Very Fast, Very Far

Outside San Francisco in Marin County, a 2,200-acre luxury real estate development is rapidly going up that will eventually be home to 16,000 people. In Honolulu, plans are afoot to break ground for a 28-story, 1,056-unit cooperative apartment building. In Hong Kong, the foundation for a new 166-room hotel is being laid. In Manila, Tokyo and Bangkok a network of agents are investigating new business opportunities. Masterminding this transpacific wheeling and dealing is stocky, cigar-chomping Chinn Ho, 57, the prototype of Hawaii's newest business phenomenon: the self-made, fast-moving Hawaiian millionaire of Oriental descent.

For generations, Hawaii's business community was tightly controlled by the islands' haole (Caucasian) first families through a web of interlocking marriages and directorates. With clerkships the top jobs offered to them by most haole firms, Hawaiians of mixed blood turned to running hui--syndicates in which one astute businessman administers the pooled resources of the members. So successful a hui manager was Chinn Ho that he cracked Hawaii's bamboo curtain and gained a toehold in the haole establishment; he was the'first Oriental named a trustee of one of Hawaii's landed estates, the huge Robinson estate, a bastion of Hawaiian conservatism, first Oriental invited to join the businessmen's Commercial Club, the first named President of the Honolulu Stock Exchange.

Nothing from Grandfather. The first move is Chinn Ho's trademark. He has made the foundation of his empire, Honolulu's $25 million Capital Investment Co., Ltd., so flexible that it can quickly and easily be tailored to attract the risk capital required for specific situations. Stretching out from Capital are ten subsidiaries with tentacles reaching out all across the Pacific; some subsidiaries have subsidiaries; one sub-subsidiary in turn controls three other corporations. Through Capital, Ho controls the whole complex. "We can arrive at very fast decisions," he says. "That's the essence of our operation. We don't maintain any traditional holdings, no land that grandfather owned. Every last bit of our assets has a quotation."

Hawaii-born Chinn Ho started out as a bank messenger after graduation from high school, jumped to a brokerage house, studied the stock market reports so dili gently that he became a customers' man. With his shrewd head for finance, Ho began to supervise a number of hui; he speculated in Philippine real estate, bought Waikiki land for as low as 40-c- a square foot. During World War II, he stepped up his operations, bought up choice Hawaiian land put on the market by islanders fearful of Japanese invasion.

"This Is a Small Town." By 1944 Ho's hui had become too large and awkward to manage so informally. Ho formed Capi tal Investment Co., three years later made his first big killing at the expense of Castle & Cooke, one of Hawaii's conservative "big five" companies. He coolly raised Castle & Cooke's $800,000 bid for the 9,000 acres of a defunct sugar company on Oahu. Four years later, after parceling off only 40% of the land to small farmers, Ho had collected $3,000,000 more than he had paid for the acreage. Ho is saving the balance of the land for a development that he thinks will be worth $25 million.

In 1955 he outmaneuvered the Oahu Sugar Co. for 230 acres that it desperately wanted on the venerable Mark Robinson estate. The land controlled the irrigation track into the sugar company's fields, also the roads over which its cane-hauling trucks had to move. Ho extracted only an ounce of flesh when Oahu Sugar came to him after it had been outbid. "I could really have been tough on them," he says. "I could have sold for a $500,000 profit instead of only $150,000. But they'd never speak to me again, and this is a small town."

Ho foresightedly cuts local businessmen in on his projects outside Hawaii, firmly believes that investing U.S. companies can no longer angle for complete control of their enterprises in the strongly nationalistic Asian countries. But in spite of his big-league operations across the Pacific. Ho is still the head of countless hui. He still gets phone calls from Oriental widows who have faith in his reputation--and $1,000 to invest.

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