Part 58 (1/2)

They had nothing. His father got a job winding coils that went into refrigeration units. Wayne grew up in East Los Angeles, went to college, joined the navy, drifted around. For a while he worked for unglamorous-sounding businesses with names like the Frieden Corporation, but nothing stuck. He got married, had two children, and wasn't thriving. He had to do something.

And then he had an idea.

Maybe ”idea” is the wrong word. He had a realization about a very no-frills aspect of American life: ”You could rent a storage unit out for more than you could rent an apartment out, and with none of the overheads.”

”How come?” I ask.

”Supply and demand,” he replies, shrugging. ”People needed them and were willing to pay for them.”

This was 1972. He put a down payment on a building in San Diego and divided it into two hundred units. ”After that, it was just building the units up, one at a time. For years and years. That's all. You don't get money unless you have a lot of talent, which I don't have, or you work hard, which is what I do. We don't have any golden touch here.”

”How many buildings have you got now?” I ask.

”Maybe twenty-three hundred,” he says. ”With five or six hundred units inside each.”

Wayne says he never once stopped to contemplate the amount of money he was making. ”I was just looking at getting the best locations I could and getting the buildings opened and getting the tenants and getting the cash flow and on and on,” he says.

”You never once thought, 'This money is cascading in. I am worth FOUR BILLION DOLLARS?'” I ask.

He shakes his head. ”I don't spend any time at all thinking about my personal wealth. I suppose if I had nothing I might think, 'I have nothing.' But when we decided to go public and I saw how much money there was, I was very surprised.”

In 2006, Wayne was America's 61st richest man, according to Forbes, with $4.1 billion. Then the recession hit and now he's now the 242nd richest (and the 683rd richest in the world), with $1.9 billon. He's among the least-famous people on the Forbes list. In fact, he once called the magazine and asked them to remove his name. ”I said, 'It's an imposition. Forbes should not be doing that. It's the wrong thing to do. It puts my children and my grandchildren at risk.'”

”And what did they say?” I ask.

”They said when Trump called up, he said the number next to his name was too small.”

When Wayne is in Malibu, he stays in his daughter's spare room. His home is a three-bedroom farmhouse on a working stud farm in Lexington, Kentucky. ”I have no fancy living at all,” he says. ”Well. I have a house in Sun Valley. Five acres in the woods. I guess that's fancy.”

I like Wayne very much. He's avuncular and salt of the earth. I admire how far he has risen from the Grapes of Wrath circ.u.mstances into which he was born; he's the very embodiment of the American Dream. I'll return to Wayne-and the curious way he views the world-a bit later.

But first let's plummet all the way down to the very, very bottom, as if we're falling down a well, to a concrete slab of a house on a hot, dusty, potholed street in a downtrodden Miami neighborhood called Little Haiti.

THE AIR IS SO DRY it hurts your teeth, unlike Wayne's Malibu air, which is enlivening. As it happens, the view down the street includes not only used-car lots but also storage facilities-the idea that made Wayne his billions.

A young man peers into a crack of sunlight that emerges from behind one of the sheets that block out all his windows. His name is Maurose Frantz, but he goes by Frantz. He can't afford air-conditioning, hence the sheets, so it's very dark and stuffy in here with old air. Six people live here-Frantz and his parents, grandparents, and little brother-and it's the size of my living room.

”Outside is dangerous,” Frantz says. ”One time someone pulled up and said to me, 'Do you need a gun?' He showed me a gun! I said, 'I can't hear you, man.' Another time my grandpa-they jumped him. They took his wallet. They slotted him. He cried, he cried, he cried.”

Frantz is Haitian. His accent is very strong. Throughout our time together, I'm constantly asking him to repeat what he said.

”They did what to your grandpa?” I say. ”They slotted him? Slattered him? Sorry?”

”Slapped him,” Frantz replies. ”Slapped.”

Frantz washes dishes at Miami's Capital Grille restaurant, a posh steakhouse right on the harbor in Miami's financial district. He makes $180 to $200 for a twenty-seven-hour week. That means he makes in an hour what I make in 2.4 minutes, and what Wayne makes pretty much every time he breathes in and out.

At the end of the week, Frantz gets an ATM card with his pay already loaded onto it. He receives no health benefits or sick leave or anything like that. Sometimes when he clocks out at the end of the night, he finds he's already been mysteriously clocked out by someone else. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), a restaurant workers' advocacy group, say this practice has been reported in Capital Grilles across the country, so they've launched a cla.s.s-action suit against Darden-the restaurant chain that owns Capital Grille-for such ”wage improprieties.” Frantz says he's repeatedly requested some kind of paper breakdown of how many hours he's been paid for and how much tax has come off, but they never give it to him, so he's stopped asking. He's also stopped asking for a promotion to busboy. He says they told him they'd let him know, but they never did. According to ROC, the Capital Grille is notorious for denying promotions to dark-skinned people. It's possible for a black worker to become a busboy, Frantz says, but he's never seen a black server.