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58 LAND AND POWER IN HAWAII • But Mehau and-others steadfastly denied that his involvement went any Q *urther,a denial bolstered by the fact that vigorous criminal investigations (� rom about 1978 till 1980 by three separate law enforcement agencies,coor- linated by the federal Organized Crime Strike Force and including a hear- ng of evidence by an investigative grand jury,.resulted in no charges being HAWAII: SUBDIVIDING nought. As with what Mehau told the Los Angeles Times,the criminal investigators LAVA FIELDS ind prosecutors found that Mehau had underworld associates, but appar- :ntly no underworld activities per se. Honolulu Advertiser reporter James Cooley wrote: "Investigators found Mehau to have created a remarkable ietwork of personal ties with rich and powerful figures of high and low -epute throughout Hawaii and the Pacific Basin." But, as Dooley added, 'personal associations are hardly ground for prosecution. . ." HAWAII'S real estate boom was brought to the Big Island in 1958 by two Far from dispelling the suspicions harbored by some, the investigations, V mainland businessmen from Denver,Colorado. is Dooley wrote, "if anything .. . may have served merely to broaden the Glen I. Payton and David E O'Keefe organized a Hawaii corporation nystique which has built up around the physically imposing Mehau since he called Tropic Estates Ltd., which included several local-Asians among its )egan to make a name for himself as a tough, no-nonsense cop in the members.In 1958 Tropic Estates bought 12,000 acres of land between Kur- 1950s."58 tistown and Mountain View in Puna from Big Island Democratic politician If questions lingered, however fairly or unfairly, about Larry Mehau as and businessman Robert M. Yamada. The land was cut up into 4,000 lots -.ome kind of organized crime godfather,this was true of organized crime in which were put on the market for$500-$1,000 with terms as low as $150 ;eneral.The local syndicate was like a guerrilla force of unknown strength. down and $8 a month. The project was named Hawaiian Acres. The lots :t was known to be out there,a factor to be reckoned with in the equation of sold spectacularly well.' nodern Hawaii. But how big it really was, what territories it controlled, The effect of this success was electrifying.A Big Island subdividing boom vhat high ground it might be seeking to occupy—these were things that was on. For the next nine years new large-scale subdivisions were approved :ew or none outside of organized crime knew. And as of early 1985 no one after the other by.Hawaii County. iighly placed organized criminal had spoken comprehensively on the pub- There was substantial development of other kinds all over the Big Island is record. then and later that had counterparts elsewhere in the Islands:resort hotels at Hilo,with an international-size airstrip to serve them;heavy hotel and condo- minium building at Kailua-Kona;and an ambitious attempt,spearheaded by Gov. Burns, to transform the whole northern stretch of the west coast into a -regional resort complex,making it,in Burns'words,a"Gold Coast."2 But the developments unique to the Big Island were in the mold of the one in Puna that set off the boom:sizable acreage in remote areas,of little or no real economic use value,subdivided into house lots on which practically no one ever actually built homes. • Only on the Big Island was there so much empty space that had no foreseea- ble economic use.Thus nowhere else were there speculative subdivisions. Most of the really big subdivisions of this sort were done in the vast, sparsely populated southeast and southern districts of the island,in Puna, Ka`u,and South Kona. By the time the Big Island boom came to a halt in the mid-1970s,some- thing like 80,000 lots of this kind had been created—on an island whose population at the time was somewhat less than 80,000. * * *