The Human Investor Part II

Emile Gouiran was only getting started as a benefactor. He applied to charity the modus of his professional forte; fixing what wasn't working, putting a shine on what others had neglected, sometimes even to the point of heroic rescue as with a number of nearly shut down orphan facilities which he caused to be restored or kept open by his relentless intervention. He renovated educational facilities, built dazzling new orphanages, super funded educational endowments for underprivileged children, and even set up a legal defense fund endowment to pay the cost of defending them. Emile believed that children brought up as he was, in orphanages, welfare and juvenile facilities were, as he, more prone to getting in trouble. Interestingly, he called the legal defense fund The Vindication Fund. Among its stated purposes were to right the injustice of overzealous prosecutors, and counter the abuses of corruption at the judicial and political level, and to brake the prosecutorial abusesof trials by the press. Many a young man and woman have found their refuge and salvation from such abuses through this philanthropy.

Emile Gouiran was born in Washington DC of an Argentinean mother and French father. The parents had met in Argentina. The father a then well known scholar, professor, author and philosopher (complete with libraries named after him) ultimately married Emile's mother in 1949 after Emile was born. He omitted the process of divorcing his wife and a mention of his then four, later five other children. With Emile he fathered six. The acorn does not fall far from the tree as history will tell.

Emile Gouiran was obviously sourced from brains. His father paled with the likes of Jean Paul Sartre and Andre Gide. His mother now 88 was a rapacious student and intellectual; her academic baggage includes three doctorate degrees. Interestingly, his mother took the Hippocratic Oath to the letter, a medical doctor her fee schedule was whatever the patient could afford if anything. She was also the source of what would become Emile's steadfast opposition to abusive police and judicial power. She acts out what she professes and took the heat for him in a case involving prosecutorial inabilities to get to the son. The prosecutorial strategy to get to the son through the mother failed and she managed to successfully acquire credible and incontrovertible evidence of political and judicial corruption. This she did, but the cost was dear: the truth was twisted by prosecutorial despair to frame a charge of perjury and she lost her license to practice medicine to the vociferouschagrin of thousands of her patients. She has written a three volume book exposing the local system and the individuals including prosecutors, judges, and investigators, with overwhelming credible proof and recordings in support. The book and its documentary and recorded support is sequestered with limited access reserved to an undisclosed global publisher and these documents and texts will be released after her death as will the upper six figure fee and subsequent royalties which will be gifted to an endowment to promote the interest of underprivileged children seeking a medical arts education.

Emile's talent's in business undoubtedly were drawn from his great-grandfather on his mother's side; a land baron owning untold millions of acres in Argentina he gave life to the city of Cordoba. Manuel Garcia had an insatiable appetite for land. He eventually presented the Argentinean government with a generous offer; he would donate the land needed for a military air-base as a gesture of his patriotism. The offer was accepted, and in came water, sewers, electric, gas and even roadways. He promptly subdivided the remaining hundreds of thousands of acres into buildable lots and the city of Cordoba was born and built, and with it his formidable fortune. His descendants were numerous however.

Emile Gouiran has an appetite for everything and a fear of nothing. He has chosen to devote a large part of his time and legendary generosity to the next generations of global orphans. He enjoys doing as many things as he does because with that lies the ever present possibility of learning something new.

An unreserved protector of the arts, Emile Gouiran rallied his moneyed friends, and together they gathered some of the world's literary works and treasures and used them as an expedient to establish, resuscitate and reinvigorate the study of literature from kindergarten through professorial tenure in every country in which the Donemiran and Davalaven Foundations actively support children.

He did all this with a "deeply rooted entrepreneurial creativity" that could see the seeds of great projects in tentative, unformed ideas and could bring them to fruition not only through his own money and effort but also by finding innovative ways to mobilize the talents, energy, enthusiasm, and resources of others.

Orleans, a city some 45 km south of Paris had been Emile Gouiran's backyard from the age of 18 months when he was on the authorities' request placed in an orphanage there until he was a boy. In the 1950s, his closest thing to attention and an interface with the outside world was the occasional visits of American soldiers stationed at the US base in Orleans. They would come to donate military food, second hand toys left by departing military families, and some to play with the children. He learned his first word of English, the number 8 which he could not pronounce - it simply came out "arrrrr". He was 3.

As a child, he took to walking alone, he would walk for hours. Always an outsider vexed by his circumstances he never really quite fit in. He never was exposed to team sports or activities. Yet in competition he was ferocious, he mastered and competed vigorously in the art of Taekwondo, for years, rain, shine, or snow.

In 1968, Gouiran left the Marine Corps and immediately started his first business, he soon ran a very successful repossession and collection agency ensuring credit recoveries for the likes of Sears, WT Grant, EJ Korvettes, A&S to name but a few. A year later he was buying real estate and opening a real estate brokerage agency "because the real estate agents wouldn't take me seriously and I couldn't get enough to buy." He explained. These were the Lindsay years, that mayor had already altered New York into a case study on how not to run a city. Lindsay, the archetypal 1960s luxuriously chauffeured noninterventionist, had churned every idiotic design of the time into rules and law. Welfare was marketed to "Come-and-Get-It" and more than doubled in the name of communal interest; the public parks and facilities were trampled with callous disregard invaded by hordes of musical destruction.

This was the era of permissiveness; "victimless" crimes should not be reprimanded. Expressions of mind and art such as graffiti were not vandalism, doing drugs was creative fuel and dealers mere retailers. Public urination, they do it in Paris, and public drunkenness is a state of irreproachable being. The defacements and despoilments of public places were a cost of liberal expression. New Yorkers had accepted parks filled with filth and the stench of organic waste. The muttering and tousled deinstitutionalized madmen were landscape artifact as were the tough, hostile stares of the resident muggers and drug dealers. These conditions were as unsafe as they were unsightly.

Most troublesome for Emile Gouiran, was that children had become commodities, useful to increase welfare checks, rental payments and other support benefits, it was a business. Welfare homes, juvenile institutions, orphanages, halfway houses, foster homes were dumping grounds for thousands of once born, unwanted progeny of unidentifiable but assuredly living parents.

Unlike most New Yorkers, Emile would not stand for this. And so, he went about to see what he could do. He also reasoned that if the most successful country in the world could score so bad, that the rest of the world's children must be worse off.

He sponsored a study showing how private money, a private Board, and modern management could rescue the state of misfortune surrounding innocent children in inapt facilities. He, in cooperation with wealthy friends set up the Davalaven and later Donemiran Foundations to begin turning the study into reality.

"By then a new man was mayor," Gouiran recalled dryly. "Abe Beam was from Brooklyn. He had no use for children, orphanages and other juvenile facilities." For four years, Gouiran felt he was spinning his wheels. "I made virtually no advancement, the mayor wouldn't hear of it." The Foundations self-funded a number of facilities, equipment, and even payrolls for establishments laboring under demoralizing and inefficient workforce, but the Foundation's main accomplishment was merely to hang in there. "Here's what I learned from this," Gouiran says: "If you have an excellent inspiration, it's going to happen, in spite of yourself and no matter how bad you turn it."

Emile Gouiran's passion about his work and projects is universally known yet many in his entourage have voiced suspicion that one of the secrets of his success is that "he does not sleep". His secret however seems more related to his ability to concentrate 100 per cent on anything he does. He channels his energy into everything he undertakes and is always first to arrive and the last to leave.