Friday, Sep 11: Lenny Mills, Jr.

Good morning. Welcome to the second hour of the program. I'm Chris McCarthy. I'm joined by my good friend, Lenny Moos, Jr., who helped us select me. Good morning, Lenny. How are you? Very good, Chris. Good morning to you. So, Lenny, by the way, it's 9-11, 25 years later. What's your recollection of 9-11 and the World Trade Center? Go ahead. Yeah. You know, we reflect now, 25 years later, like you mentioned. And for me, I was in the World Trade Center earlier that summer before, you know, September being the fall, in my opinion, right, I'm saying, just the mark time. I was there for a meeting. I was on the 50th floor. I was working out a contract for a franchise in a business that I had. And it was a beautiful, first time I had ever been there. Yep. It was a great experience to go there and go up to the 50th floor. And the view, by the way, was unbelievable. I know you said at the break here that you had been in it, too. Oh, yeah, amazing. It's magnificent, right? And what's the quote you said? So, I had a brochure from a family trip in the 70s or 80s. We went to the World Trade Center, my family, I was a kid. And I found the brochure later. And what it said is, the closest some of you will ever get to heaven. Yeah. Absolutely beautiful view, right? It was breathtaking. And it's pretty prestigious for those companies to be in there, right, international trade and every single floor. So then we came back and I didn't think anything of it, right? You went there. You just did your thing. You're back. And then all of a sudden, September 11th, I was in Providence working on a job and I was on my way back to East Providence. I stopped at a local place to meet some contractors for a coffee and the TV was on. And next thing you know, on comes the news and you get the visuals of the planes running into the building and it's just unbelievable to see it. It's a very, very humbling experience for me to have seen it. And then you think to yourself, all those people and then who are they and what are they all about? People I had met maybe 90 days to 100 days earlier and we were working with them. And then I started to find out that there were people that I knew that were there. Yeah. I have a friend that his mother and father lived there. They lived in the trade center, right? They worked and lived there. And then I had a friend that I did work for as a contractor. His sister had never flown before. She was terrified of flying and she finally had gusted up enough nerve to go to Boston and fly to Las Vegas. And she was unfortunately on the plane. So you hear these stories, right? And I can tell you a few others, but there's plenty of them out there, unfortunately. But yeah, those were my experiences, you know? And so at that point, I was doing a lot of work in the Cayman Islands and I started to think about my role, you know, as a businessman and traveling, right? Everyone said to me, will you ever get on a plane again? And I immediately did say I would get on it, you know? I didn't have any reservations and everyone was saying that, well, you know, you might want to think about this or that. But I actually flew to the Caymans two weeks after that. Really? So yeah. And that was my experience with that. It didn't bother me, you know? But through the years, you start to learn the more knowledge you get and things like that. And then my roles changed in the Cayman Islands. I became in charge of, you know, taking care of, I became the chairman of a strata out there and I started to run a resort out there. And it started to make me think about things that could happen over there. Not only the terrorists or we're surrounded by like different countries that islands that are poor, which are countries. Yeah. They come over, they try to come over and rob and do different things. And you start to think about how you protect your people. Right. Yes. And lo and behold, on September 11th, three, three years later, we got hit with Ivan, Hurricane Ivan in the Cayman Islands. Devastating hurricane. Yeah, it was. It was a summer of unbelievable hurricanes anyhow. If anyone researches that 2004 tracks of hurricanes, it was one of the most it was the most active one that I've ever lived through, you know, in my lifetime. I don't know if it's ever the most, but it was I mean, it was they went into Florida, hit Florida many, many times. And so Ivan was a hurricane category five and it hit the Caymans out of four. And anybody that knows anything about hurricanes, the biggest threat to hurricanes other than the obvious is the surge of water, right? That the wind push, you know, if anybody to give you a audience, a visual when your coffee's hot and you blow in it to cool it and you see the waves, right? Or you blow in your your soup, right? The court. Yeah. Well, hurricane does the same thing. Right. And so those waves are phenomenal. So I know between we're 90 miles from the Cayman Islands is 90 miles from Jamaica and they have meters in there that measure the waves all the time, not just because of this, but the waves were recorded at an over 90 feet high, over 90 feet high during Ivan and