Editor’s Note: Terry Giles and his wife Kalli O’Malley funded the Giles-O’Malley Center for Leadership at California State University, Fullerton. The Business Journal in May named the couple to its OC 50—The Giving 50 that identified notable executives and entrepreneurs involved in OC philanthropy. Giles, who began as a lawyer, has invested in more than 35 companies throughout his career, including turning the Garden Grove Toyota into that company’s fifth largest dealership worldwide. The Business Journal’s annual report on auto dealers begins on page 15.
It was 1974 when I passed the Bar and, up to that point, made the most important decision of my life. I had turned down $40,000 a year going to work for one of the best criminal lawyers in Orange County. Instead, I decided to hang out my own shingle.
My earnings went from $25,000 in my first year to $300,000 in my fourth year. By the fifth year, we had 35 lawyers in the firm and over 100 employees total. I would personally try 90 criminal cases to verdict, including 13 murder cases and three death penalty cases. By 1980, I was feeling pretty good about things.
Then I got the Fred Douglas case. He was accused of making X-rated “snuff films” where the victims were murdered. Nine girls, prostitutes and female bar flies from Garden Grove and Santa Ana, had disappeared.
A bar maid had come forward and told them that Douglas had solicited her to help him line up, torture and kill two women—and the whole process was to be filmed. She was terrified.
A sting operation was set up with two undercover female police officers posing as hookers and Douglas was caught on wire bragging about what he was going to do to the girls.
Inside a shack in a San Bernardino desert, police found torture devices and a meat hook, with what appeared to be dried blood, hung from the center of the ceiling. A massive search began for the missing girls, but no bodies were found.
However, search warrants for Douglas’ home and shop turned up hundreds of photos of the women who were tied up and looked in pain as various carpenter tools were being applied to their naked bodies.
Fred’s son called me. As a criminal lawyer, I thought that this hugely publicized criminal case just meant another round of “show time.” My defense of Fred Douglas would turn out to be a classic, featuring the most dramatic cross examination of my career. I won both the case and a lot of press.
Cut to one year later when I’m on vacation walking on a beach on Maui, I’m tracked down and rushed back to the hotel for an important call. There were no cell phones in those days.
Fred Douglas was arrested for the murder of two more girls killed just six months after I earned him his acquittal. He wanted me to represent him. It was one of those moments in which life turns.
“No,” I replied. “I will not be representing him.”
He was eventually convicted and sent to death row at San Quentin.
A Father’s Hatred for Me
What remained most vivid in my memory were the moments immediately after the phone call. Back alone on the beach, the thought ran over and over in my mind: This is nuts!
What am I doing? Why is the world a better place because I do what I do for a living?
One case that left an especially tough impact on me was a drug-related murder, where my client was alleged to have thrown another kid from a plane. But since it could also have been accidental, or self-defense, I threw all sorts of doubt out there, most of which involved trashing the dead kid.
I got an acquittal, and that seemed the end of it. Except three or four years later, somebody told me they ran into the father of the dead boy, and he despised me so much, saying he’d kill me in a heartbeat if he thought he could get away with it.
I got a lot of death threats in those days, so another one wasn’t in and of itself a big deal but, maybe because the victim was so young, or because the father loved him so desperately, that one really hit me.
Fred Douglas wasn’t the first, just the one that finally stopped me cold. I was 34 years old, with every confidence in my abilities, and a lifestyle I really loved. I had envisioned and produced exactly what I had asked for. And now two innocent girls were dead, and I decided to leave the practice of law.
Toyota Makes Gold
I had no idea what I’d do next. Everything about me to that point had been about being a criminal defense lawyer, and I was walking away at the top of my game. It was 1983.
I happened to pick up a Fortune magazine and notice a line on the cover: “What’s the most valuable franchise in America? Look inside, you’ll be surprised.” So, I flip it open, expecting it to be a McDonald’s or a Taco Bell or some other fast-food chain. But instead, it says…a Toyota dealership.
As it happened, there was a tiny Toyota dealership nearby, and its owner was looking to sell. It was in a not-so-great area of downtown Garden Grove; one small building, no real showroom, selling 35 cars a month, with maybe 50 cars on the lot total, new and used.
Of the 1,200 Toyota dealerships ranked in size in the United States at the time, Garden Grove Toyota was number 1,150.
Two years later, in October 1985, I reopened Garden Grove Toyota in a beautiful store alongside the Garden Grove freeway, and the place took off like a shot! I mean overnight.
By the time I sold the dealership in 1987, we were the fifth largest Toyota dealer in the world, selling 1,100 cars a month.
Good Vibration—Great Results
By then, I was also chairman and majority owner of Pacific National Bank, a partner in the Canon dealership that had the copier and fax machine sales rights for Southern California, and a partner in a television production company.
I would eventually buy or start 35 different companies including 5-star hotels in Europe, manufacturing, research laboratories and even producing a play on Broadway.
Oh, and eventually I put a small legal team together and began representing good people in good causes in the civil courts. I went on to handle 60 civil trials including plane crashes, business disputes and representing 150 of the 800 victims of the Catholic predator priest cases.
I was appointed Trustee of the Martin Luther King Estate by a judge in Atlanta, hired as the lead negotiator on the sale of the largest computer retailer in the world at the time and consulted on the sale of a MLB franchise. I would even write a Wall Street Journal best seller entitled “The 15%.”
It’s been a good life, and at 76 years old, I now spend my time at my home in Houston, my ranch outside of Austin, my home in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and my 1,100-year-old castle hotel on the French Riveria.
To be sure, I was not a success in every venture, and I took my fair share of hits along the way, but I never lost confidence in my formula for success. The failures always came due to a loss of focus or thinking I was bullet proof.
Which brings up one last thought: If you have a powerful and positive vision of the best “you” which you can imagine, align your behavior and your words with your beliefs, have the guts to follow through, and see to it that all setbacks are temporary.
Most people will say you’re just lucky. Just let them think that.
Work hard and there’s always someone who thinks they can outwork you. Be smart and there’s always someone who believes he is smarter. Bring capital and there’s always someone who has more money. Be tough and there’s always someone who thinks they are tougher.
But be lucky, and people no longer even mind losing to you. They just walk away, head shaking and mumbling to themselves— “you just can’t beat lucky.”
