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Lennar Executive Evacuates Family From Beirut Bombs

Lennar Corp. executive Emile Haddad last week arranged a hasty, harrowing escape from Lebanon for his wife and two children visiting relatives in the Haddads’ homeland.

Haddad, the Business Journal’s co-businessperson of the year for 2005, flew to Milan, Italy, last week to be reunited with wife Dina, 16-year-old daughter Serene and 10-year-old son Marc.

“I haven’t slept for 48 hours,” Haddad said just before boarding a plane at Los Angeles International Airport.

Haddad said he had his family shuttled into Syria,minutes ahead of a bomb explosion,and then flown from Damascus to Italy.

“The heart doesn’t stop bleeding, but right now it’s not hemorrhaging,” Haddad said.

Haddad, Miami-based Lennar’s chief investment officer and head of Western operations from Aliso Viejo, said he was relieved for his family’s well being but regretful of the renewed violence and destruction in his native land.

Haddad came to the U.S. as a young man in 1986. He touts his rise in real estate as an American dream.

Along with Jon Jaffe, Lennar’s Aliso Viejo-based chief operating officer and the Business Journal’s other 2005 businessperson of the year, Haddad holds one of the top titles at the homebuilder.


Planned To Join

Haddad had planned to join his family in Beirut this week for an annual reunion with relatives and friends. Then last Monday morning, as he was having coffee and watching the news, he saw “all hell has broken loose.”

Haddad called his wife,”Thank God for cell phones”,and told her to “take your whole family to the airport” and fly out.

Too late. Israeli warplanes soon bombed the airport.

He said he called her back and told her to try to get on a boat. But the ports also had been bombed.

Haddad then arranged to have Dina and their children moved to a hotel “in the mountains” to get them out of the line of fire in and around Beirut.


Official Channels

He then contacted the State Department and U.S. Embassy to find out about evacuation plans for Americans.

But with “the window closing” on ways to get out and the evacuation plan “not well articulated,” Haddad said he decided to act on his own.

He contacted friends in Lebanon who arranged to have his family driven into Damascus, where they then were put on a plane to Italy. Haddad said he owes his friends a debt of gratitude.

The U.S. followed with its own often chaotic evacuations of thousands of Americans by cruise liners and Naval ships. Some Americans said they waited a week or more to be shipped out to Cyprus.


Syria Trip

The trip to Syria was dramatic. By the time the U.S. Embassy called back, Haddad said it was a half hour too late,his wife and the children already had been sent on their way.

The road to Damascus was bombed a half hour after his family traveled over it, Haddad said.

All the while, he said, the ordeal forced him to “relive my own nightmare” of 1982, when Haddad was a student at the American University of Beirut and under siege for three months.

“We were always hoping that the next generation was not going to see what we saw,” he said. “Now a whole generation is going to see things that will change their lives forever.”


Personal Side

Haddad expressed no bitterness.

“The innocent on both sides pay a price. That’s what kills you,” he said.

Haddad’s parents live in Orange County and were here last week.

He said he remained concerned for other family and friends who live in Lebanon or were visiting there last week.

Dina was particularly grieved that she couldn’t take a nephew and niece with her out of Lebanon, he said.

The current ordeal in Lebanon “makes you more appreciate things that are really important in life,” Haddad said.

“Things that seemed important to you yesterday are not important today,” he said.

He also commented on the physical destruction:

“It breaks my heart to see an infrastructure, which has been built by someone who I respected very much, destroyed,” he said, referring to the late prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was assassinated last year.

But he added, “Don’t worry about concrete. It will be rebuilt. Lebanon has been rebuilt many, many times before.”

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