the Cayman Islands, unlike Jamaica, as like Jamaica, Jamaica has elevations over six thousand feet high. Oh, yeah. I know a guy who taught karate up in those. Yeah. No, don't remind me. I was young and not that educated back then. And I did take some risks. But that being said, I mean, you could be down on Montego Bay or Ocho Rios and on the beach in 90 something degree weather and look up at the mountains and you could see snow caps. So this gives you an analogy which switches me to the Cayman Islands. The highest elevation on the Cayman Island is 60 feet, six zero, not six hundred, not six thousand. Yes. Sixty feet. So there was a moment in the satellite during the Hurricane Ivan that the Cayman Islands was not visible by the satellite because of the surge of water. You know that. Really? Yeah. So it was a scary time. Devastating. Devastating time. I was there the day before Ivan. Yeah. I've been through some hurricanes over there, close ones, not so close ones, very close ones. Ivan, I left because I knew better. I left literally the day before. I flew back as soon as the government would let us. The only people that could fly back after Ivan were people that had, you know, copy of their deed that they own property and the airlines were checking that in Boston to let you go on. But what I'm getting at is it made me start to learn about preparedness as a leader. You know, I says, boy, I better start getting on top of this stuff. Yeah. And so ultimately I became the the chairman of the Reconstruction Committee over there for our organization. And we went on to rebuild the place. It was some question by some of the owners that maybe the buildings would have. We have four buildings that place I'm speaking of to you now. Yeah. Four separate buildings right on Seven Mile Beach, and there was some question whether they'd be torn down. And by the way, a lot of places what we're torn down. Why would you turn them? Why would you? Why would why would that be a thing? Oh, the damage that was done so old. Well, yeah. So the biggest threat is I always tell everybody, like you see buildings in like New York, like the one we're speaking of today or Providence and Boston, any city. Those foundations are set, they're they're piled, piled, driven into the ledge. That's what holds those buildings up because the soil can't unlike your house and my house. When I do a foundation residential or small commercial, let's say, for example, everyone knows a Dunkin Donuts. Yes. Foundations. I set them right up on soil. OK. Suitable soil. But on a building that that that tall, not only with the height, the wind is a big challenge for a building, biggest challenge for them. So those buildings have to be set on pylons into the bedrock. And that's what keeps those buildings from tipping over from the wind. In the Caribbean, you want to always buy and invest in a condominium or anything like that that has pylons driven into the coral base and the same thing, which is, you know, which is a bedrock. OK, I know. So a lot of them weren't. All right. See, a lot of them weren't. So those those those fatigue, they had structural damages, cracks and failures that just couldn't be because they were cost prohibitive to remodel. Sure. The place that I was involved in and owned in there was driven into the coral bed. So they were structurally sound. I could tell by looking at it, you know, that eventually I needed experts to come in. I had to answer to a lot of owners. Yeah. And by the way, a lot of powerful, wealthy owners out there. One of them was Bud Adams, who passed away, but he used to own the Tennessee Titans, right? Royal Tycoon. He was an owner there with us. So, you know, oh, Lenny, it looks good. We appreciate it and everything. But we want some science. And of course, I'm not reckless. Anyhow, I knew we would have to deliver that. So those things are how we eventually made an analysis. But the most important thing I learned was being prepared because I wasn't actually the chairman of the strata at the time. OK. I was became the I first became I became the chairman of the Hurricane Reconstruction Committee. But after that, with their infinite wisdom, they elected me to be chairman. Right. And by the way, I wasn't even there at that annual meeting that was held in the Western and Seven Mile Beach. And I was in Las Vegas at the Concrete Convention. My father called me up and he told me, hey, congratulations. I said, for what? He goes, you're now the chairman over here. I says, oh, my God, I didn't even volunteer for that. I'm not that I was disappointed, but I really was surprised. Surely, you know, this is a sincere story. So anyhow, immediately I said, I can't not be prepared for this stuff going forward. So there's a lot of challenges. When I went out there, we were you know, the place was devastated. Ten thousand vehicles were immobilized. The wave of water came. It was salt. It was salt water and salt water got in the electrical of the vehicle. So none of the vehicles would run except for a few. And the ones that did would catch on fire within a week or so because of the wiring. So we had them catching on fire