Marketing Lessons From My Bosses, Part 7: Make Your Own Luck

Back in the late 1980s, I was work­ing at the Miami News. One of the ongo­ing news sto­ries of that time (and still today) was the state of affairs in Haiti.

There was always some­thing going on: a boat­load of refugees being hauled in by the Coast Guard or, trag­i­cally, drown­ing; another in a long line of coups; hur­ri­canes; drug smug­gling — you name it.

I was dragged in to a lot of these sto­ries because 1. I spoke French, and could get by in Cre­ole, 2. I had been to Haiti and done some report­ing there: http://smartblog.smartmarketingnow.com/2010/01/the-trip-to-hell-costs-ten-cents/

On one par­tic­u­lar night in June, 1988, there were rumors com­ing out of Haiti that a mil­i­tary coup was tak­ing place. This news was greeted with a cer­tain cyn­i­cism in the news­room because it seemed there was always a coup d’etat tak­ing place in Haiti. The “gov­ern­ments” changed so often in Haiti that res­i­dents would answer a ques­tion about their age by telling you who was pres­i­dent the year they were born.

The pres­i­dent in June 1988, Leslie Mani­gat, was unusual in that he was not a mil­i­tary man, and had been in office only four months.

My job that night was to see if I could get some actual news about what was going on, with­out actu­ally going to Haiti. That meant what reporters call “work­ing the phones.”
I grabbed some old Hait­ian tele­phone direc­to­ries out of the morgue, and started dial­ing every gov­ern­ment office I could find. Since the state of the tele­phone sys­tem in Haiti was some­where between the state of the roads (pathetic) and the state of the Hait­ian air force (non-existent), I did not hold out much hope of get­ting any­one on the phone, much less any­one who could tell me any­thing newsworthy.

As it turned out, I was wrong about that.

A cou­ple of hours went by as I banged the phones. Mostly I got no answer, which made sense since I was call­ing at night, long after gov­ern­ment offices were closed. Occa­sion­ally one of my calls was answered, but not by any­one who could help me.

Some­where around my 50th phone call, a man answered the phone and iden­ti­fied him­self as an edu­ca­tion min­is­ter in the cur­rent gov­ern­ment. Great piece of luck! In fact, he said, he had a house in Miami, where he had lived as a refugee before return­ing to Haiti in Feb­ru­ary to join the new gov­ern­ment. Excel­lent luck! And, he said, his wife was a school teacher in Miami. More luck! Finally, he added, he knew the Miami News and would be happy to talk to me. Fab­u­lous luck!

That’s where my luck seemed to end, how­ever. He told me that the rumors of a coup were com­pletely false and that he, and other mem­bers of the gov­ern­ment were hard at work in the National Palace (since destroyed in the 2010 earth­quake). “There is no coup,” he told me. “Every­thing is fine.”

Ah well, no story. Wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last that I spent a bunch of time and energy chas­ing a non-story.

But no sooner had Mr. Lescou­flair said the word “fine” than I heard the sound of gun­fire over the tele­phone line.

He hit the lights, ducked under the win­dowsill and while occa­sion­ally peek­ing into the court­yard from his dark­ened office, pro­ceeded to nar­rate the rev­o­lu­tion to me for the next hour. That nar­ra­tion ended as I heard his office door burst open and the com­mand “Haut les mains!” (“Hands up!”)

“Call my wife,” Lescou­flair whis­pered to me, and then the line went dead.

It was sev­eral weeks before I met him in per­son at the Miami air­port. He had been clapped in the noto­ri­ous Fort Dimanche prison out­side Port au Prince. He claimed that my arti­cle had saved his life. They didn’t dare to kill him, he said, because the arti­cle had made him too famous. Finally, they released him and kicked him out of the country.

The story had caused some hub­bub. A TV sta­tion came up to the news­room to inter­view me, and I was a news­room celebrity for a day or two. The man­ag­ing edi­tor, Sue Reisen­ger, had posted my story on the wall with some flat­ter­ing com­ments writ­ten across it. She called me into her office and con­grat­u­lated me. I scuffed my toe on the floor and said (truth­fully) that it had been a lucky phone call.

That’s when she deliv­ered the les­son that has stayed with me.

“Some peo­ple,” she said, “make their own luck.”