Where there is scarcity, price is no object. This basic tenet of supply and demand would later become a governing principle of my investment philosop… - Sam Zell

A Jewish refugee delegation, including my father, went to the Vilnius Japanese vice consul, Chiune Sugihara, for these transit visas. Sugihara wired Tokyo three times for permission to help the refugees, but was denied each time. The vice consul was a Japanese career diplomat, but he had also been raised in a middle-class samurai family. And part of the code of the samurai is benevolence and mercy, and appreciation and respect for life. Despite the risk to his career and his family, Sugihara ignored his direct orders and decided to do as much as he could. For the next month, he and his wife barely stopped to eat or sleep as they wrote out thousands of transit visas. My family was among the six thousand Jews Sugihara saved — the Sugihara Survivors.

Timing and execution made all the difference. We earned most of our money on the first one hundred stations we bought — numbers 20 to 118. Why? Because after that the rest of the industry caught on, competition for stations increased, and prices went up. However, we continued to acquire even then, albeit at a slower rate, because of the economies of eliminating redundancies within a large portfolio in geographic concentrations and because our average price per station remained so low. But it was the first-mover advantage that made Jacor a lead dog — and a home run. Within three years, we went from 20 stations to 243.

The opportunity was in the fact that maritime law, in the form of the Jones Act, prevents foreign-built or foreign-flagged ships from conducting coastal trade in the U.S. In the case of tourism, foreign vessels have to either drop off or pick up passengers from a non-U.S. port, certainly not convenient for interisland vacationing in Hawaii.