If you know Dick White from industry meetings or dealings with Integrity Insurance Company in Liquidation, you probably did not picture him wearing a biker jacket and cruising down Route 1 to Florida.
Of course his jacket patch, rather than depicting an outlaw insignia, would probably include a reference to his favorite leadership book, the Bible. He says “Bible” is an acronym for “Basic Instruction Before Leaving Earth”. But if he could have a second career, he would continue the job he had in college as a lifeguard at a northern area beach in the summer and a Florida one in the winter, traveling back and forth biannually by motorcycle with his best friend Debbie Polise-White riding on the back.
The Integrity liquidation is almost completed. The final checks are in the mail. When Dick took the job of running the liquidation in May 1995, he really had no expectation it would take until 2015 to finish. In fact, in AIRROC’s 2011 Insolvency Special Edition, he predicted it would close by the summer of 2012, having originally estimated the year 2000 for the N.J. Insurance Department (so don’t ask him to estimate anything). The best part of his job, however, was paying creditors from marshaled assets; the worst part was the glacial pace of the litigation. When we asked him about lessons learned he said: “I play golf. I find that when hitting your tee shot, results are better if all you ‘see’ in front of you is fairway and likewise when hitting your approach shot to the green, all you ‘see’ is the green. While the bunkers (traps) are there, not ‘seeing’ them promotes good results. So too in business (or life)—focus on the goal, not what can go wrong.” As for current trends in the marketplace, he notes the large amount of available capital has given new energy to the run-off industry thus making it a lot different than it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s and even into the ‘90s. He also believes the state DOIs are now better-staffed and are cognizant of monitoring the industry more closely for potential financial stress.
“When Dick took the job of running the liquidation in May 1995, he really had no expectation it would take until 2015 to finish.”
We asked him for his favorite quote to which he unabashedly replied with his own: “Don’t tell me how much you’ve done; tell me when it’s complete and work until you drop.”
His favorite book is The Vicar of Christ by the late Walter F. Murphy, a professor of constitutional interpretation at Princeton. It is a fictional account of a young lawyer, first serving as a Marine officer in Korea, ultimately ascending to the U.S. Supreme Court.’ After suffering terrible personal tragedy, he was later selected by the College of Cardinals to be the next Pope despite not being an ordained priest.
When we asked him his opinion on AIRROC and when he first became involved, he said that Trish Getty contacted him in the beginning and he was a whole-hearted supporter. To this day, he feels AIRROC was “a good idea that became great” even though it was a tad too late in dealing with the issues that Integrity faced.
While Dick claims to be good at “doing nothing”, he will continue his career as an arbitrator and he has promised to do an article for us on the Integrity insolvency.
Refer to page 31 in the Fall 2015 issue for article. https://www.airroc.org/assets/docs/matters/airroc%20matters%20fall%202015%20vol%2011%20no.%203.pdf