on the streets that were still there. The streets were ripped up. It looked like a war zone. It literally looked like a war zone. You go on a street and there's sand all over and wrecked vehicles and debris and boats from, you know, the harbors were right in the middle of downtown. We're talking about Lenny Miller Jr. from Rehoboth. He's talking about his time, 9-11, when Hurricane Ivan struck his property in the Cayman Islands. So it looks like a war zone, the place. Now, I've been on Cayman Islands and it's an island, obviously. Where did you get the supplies to rebuild all that stuff? So if you can imagine, there wasn't literally not one telephone pole at the on the island that was not broken. Everyone was broken. And we lived without electricity and water for six months. It's a British isle. We lived under martial law. So I lived there. So from 7 at night to 7 in the morning, you literally not only couldn't go on the street, you couldn't come out of your property outside in the yards and stuff. So it was against the law. And you obeyed that. And I'm here to tell you, they mean business when they do that. And so consequently, you know, we had to start thinking of how we're going to rebuild, where we're going to get supplies from. Now, remember what I said earlier, the whole Caribbean was ravaged with hurricanes. So every island was looking for materials and everybody on the Cayman Islands looking. So it became a challenge. So I soon started to figure out, you know, who was in the business like myself. I'm in business. And Bud Adams had connections. And there was a guy in Chicago that ran a very large roofing and a company, I mean, a large roofing company, thousands of employees. So I started to get them to get us this, the supplies and ship them over and pay the duties and get it done. And so it was a real challenge. So yeah, but the biggest thing was planning. Like I learned that I had to be planned. I have to plan going forward. So we had, you know, you think you just need generators and you need this and that. Well, it isn't that simple because if you don't store you, like we all have generators. I have one at my house. I'm sure your friends have a lot of them and they're on the ground where you don't want to put them on the ground, a generator on an island, because when you get water surge from the ocean, they know they're no good. It's a burn. You don't want your fuel sitting in a garage floor somewhere or a utility room right on the ground because they get washed away. I mean, this literally, this literally overtook the whole island. Like I say again earlier, the island was not visible by satellite for 20 minutes from the water cooling over it. So people were in tall buildings. They went to the tallest buildings they could go. And you want to know an ironic thing is that nobody died on that island. Really? Nobody died. Yeah. But afterward, I mean, people were living 20, 25, 30 people in a house to help each other out. So the planning became important and it became a challenge that I never had before because I'm used to like I'm when in Rome, I was used to being a Roman, so I was used to Northeast where we live and we're sitting here today. Challenges like that for hurricanes and never in my wildest dream that I knew I would be in this situation and have to plan. So we put a lot of thought into it, you know, we got a lot of experts in the key to leadership is hiring the right people. Right. And I can tell you in my businesses, I don't I can't do every phase of my business at all, especially the day to day operations. But I hire the best people. Yes. And I make sure they're smarter than me. Right. It's very, very important. I know a lot of owners and leaders don't like to do that might make them look bad. You know, this is their philosophy, but not me, not me. The most important thing for me in a job is to become more or less irrelevant than others, hire the right people and get them to do the job, oversee them, keep an eye on it. You know what I'm saying? Guide it. You know what I mean? So that's what I did. And so I needed a lot of help to prepare for something like that. So you can imagine now coming back to 9-11. Yes. Something like that never happened in this country. Can you imagine being in leadership, the president of the United States and all the people in New York, the leaders, the mayors and everything, and all the public safety people, the challenges. Yes. And the immediacy of all these people's lives devastated and thousands of deaths. And, you know, we're still having settlements now with people with their health. We're not even close to the finality. You know, so a lot of times the public doesn't understand what leadership has and the leadership can't always articulate it or describe it for for legal reasons or safety reasons. Or they don't even understand. They don't understand it. So some of the people who are in leadership don't even understand how to be leaders. Right. They got elected because they were popular and maybe the only person on the ballot. Yeah. And so consequently, when something like this happens, we get a wake up call. Right. Yeah. World War Two, Pearl Harbor. We got a wake up call. Right. Just to state the obvious. So it's a very unfortunate thing. And I can tell you, I wasn't in leadership in the Caymans, but I soon became like I described to you in the audience, our audience, I became one. But I was not going to get caught, you know, not knowing what to do and have the right safeguards in places. And I had to hire the best people on that island to advise me. And I did. I worked day and night to make sure I did. And I'm here to tell you, I still don't understand the full part of it. But I do 100 percent if we went there, flew there right now this afternoon, I'd show you who to hire. I'm game. Let's go. Yeah. Very important. