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THE LAMBORGHINI, THE QE2 & ME.

For three years back in the 1980s, the Republic of Haiti was a client of mine for tourism public relations. Baby Doc Duvalier was still in power and, despite being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti was nonetheless attractive to tourists. It was safe then, and the people were friendly. Besides earning a fee, my thinking was that if my work could increase tourism it would help the economy and trickle down to the people by creating more jobs at existing hotels and even perhaps from new hotel construction.

In 1984 I had the good luck to stumble into a situation whereby I was able to put one of the most powerful men in Haiti together with his newly bought Lamborghini V12 Countach 5000s, and come out smelling like roses. When you do business in a dictatorship it doesn't hurt to have someone close to the throne indebted to you.

Only 321 Countach's were produced from 1982-85. Once referred to as the "King of Supercars" the Countach is said to be the most photographed and most well known car in the world. With an estimated top speed of 182 MPH, at times it has also been the fastest car in the world.

Permit me to digress briefly and explain what it was that I was doing there: Among the several things one does when promoting tourism to a country or destination is organize and escort "group press trips" as often as possible. I conducted nine back-to-back group press trips to Haiti in the calendar year of 1984. Each trip had between six and ten magazine and newspaper travel writers. The obvious idea is that by bringing the media to the destination and showing them what a country has to offer, the writers will write favorable articles, and more tourists will come. The Caribbean Tourism Organization noted recently that my nine consecutive press trips in 1984 still remained as the most productive and sustained PR effort ever in a one year period to any Caribbean island.

During these trips, one of my favorite hotels to stay at with my group of writers was The El Rancho Hotel in Petionville, which is about five miles outside the center of the capital, Port-au-Prince. I liked the place because it had a sprawling, attractive layout, a free-form swimming pool, and a casino where you could play Roulette with twenty-five cent chips. It was modern looking and, in my opinion, a few notches above the rest.

One afternoon as I was having a cool drink at the patio bar with the manager, Willie Wichert, and chatting about anything and everything,

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