One man is an island

Eccentric might be a kind word for the shipping magnate Larry Hillblom, who put the “H” in the world’s largest courier system, DHL.

A genius, undoubtedly, he revolutionized how the world communicates, helped upend long-standing institutions and had a savant-like ability to use legal loopholes to his advantage. He did this wearing dirty jeans and novelty T-shirts, which served to highlight his unnaturally round “baby face,” according to a book on the relatively unknown mogul called “King Larry.”

Like with other self-made billionaires (Steve Jobs comes to mind as a close kin, down to their pathologically casual attire) genius goes hand-in-hand with general unpleasantness. And this is certainly the case with Hillblom.

Michael W. Dotts

Larry Hillblom fled to Saipan, where he became “king” and sat on their supreme court — until vanishing in a mysterious plane crash.

Hillblom with Josephione, one of his many young conquests.

DPA /Landov

HILLBLOM's DHL challanged the US Post Office monopoly.

To escape taxation, he moved to an island in Micronesia, where he earned the title King, all the while pillaging its underage natives (he claimed to have bedded 132 virgins during that time).

Yet, despite his crazy life that seems lifted from the headlines, the man remained in relative obscurity — and even his death in a plane crash is still uncertain.

Hillblom grew up as the stepson of a peach farmer in California’s Central Valley. His biological father died when he was 2 and his mother remarried a farmer, from whom he learned the value of hard work, but he knew from a young age that he was destined for greater things.

“Someday,” he told a friend. “I’m going to move far way, and I won’t write any letters.” He added, “I’ll call you once in a while but I will not write any letters.”

He fixated on fellow eccentric Howard Hughes at a young age, even aping some of his behaviors. Like Hughes, he had a “irrational hatred of his mother,” author James Scurlock writes in his new biography.

“Larry would tell his friends all these amazing things that his mother had done for him, and then he’d be like ‘that bitch,’ ” Scurlock writes.

Also like his hero, he developed “quirks” — carrying Lysol and ketchup bottles because of a claimed germaphobia, though the author believes this was more of an affectation than true paranoia.

He did “the switch” at a young age, transforming himself from a nerdy momma’s boy and a devoted Lutheran into a popular class president who bought a Corvette from the money he made from his stock-market winnings. After a year at community college, he attended Fresno State and then the University of California at Berkeley’s law school. There he dumpster dived and lived in cars to make ends meet.

He only returned to his hometown a handful of times, before he disappeared from his mother for the next quarter-century.