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break. More with Lenny Mills Jr. talking about 9-11 and there's a lot of things that did happen on 9-11. By the way, the Republican Town Committee will have a table across from the Apple Peach Festival on Saturday. They'll also have some folks who are running for office at the table attending the festival. Stop by and say hello. All the great Republicans, unenrolled and Democrats, welcome out to the Apple Peach Festival. The Republicans look forward to welcoming both the candidates and the residents. They wish everyone a happy, successful Apple Peach Festival. So head out to the Apple Peach Festival this Saturday. We'll take a break. We'll be right back. You want to talk about 9-11 or anything with Lenny? He's here with me. We'll have Tom Hodgson coming in the next hour. He has some very interesting experiences from 9-11. He was down there post-attack to help out. Stick around. We'll be right back. Back to Chris McCarthy and South Coast now on WBSM. Call 508-996-0500. Welcome back to the program. It's Friday. It's the 25th anniversary of 9-11. Also the anniversary, 1971, General Pinochet overthrew the communist government of Allende in Chile. And then Allende shot himself in the head with an AK-47 he'd gotten from Fidel Castro. That was over. And then a period of robust economic self-determination happened in Chile. So anyway, a lot of things happened on 9-11, good and bad. So Lenny's also talking about the fact that a few years after the 9-11 attack on America, Mother Nature overreacted and had a big hurricane, a tremendously devastating hurricane in the Cayman Islands to his properties in the Cayman Islands. But you learned a lot out of that. Yeah. I did, like I was explaining a little earlier, I learned preparedness and to always be ready for it. In other words, it's easy to become complacent and if I can use words like soft and not think it's going to happen again and not make it a priority. But it has to be a priority because at any moment, these tragedies strike and the leadership always has to have the people, the equipment, the connections, the relationships with different people between venues and politicians and businesses. It's a combination. I'll give you an example. It translated this winter with the blizzard. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So the blizzard, I mean, everybody knows and I mean it humbly, not in an arrogant way, but we're proud. Rehoboth was, if not the one of the best towns around to drive through, you know, and we have over 200 miles of roads, 47 square miles to cover with those 200 miles. But we were ready way ahead of time. We had relationships with private contractors. We spoke to them. We had contracts with them. We were all ready to go. And I know some of the towns that I talked to didn't do that and then they were trying to scramble to get them when the storm started to go and get deeper and deeper and then their trucks couldn't take care of it, just like our trucks couldn't take care of it. But we were prepared for that, you know. So those are the things you learn and you constantly have to do. And so now you think, well, you might not get another blizzard for whatever in my lifetime, but no, I do have, I still, every year I have to make sure I'm keeping those relationships with the contractors and some of them retire, go out of business and you need new ones. And I'm always looking for that and I'm looking to put the right people, like the superintendent, to hire the superintendent knows more than me about the roads in Rehoboth. But I hire him and he's a lot smarter and a lot better, but that's my job for the people is to do that. Right. And that's what leadership has to do. You got to get rid of your ego. You know what I mean? You have to get rid of trying to take it to do everything yourself. You have to really step up and do those things. And so the big thing with these things is always expect what can't happen. It's kind of like the fight business, right? You never know when you're going to get hit with something, right? You just never know. You have to be prepared for it, you know, and how do you prepare? That's the key to leadership. We always talk about hurricanes because we live, you know, we had a couple bad ones over the years. It's been a number of years since we've had them. But that's just around the corner, really. We're in hurricane season now. You've lived through them, preparing