Big Fish
In the eighties Tilman Fertitta’s seafood restaurants earned him millions while his hard-nosed business tactics earned him enemies. But these days the Galveston native is winning new respect in his hometown by standing up to the most powerful family on the Island.
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“It’s the one thing that gets to him,” sighs his father, Vic. “Because my son is a control freak, and this is the one thing he can’t control.” How do you prove the negative? Dean Witter vetted his finances before green-lighting the public offering of Landry’s, and the Secret Service all but turned his underwear inside out before letting him host a fundraiser for Clinton last September. I’ve seen his architect’s blueprints for the Kemah development, and the closest thing to a casino that’s in the works is a Ferris wheel for kids. And for what it’s worth, his temperament and his last name aside, Tilman Fertitta is about as Italian as Hakeem Olajuwon.
But his great-great-uncles, Palermo emigrants Rose and Sam Maceo, are another matter. Every Galvestonian knows the legend of the Maceo brothers: local barbers who became bootleggers and then in 1926 opened up the Hollywood Dinner Club and later the Balinese Room—complete with air conditioning (a rarity in those days), glorious food, big-time entertainers like Fred Astaire and Guy Lombardo, and a fully loaded casino. Genteel Sam and whip-smart Rose brought a glamorous cachet to the Island, kept out the Chicago mob, discouraged the residents from gambling, donated to charities great and small, and propped up the town’s economy—which helps explain why many still view the wide-open era as Galveston’s moment of greatest glory.
Yet what the Maceos ran for thirty years was indisputably an organized-crime syndicate. The brothers’ slot machines were ubiquitous, and their homemade booze was distilled and bottled in a large Galveston warehouse. They could defy the law because the local lawmen were on their payroll—“Paid them off, every month, in cash,” according to 85-year-old Pete Salvato, a close ally of the Maceos who operated casinos in the Galveston County town of Dickinson. “They used the law to chase the competition out of town.” Judges and politicians were equally compromised. Additionally, the Maceos owned a number of legitimate local businesses—a fish house, a dairy, a trucking company, a concrete-mixing company—and applied their muscle to ensure that these industries as well remained under their control.
The Maceo era came to an end on June 19, 1957, when state attorney general Will Wilson filed civil action against the brothers and their lieutenants—including their nephews Victor and Anthony Fertitta. Six days later Tilman was born.
Fertitta was two when his great-uncle Anthony moved off to Las Vegas, three when his grandfather Victor died. In Houston, that tenuous connection was enough to make him a mafioso. But in Galveston, people took a different view of things. There, the Maceos and Fertittas were public-spirited, instinctively charitable gentlemen whose word was their bond. Not only were they not evildoers, they were everything a hero should be. Which was, in the view of many Islanders, everything a Moody was not.
A historian would be hard-pressed to find another Texas family that has given so much away only to be so hated. The Moodys have been a public relations disaster ever since Colonel Will Moody, Sr., evaluated the Great Storm of 1900 thusly to his son: “The fewer people on the Island, the better the hunting and fishing will be for us.” Unlike the Sealys, who provided the first big bequest for Galveston’s number one employer, the University of Texas Medical Branch; or the Kempners, whose generosity has always been discreet yet profound; or George Mitchell, whose revival of the Strand district was a magnificent labor of love; or for that matter the Maceos—unlike the other Galveston scions, the Colonel’s tribe has always seemed to give begrudgingly, even bitterly, and with the expectation of a payback.
Colonel Moody’s great-grandchildren may be the most roundly despised generation yet. Most notably, Shearn Moody, Jr., was carted off to prison in the late eighties for receiving kickbacks from recipients of questionable Moody Foundation grants (and was pronounced the sleaziest man in Texas on the cover of this magazine). Shearn is now dead, leaving his brother Bobby to bear the town’s scorn. He’s an easy target, being almost Garbo-esque in his elusiveness—the better, he says, to avoid the attention of tax assessors and kidnappers. Instead, Moody leaves it up to his lieutenants, attorney Buddy Herz and brother-in-law Doug McLeod, to browbeat local politicians and the media into giving Moody whatever they say he wants. The Galveston County Daily News has shown considerable fortitude in speaking its mind, but city officials have continually indulged Moody’s wishes—because, as one frustrated ex-official observes, “By and large, a person isn’t going to speak up against the people who provide. So the Moodys have pretty much had their way.”
But has that way always come at the expense of Galveston? “At the Moody Foundation, we can give anywhere in the state we want,” Bobby Moody reminded me one afternoon over lunch. “But over the last thirty years, we have committed maybe $380 million in Galveston.” He pulled out a clipping from that morning’s newspaper that discussed the imminent opening of a Texas A&M marine biology school in Galveston—made possible, he informed me, by a $1.75 million matching grant by the Moody Foundation. The Moodys started putting money into the Strand long before Mitchell got there, he pointed out. And then there was Moody Gardens, which was founded in 1983 to rehabilitate victims of head injuries, such as Bobby’s son Russ, but was now one of Galveston’s greatest tourist attractions, with a IMAX 3D theater, a rain forest, and soon a NASA space museum and an aquarium. But in the meantime, he reminded me, “The Moody Foundation is building a convention center at Moody Gardens at no cost to the city.”
