From WIRE REPORTS
The illegitimate Vietnamese American son of a controversial U.S. billionaire just finished a secret visit to Viet Nam with his mother and two half-brothers.
Nguyen Be Lory, the 18-year-old heir to around $50 million from the fortune of late DHL founder and owner Larry Hillblom Jr., visited his mother’s hometown in Binh Thuan Province in south central Viet Nam, where his out-of-wedlock father established the now famous Novotel hotel and the 18-hole Ocean Dunes Golf Course 20 years ago.
News website VnExpress said the visit was Lory’s first after 13 years in the U.S. Lory left Viet Nam as a young child.
He and his family also visited Con Dao Island as Lory was curious about the place Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie went with their six children late last year.
The teenager showed interest in a villa on sale for around $2 million on the island, and said he would come back soon, VnExpress reported.
As the boy is still a student, his inheritance has been invested by his money managers in businesses under his name. He will receive the funds at age 21.
The boy was born one year after Larry Hillblom met his mother, Nguyen Thi Be, then a room-service staff member at his hotel and golf course in Phan Thiet, the capital town of Binh Thuan.
Hillblom only knew about the Vietnamese son through a photo sent to him when the boy was several months old. That was soon before the billionaire, a flight enthusiast, was killed in a plane crash in May 1995 on his way home to Saipan.
Various women then claimed that at least 10 children they had were Hillblom’s. They accused him of statutory rape.
But there has been no DNA for confirmation as Hillblom’s body never was recovered.
His house was mysteriously wiped clean after the accident. His sinks had been scrubbed with muriatic acid, and toothbrushes, combs, hairbrushes and clothes were found buried in the backyard.
In legal proceedings that lasted until 1999, when a judge ordered Hillblom’s mother and brother to summit to genetic testing, three other children were identified as Hillblom’s, including one from Guam and two from the Philippines.
Each child inherited $90 million, which was taxed, and $240 million was given to the University of California for medical research as Hillblom had stipulated in his will.
Hillblom, a law graduate, co-founded the shipping service, DHL, in 1969.
The billionaire’s life has been featured in James Scurlock’s biography “King Larry: The Life and Ruins of a Billionaire Genius,” published in January, telling of his expatriate life from the early 1980s in the Western Pacific, when he led the resistance to American meddling in the Mariana Islands, rewrote the tax code and real-estate laws, and became a Supreme Court justice.
His paternity controversy was documented in Alexis Spraic’s “Shadow Billionaire,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009.