for them. I know that Mayor Mitchell has tabletop exercises with his department heads. What are we doing? We talk about it here on the X. I'm fascinated by it. And the fact that I can remember my cottage got hit. The property was spared, but everybody around us got wiped out. I can remember walking down it as a young man with my dad. I think I was just, was I home from the army now? I think I had been. Yeah, I must have been. And there's electrical wires all over the street, people without electricity. That ocean's unforgiving. Yeah. And so there's so many factors to it, right, Chris? It's not just, you know, that comes and it breaks some wires and trees. I mean, it does devastating things if it's to that level. But you have to think about, you have to think about all the public safeties. How do you get an ambulance to somebody under those conditions? How does the police report to those conditions? How does the fire department get there? I mean, how do you take care of the sick? What do you do with people if it's in the winter and the blizzard and they have no heat? Where are you going to put them? Where are you going to mobilize them? And how are you going to, once you get them there, how are you going to feed them? Right. And by the way, when you get them in there, is there generators that are going to work in there? And is there backup systems? Because you need water and you need heat, right? You need all these things. So amongst all those things, and while you're doing all those things and all that, you're already forecasting, which hopefully you plan for as a leader, is how you're going to start to rebuild. And then you have the people are suffering. Yes. Like I can tell you, for example, in the Cayman Islands, but once that hurricane hit, it was over 90 degrees every day. There was no electricity on that island. No AC. There was nowhere to go. So the biggest damage to property that I've seen was not so much, you know, it was a lot of damage from the hurricane, don't misunderstand me. But it was after that, without air conditioning, you don't have dehumidifiers, right? You don't have any ability to dehumidify any building or unit. So everything became mildew six months without electricity. So everything that didn't get damaged was damaged. Now, I mean, you go to the point where you even have to think in a building, like all the vent ventilations and stuff. You might clean everything up aesthetically, new rugs, new furniture, new paint, right? New kitchen cabin trees, all those things, it looks good. But if you don't think of your ductwork, you put people in there, they're getting sick, right? There's so many things. And was, did the wire, do you have exposed wire? How old are the buildings? You know, did any of that get corroded from the moisture and stuff? So it is a tremendous thing to undertake. And if you're trying to do it because you didn't plan for it, you're in big trouble. You're in big trouble, right? Yeah. So leadership, good leaders cannot do that. You have to really, really prepare for that stuff. And there's a lot to it. I mean, all the things we're saying, and you have to keep doing it and redoing it, it has to become an automatic response once it hits you. You can't react to it. You're going to react that it's hitting you, don't misunderstand me. But your plan can't be a reaction to it. But then you have to adjust too, because you don't know which main roads are going to be shut down. Right. Or bridges or, you know what I mean? These electricity falls down, the road could be in perfect condition, but you can't cross it because there's live wires on it. Yes. Right. So, yeah. Lenny Mills, Selectman and Rehoboth, international businessman, is my guest today talking about, well, it's sort of morphed into leadership talking about how do leaders deal with crises like a terrorist attack or a hurricane, any of that type of stuff, where the population is panicked without supplies, possibly even without electricity, often without electricity, right? Yeah. And it's the human factor that haunts the soul of a leader, because you have people displaced and they're with their elderly family and the family members, and they're with people that are sick. You know what I'm saying? There was one this winter that the person had slipped at home and they were bedridden. They couldn't move and they had no electricity and there was no way to get anything there. So I'll share this with you, which I don't like to do because I don't want it to come across in a bragging way, but I have trucks with generators installed in them, permanently installed. So I had one of my workers drive there with the truck and plug in the generator to keep the life support thing going for the person. It's the first time I've disclosed that, and I'm not looking for any credit or anything. But I'm just saying, leaders are always looking back. You have to do a look back on who's not being helped, who isn't. And then they have animals. People are there, they have animals, you know, and children. And you say, well, it's an animal. I don't believe that, but people say that. But those are comfort for the children and