“But this hotel you’re building next to the convention center,” I said, interrupting him. “Leaving aside its merits, isn’t Fertitta right that building a hotel that’s exempt from federal and ad valorem taxes, has no debt service, gets subsidized by the city, and can offer all those attractions at Moody Gardens for free—isn’t he right that it puts hotels like his at an unfair competitive disadvantage?” Moody dropped his fork softly, folded his hands, and crinkled his left eye in thought. Finally he said, “Well, I don’t think Mr. Fertitta is going to have to pay federal income tax either, because I don’t think he’ll generate a profit on his hotel investment in the first place.”
And that was all Bobby Moody had to say on that subject.
FERTITTA DIDN’T COME HOME TO GALVESTON and invest $40 million to be treated like a chump. The guy who was responsible for Vice President Al Gore’s visit to the Island and ornamented the Seawall with his gleaming restaurants and his lavish San Luis redesign wasn’t going to let Bobby Moody make a mockery of him. When Fertitta learned, just months after buying the San Luis complex from Mitchell for $16 million, that the Moody Foundation would soon be breaking ground on the “nonprofit” hotel it had originally slated for construction in 2004, he informed the Moody camp of his intention to sue if the plans weren’t shelved. They weren’t, so he did. On November 14, six days after he filed suit, he railed against the Moodys at the chamber of commerce luncheon held on Moody property. Moody attorney Buddy Herz responded the next day by threatening to pull the family’s chamber memberships for permitting such an attack on hallowed grounds. The battle was joined.
Overnight, it seemed, Fertitta became a local hero. The Daily News’ letters page was crammed with missives by Islanders who saw the Maceo descendant as a giant-killer. Even before the lawsuit, editor-publisher Dolph Tillotson had devoted a special section to the Fertitta-Moody dispute; he recalls, “Buddy Herz argued the case that the Moodys had done wonderful things for Galveston and this would damage relations, so we shouldn’t do the stories.” Tillotson ran them anyway, siding with Fertitta’s concerns in an editorial. Later, George Mitchell expressed his support for Fertitta, creating what Herz publicly termed “an unholy alliance.”
In the bars and shops of downtown Galveston, people who didn’t care much one way or the other about convention centers or hotels nonetheless saw what the controversy symbolized. The big old dog was getting bit, and the Islanders I talked to were loving it. No one, of course, was loving it as much as Tilman Fertitta. Letters were pouring into his office from folks he had never met. They saw him as a fresh voice, an agent for change, as his buddy Clinton would have it. Not that Fertitta wanted to become the little people’s standard-bearer on the Island. He had other fish to fry, as it were. “Every morning,” he would often tell me, “the Moodys get up, and this is what they think about all day long. And I think about it maybe twenty, thirty minutes a day.”
Still, it wasn’t a bad way to kill twenty minutes, sitting in the hero’s seat. Since the lawsuit had been filed, Moody, Mitchell, and Fertitta—the Big Three in current Galveston parlance—had been negotiating a compromise. At the end of one afternoon, Fertitta discussed the tentative settlement terms with me, lovingly ticking off each concession granted by the Moodys: offering equivalent discounts on attractions to all the other hotels, free transport from the other hotels to the new convention center, changing the name from Moody Gardens Convention Center to Galveston Island Convention Center, on and on, with more fine-tuning to be done.
“They fought us on everything,” he said, leaning back behind his desk. “I didn’t kick their ass, but I made them compromise for the first time in a hundred years. And these concessions are for everyone, not just me. All the other hotel operators who wouldn’t stand up—it’s for them too. Anyway,” he continued, “once the agreement is finalized, we will do the right thing and we will drop the lawsuit. But they know that this guy is gonna be watching everything they do.”
But even Fertitta didn’t seem to believe that. Spend the rest of his years monitoring Bobby Moody when he had so much left to do? He had the Kemah waterfront to develop, a pro sports franchise to acquire, maybe even a future in politics. For now, he had 12,000 employees to take to a different level and all those shareholders to appease. Fellow CEOs were enlisting his support on various legislative issues. Joe Kennedy’s people had talked him into hosting a party for the Boston congressman a couple of weeks back. On top of everything else, he’d promised Paige and his two sons a week at their home in the ski resort of Beaver Creek, Colorado, and it would be a miracle if he could sustain two hours on the slopes without a conference call. A guy could grow old doing the right thing.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Tilman Fertitta sighed. “We had more fun in the eighties. We laughed a lot easier.” He managed a laugh, for nostalgia’s sake.
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