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Dole has frequently used Lindner's corporate aircraft on the campaign trail. His office repaid Lindner nearly $45,000 for air travel in the first nine months of 1995, based on first-class commercial rates. But the plane rides are worth far more than that, since they amount to airborne limousine service. Dole is not the only pol to get special treatment. Lindner flew Newt Gingrich to a G.O.P. fund raiser in Cincinnati in December 1994 and shared the flight back to Washington.
The reclusive Lindner, a strict Baptist who doesn't smoke, drink or swear, is an all-American success story. Raised in a blue-collar Cincinnati neighborhood, he dropped out of high school at age 14 to help with his family's small dairy. He enlarged the business into the foundation stone of his current empire. Lindner acquired control of Chiquita in 1984. Last year he reorganized American Financial Group, which includes Chiquita and insurance and broadcasting interests, and sold a 49% stake of the holding company in a public stock offering. But the empire remains burdened by Chiquita's troubles, which include a $1.3 billion debt load from an ill-advised expansion after Lindner took over.
Through strenuous cost cutting, Lindner turned a $56 million profit at Chiquita during the first nine months of 1995. But he blames the company's still fragile condition on the agreement between Europe and its trading partners, a deal that sets preferential quotas for bananas grown in former colonies like Jamaica and the Ivory Coast. Colombia and Costa Rica, originally outside the arrangement, have cut their own restrictive deals with Europe and thereby bolstered the quota system.
All that has struck hard at Chiquita. Unlike rival banana growers Del Monte and Dole Foods, the company has grown its wares mainly in Central America and has seen this fruit shut out of the protected Euromarkets. In a bid to change Colombia's policy, Lindner arranged a showdown with the country's President, Ernesto Samper Pizano, in a Miami hotel room in December 1994. There, he pulled out pictures of himself with Ronald Reagan and George Bush and bragged of his relationships with Dole and Gingrich. Colombian Ambassador to Washington Carlos Lleras, who was present, reports that Samper was "very shocked, and I was very angry."
That demonstration may not have changed Colombian minds, and Kantor did little more. Lindner likes to say that "I don't understand balance sheets very well, but I do understand people very well." When it comes to bananas, though, he may still have something to learn.
--Reported by Viveca Novak and Adam Zagorin/Washington