for the elderly and even for adults. Animals are family members. Yeah. For most people. Not everybody feels that way, but hopefully those people don't have animals. But if you've got a dog or a cat or whatever, a pet monkey, whatever, it's like a member of the family. Yeah. And so you take, like, Rehoboth, if you don't have electricity, you don't have water. Right. Oh, because they're all wells. Because we have wells and pumps. So we're out of business. And so you don't have water and we don't have, we don't have, you know, heating systems, stuff like that. So it's important, you know, some of the systems more and more in Rehoboth are built above the ground, you know, because of the requirements for the Commonwealth and in our town and other towns. So those need pump up system. So those those systems can back up. Right. So in the Cayman Islands, where I was operating it back, going back to that, and I know I'm vacillating, but I'm saying all the challenges, if people are interested, you know, we had city water and sewage. We have that on that island. It's a very, very advanced island, you know. But the sewage system broke, it had a problem. In the grocery store. The ocean got into it? The ocean got in and lifted the pipes and put the wrong pitch on and it ran backwards. And there's only, at the time, two grocery stores and they're very large and advanced grocery stores, a state of the art, beautiful grocery stores. But the main grocery store, Foster's, had four feet of sewage in it. So I mean, you got to feed people, you got to take care of them. So if you're not, if you haven't had a plan ahead of time, of course, we work with the president of the island ahead of time and the leaders of the government and the leaders of business. It's very important. The business people are extremely important. I can tell you, Rehoboth, in that blizzard, without the private contractors in our town, we were in big trouble because we couldn't handle it alone. And everybody was fighting. When that happens, everybody is fighting for the same contractors. That's the point, right? The competition for resources. Right. Yeah. It's competition for resources. And then when you have to rebuild, like in the island, for example, everybody's fighting for, everyone gets their insurance checks at the same time. And then they're all fighting for the same electricians, the same plumbers. Some of the places weren't rebuilt until five, six years later. We were open in six months. Really? Out of 5,000 available rooms, we were part of a pool. We were part of the first 500 that opened up in six months. We were proud of that. I lived there. I was there all the time. You've got to be proud of that. Yeah, yeah. We all. It was a group effort. I didn't do it alone because, again, I'm telling you, I know one thing. My most important thing in leadership is to hire the right people. Hire the right people. Put them in there. People who are what? Smarter than you, right? A lot smarter than you. They have to be a lot smarter, and you have to let them go. You have to let them do their job. You can't interfere with them. You can't micromanage them. You pay attention, and you're watching, and you're watching how they move. It's like a team, right? You're watching your team, right? But you have to let them run their business and their leadership the way you hired them to do. Hopefully, you have good hires. 508-996. If you want to get on the conversation, you can. Talking with Lenny Miller Jr., it's morphed into sort of a conversation about leadership skills, experiences, disasters that people have been through. If you've got something to add to that, we'll take your call. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back. This portion of programming on WBSM brought to you by South Coast Health, Advanced Medicine, More Care. South Coast Now with Chris McCarthy, weekdays on 1420 AM and 99.5 FM, WBSM. Welcome back to the program. This hour is brought to you by the cold beer and the world's best chicken wings at Rose New Bedford. They've got a great website. Check it out. Make a reservation. They've got a full menu. All kinds of drinks with alcohol and without alcohol. All available at Rose Alley Ale House. Again, great weekend to head to Rose Alley, have a couple of drinks, make a few mistakes, get out of the house, get to Rose Alley Ale House. Continue the conversation with Lenny Miller Jr. So, Lenny, we're talking all about all this preparedness for disasters, how to handle disasters, natural, man-made, all the rest. Where does the money come from? Because you can't do anything without money. Explain that to us. Yes. So, of course, my saying is if you have a problem and you need money to solve the problem, if you have money, you don't have a problem. So that's part of the plan. That's part of the preparedness. So I'll give you an example with the storm in Rehoboth, the blizzard. We knew it was going to come. It was going to be bad. So everybody, everybody from town hall to the building maintenance department and the highway department was prepared to document, take pictures, keep detailed notes of everyone they hired and their hours