold-colored everything, inside and out. Amazing! No wonder they threw the Shah’s ass out.
The Iranians were always complaining about missing and damaged parts. We knew this was bullshit, because we packed the parts and shipped them under the same systems and procedures as every other country and received very few complaints. Obviously the problems were in Iran.
Pete and I made several trips to Tehran to meet with Jafar, Hormos Mahalati (Jafar’s Son-in-law), and Farsenez, Jafar’s right-hand man and a shrewd old rug trader. I had even sent Dennis Noonan, my best guy in Detroit, to live in Tehran and work full-time at the factory right up until just after the Mullahs took over. On another trip, I took Andy Dodd from Livingston Industries (our main packer), Joe Cowan (our frame packer) and Marty Morelli (our engine packer) to find out what the hell was going wrong in Tehran. Some interesting (and sometimes hilarious) things happened.
The Iranians that we dealt with were likeable guys but big-time liars. On one trip I suggested to Pete that we secretly record our meeting with Jafar and Farsenez so that we would have evidence of what they said and promised.
I bought a spiffy new recorder and practiced turning it on and off in my suit coat pocket for days. After dinner with Jafar on some “mystery meat” (as I called it), with almost as much rice flying out of his mouth as he could shovel in, we moved to his 5,000 square feet magnificent living room for coffee and a business discussion. I stealthily slipped my hand into my pocket and turned on the recorder.
The discussion got heated and at one point I blurted out “Bullshit!” when I heard an obvious and serious lie.
Farsenez shot back, “No bullshit me, bullshit you,” and turned to Pete and said “What means this word bullshit?”
Pete said, “I think Don means you are very clever.”
As the meeting calmed and continued suddenly, there was a beep, beep, beep from my pocket. I had not run the recorder to the end in my practice and didn’t know that it beeped at the end of the tape. I reacted cleverly, or so I thought at the time. As I fumbled in my pocket to turn off the recorder, I muttered, “damn watch.” The incident passed without comment and after finishing the meeting, Pete and I headed off to our hotel, The Hilton, for a much-needed drink … or 10. No booze was allowed in Jafar’s house, of course, but the Hilton had a bar.
The next morning I woke up, severely hungover, to find my briefcase gone. In a panic, I hustled down to the front desk saying I was robbed during the night and my briefcase stolen.
After some shouting back and forth in Farsi, a hotel manager appeared and said “This briefcase?”
I opened it and found my passport, some cash, traveler’s checks, notes, etc. All there. The only thing missing? My recorder. I hadn’t fooled anyone, and the incident was never again mentioned.
During the trip with Andy Dodd, the Livingston packer, Jafar took us out to the yard where the CKD boxes were stored to show us an example of a well-constructed box from General Motors. He pointed out what he called “strong enforcements” that prevented damage.
We were looking at an upside down box, and the strong reinforcements were the skids to accommodate lift truck forks handling that were on the bottom of every CKD case. It was basically the same box that Jeep parts came in because Andy packed all of them: General Motors and American Motors Corporation. We just said “Interesting,” not wanting to embarrass Jafar.
We hung around Tehran that trip (with lots of dinners and drinks at The Cellar Restaurant, a top-notch joint, surprisingly) until another lot of boxes arrived from the Port of Khorramshahr.
The shipment arrived in horrible shape with broken boxes and in some instances, just piles of parts and twisted frames. I concluded that the problem was in Khorramshahr, not with our packing in Canada and not at the assembly plant in Iran.
So, back to Detroit to coordinate another trip to meet the next vessel in Khorramshahr. This time, I brought along Joe Cowan, my frame packer who lived in Baltimore, the U.S. port from which we shipped all of our product.
Also, importantly, Joe had a American friend from Baltimore who worked in Khorramshahr in the shipping business. And as another reason to drag Joe’s ass along: The frames he packed were arriving in Tehran looking a lot like spaghetti. Actually, Pete Noonan had nicknamed Cowan “Curtain rod Joe,” because he said Joe was binding the frames together with curtain rods. Khorramshahr was, and I imagine still is, a hell hole and in the summer that we arrived, it was consistently 45 degrees Celsius (113F) and the hotel room was the size of a small closet.
Other than caviar, which we ate in copious amounts until sick of it (still today, I refuse to eat caviar) and lots of vodka, the food was absolute shit. And of course, any thought of female companionship was wishful fucking thinking, although I did get a nibble from an attractive Pakistani nurse until she got cold feet and disappeared.
Khorramshahr is also next to Abadan, a huge Iranian oil and natural gas refinery and is about 200 yards across the Tigris river from Basra on the Iraq side. I remember looking across the Tigris to Basra, seeing huge guns in the trees and thinking, “Someday they will shoot those guns.”
They did, of course, and that’s where the Iran-Iraq war started in 1980.
So, we settled in to wait for the ship to arrive, while drinking copious amounts of vodka to fight the Dysentery we all had. In the meantime, we decided to tour the port storage facilities and maybe find some missing CKD cases. We found plenty and unbelievable things like new Cadillacs and Mercedes-Benz rusting in broken boxes and every kind of luxury good imaginable There was no doubt that the goods were originally intended for the Shah and his cronies, but never cleared through Customs.
Speaking of the Shah, there are two political questions I’ve developed over the years traveling the world doing business:
1. Why do dictators like the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand and others go that one extra step in greed and rape of their people so that their people revolt and throw their asses out?
2. How can the CIA be so fucking dumb as to not see these revolutions coming? We businessmen always see them coming beforehand.
Back in Khorramshahr, the fucking ship was delayed. We hounded (and tried to bribe) the harbor master to pull the ship in. Forty-five long days after our arrival, we were awakened in the middle of the night and told the ship had arrived.
We scrambled and headed to the port only to find the ship had already been unloaded and we were looking at a pile of broken boxes, twisted frames and loose parts loaded on trucks headed for Tehran the next day. Fuck a duck! Forty-five days wasted it looked like.
We were despondent, so Joe’s Baltimore buddy offered to take us to the Abadon Nightclub to cheer us up. We hadn’t been to Abadon, even though we could see flames shooting up far into the night sky from the huge refinery. But, surprise, surprise, Abadon was a whole new world with fairly good food, fairly decent entertainment and, surprise of all surprises, a whorehouse with girls from all over the world.
We spent two days there before heading back with Joe’s friend, who complained that he had just spent most of his life savings on those nights. I thought “Big fucking deal, I just spent 45 useless days in a hell hole.” Besides, the guy was pretty much a dickhead for not telling us about the Abadon night club until the end of the trip.
Back in Detroit, I asked Don Fedoronko, my Logistics Manager (called Traffic Manager in those days) about a fairly new shipping method I had read about called “container shipping” as opposed to “break bulk,” which was stacks of boxes piled high in the holes of ships and on deck and unloaded with cranes and slings, one case at a time.
Container shipping consisted of 20 and 40-foot sturdy metal containers and I figured we could stuff relatively small numbers of CKD boxes in them for added protection and easy unloading at the destination. I thought that was our answer for Iran and, working closely with Andy Dodd, Marty Morelli and Joe Cowan, we proceeded to organize container...
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