and the size of the equipment and everything. And we were going to submit to the state because we felt at the end it would be some relief coming. Sure. And lo and behold, right, it was a very expensive adventure for us. And we were awarded two weeks ago, the Commonwealth awarded us three hundred and sixty thousand dollars paying us back reimbursement. That's fantastic. It was all of our documentation was well by our people, you know, so we instruct. We instructed that. I made sure they were ready to do that. They did an excellent job. I left them to do that. And at the end, you know, like the gambler says, Kenny Rogers, time enough account and when the deal is done, we get the job done. Right. And we I have to go to town meeting for the money, the three, you know, 250 to three hundred and fifty thousand. I'm not sure the exact amount the people voted for. Not one person questioned. They understood it was a blizzard. Sure. But now we get the money back. So isn't that a good plan now in the Caymans? The problem was, is every place was destroyed. And like I said, all the hurricanes hit all the islands. And if you research that, it's all all documented. A lot, a lot of the insurance companies internationally went bankrupt. They filed a bankruptcy. They couldn't pay out. So I had a friend, for example, that owned a house. He owned a condo. He owned his building and he owned his business and he had vehicles, all five different insurers. Right. He lives on the island. He's a native. His name's Robert Wood. Very reputable family from the Cayman Islands. All five insurance insureds filed bankruptcy. He got he had nothing, zero, nothing. So we will play, you know, but we were pressed with now I was thrown into this hurricane committee reconstruction. And where are we going to get the money from? Because our insured did not go bankrupt. OK, we were going to wait like everyone else. And I said to my owners, if we wait, everyone's all the other condominiums on the seven mile beach is going to basically get the money at the same time. We're going to be fighting. There's only so many subs. It's strict, strict immigration over there. OK. Don't just bring people over there. Everybody who I hire and everyone that works there has to go through the government. You can't I can't bring workers over there to work. You can't do that. It's against the law. So we had a conversation with some of the owners and they haven't they had an account there with a large amount of money in it, a large amount of money. And so we went I sent out a memo and we had my owners were from all over the world, from Rome, Italy, from Canada, from Saudi Arabia, from Jamaica. I mean, the United States, honestly, from all over the world, including a lot of states in the United States. And so we had a vote that they would allow me to use that account and get the money back. So I kind of chuckled because some people said, well, what happens if you don't get the money back? I says, well, we're not going to rebuild the place anyhow. Right. So you got to rebuild it. You want either way. You're going to be fighting over subs. Yes. I won't be able to get them for you once the money's released to everybody. So let's use that money now, rebuild and hope we get it back. And of course, we recaptured the money, you know, and it worked out fine. But either way, we had to rebuild it. There wasn't a teardown. Right. A lot of places did choose. We had an option. We could have tore it down and sold to a developer in that area. We owned at that time the one I'm talking about, three hundred and fifty feet of beachfront on Seven Mile Beach, which is a golden, golden, priceless. If we had sold out, they could have added another hundred and twenty five condominiums more than what we had. They would have tore it down and had that much more. So our owners didn't want to do that. And consequently, we rebuilt it. And my reward was to become chairman over there for almost 10 years. And I enjoyed it. But it's a challenge. Internationally, it's challenging. You're dealing with people just like in town. They have their own their own way. They own their own houses. They want to do things a certain way. They want to get down the street. They want to do what they want to take care of their family. They want it out there. They're all all rich, wealthy business people. And it's hard to tell. Like I tell everybody, it's not we hope it is a lot easier for me not only because I come there, but like in the Cayman Islands, they were all multimillionaires. But Adam was a billionaire. It's hard to tell a billionaire how to run his business. I mean, they own the condos. So it's a challenge, you know, but I got a lot of experience out of it. But I will tell you this. I learned the importance of preparedness. You have to. And I really, really value hiring high quality people. That actually catastrophic quoted me forward with my own businesses. But from that point, I learned a lot of lessons and I started hiring a lot better from that point on the the situation down there in the Cayman Islands, when I don't think people can I mean, might have glossed over too quickly. In other words, there was going to be a sudden glut of money and not enough labor is not enough material. You knew that was going to happen. Yeah. In other words, I couldn't go to Honduras or Jamaica or Cuba. We do business with Cuba. The rest of the world does. The United States. No. At the time. Right. The embargo was by the United States. Just to put it in perspective, I couldn't go there and hire, you know, 50 laborers and bring them over there, start cleaning up and doing it. That's against the law. Even under those emergency service, they weren't going to do it because you can realize what the problem is. They don't know who's coming in the country, stuff like that. So after the country was really rebuilt for the most part on its feet, I would say two years later, OK, they literally the Cayman Islands government, which the president I had met and my friend Robert Wood was his best friend. They went to school together and they played dominoes every day at lunchtime. They literally had to have the British government come in with secret police to round up the people that wouldn't leave. They could not find them. And this island is seven miles wide, 22 miles long. And at the time, the population was about twenty five thousand. They could not find them. The Cayman Island Police Authority and the immigration. So the British government had to come in with special task force and they found them. They did find them. So immigration is an important thing all over the world. But in the Caymans, it's strict. You don't get away with what goes. I don't think people realize in this country, really, how much liberalism there is with immigration. Right. In our country. Right. They don't realize you go to other countries. You can't. You cannot do anything like this at all. No, I've been to other countries and you're 100 percent right. Yeah. I mean, work permits like when we hire someone out there. Right. We have to hire somebody and they come to work from another country, you know, and they have to specifically work permit for us. Now, if they want to leave, they can leave the island freely the same. They can leave right now if they want to go. But if they want to leave right now and go work for your company or another, they can't do that. Right. They have to go back to the government and ask permission to change their permit. And they're not really receptive to doing that. No. They want to control because what happens is they they lose control of the workers, you know, and then too many people have to come in and it's too hard. And like we got, we have a lot of liberal policies with immigration. It's costing us a lot of money to to to operate that way. Yeah. There's people don't realize it. But the money's flying out, you know, by the by the second in this country for immigration issues. You know, we're going to take a break. We'll be back. Mode. Lenny Miller. You remember, we'll have Tom Hodgson with his reflections in the 11 o'clock hour on the attack on the country on 9-11 25 years ago. Stick around. Family. Welcome back to the program. I'm Chris McCarthy. We're joined by Lenny Miller, Jr. Lenny, of course, the selectmen in Rehoboth, which makes him a police commissioner out there. Lenny, what do you think of this attitude of people not liking the police, trying to fund the police, taking tools away from the police? That's not your attitude, I don't think. No, absolutely. I'm pro police. I'm pro. Rehoboth is pro police. It's a very pro police. The police, I work with them hand in hand to make sure they're in the community. I give them all my support I can so that we're going to have a public safety day coming up where the fire, the police, the ambulance, everyone will be there. They'll come to talk. They go to Dunkin' Donuts so many times a year, and they shake hands, and they give the kids our little badges. It's just a good relations thing. The police officers do a tremendously good job. Unfortunately, I mean, the people that make it bad make it bad for everyone, but we have to control that as us as citizens. We can't blow it out of proportion. I know for a fact that there's less issues with police across the country than there is with clergy of all denominations by far in that, so to speak, business. I'm not casting suspicion on any religion, but that's all religions. That's a small amount of people in the police department that happens, and it does have to be corrected, just like the cameras. They got to put in the safeguards, but other than that, the cameras are here to protect us. Yeah. If you're a leader, as you are, you got to realize you need good policies, all that, and you got to take action if people do the wrong thing. If I have a problem at my house tonight and someone breaks in, I'm not going to call you. I'm going to call the police department. What happens when they're not there? What happens if they're defunded enough that they can't, or they don't have the tools to fight whatever they're up against? I don't think that's a good thing for people to believe. I don't believe in it, and I'm here to support the police on every level. Lenny Mills Jr. will stick around. Guys, we're going to-