Flash Back to July 1970
Frank Rainieri is 24 years old. He has been business advisor, making $100 a week, to a United States-based group that, in 1968, bought 15,000 acres of Dominican Republic jungle and beach for $225,000. That’s $15 an acre, if you can fathom it.
Rainieri is asked to become an on-site evaluator. One plan has called for selling the beach’s white sand for making plaster and shipping it to Puerto Rico. He pushes the site as a travel destination. He wants a 50-mile road carved through jungle that at least connects PuntaCana to a small town and to transportation arteries.
He tells the group it needs a generator to provide power for the early cottages that are being planned there.
And now, in summer 1970, he is being hauled by chief investor Ted Kheel (a nationally prominent labor mediator) from the Dominican Republic to New York City to appear before those with early stakes in PuntaCana, a group that includes labor’s billboard names, George Meany and Lane Kirkland.
He tells them that they need to spend $250,000 on an airport, guessing in an instant at costs he did not anticipate having to provide. Later on, after the development and expansion of PuntaCana had been agreed to, Kheel tries to hire Rainieri during a one-on-one meeting on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas.
Rainieri remembers it as the only day he ever fibbed to Kheel, a friend and partner to this day. He told Kheel he was making $800 a month when he was still pulling down only $100 a week. Kheel offered him a monthly salary of $1,200.
Rainieri then took a gutsy stand built entirely on one man’s business principle. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Kheel,’” Rainieri remembers. “I can’t. I always felt I would never work for anybody unless I was a partner.”
Kheel is stunned. But he compromises. Rainieri will get $1,000 a month and $200 monthly in company shares. If he can pull off the 50-mile road, build the cottages, and the airport for $250,000, he will get 2 percent of the company’s stock.
“I made the sharpest move in my life,” Rainieri says today, speaking of a decision—a calculated risk—that he believed a determined entrepreneur must make if he were ever to enjoy sufficient independence.
Eventually, he and Kheel bought 90 percent of the group’s shares.
“I guess that’s the thing I learned in life,” Rainieri said, “to say what you believe in, and stick to it.”
It is reflective of an essential word from Rainieri’s background: independence. Freedom to act individually was not so much a concept, a craving, as it was a lesson from his teenage years after his family had decided he needed to be harbored and educated in the United States.
The Dominican Republic was not a place for independent thought or actions as Rainieri grew up in the Trujillo-controlled police state that then passed for Dominican Republic governance.
Even his young classmates were threatened by the least act of free speech. Critical graffiti, a wrong word uttered—lives could be lost in an instant regardless of age if Trujillo or his henchmen became aware. It was the ugly fate of 250 young Dominicans who rebelled against Trujillo in June of 1959.
Rainieri’s parents networked immediately to move their son to the United States. They got help from a friend to enroll Frank at Mount Ascension Institute in Plattsburgh, New York. He could not speak English, of course. There he was, a 13-year-old boy on his own: new country, new language, new culture, and no idea when he might be able to return home.
He would spend the next two off-school summers in New York City, living in a hotel arranged by Ascension’s staff, paid for by his not-so-well-off parents, buying his own clothes, and struggling to speak English.
“That made me mature very early,” Rainieri says today, recalling an adolescence that posed challenges in the extreme. “It also made me very independent,” he says, repeating a treasured word. “It taught me to praise life. To balance between conservative, defensive, and aggressive values.”
He would not return home for two years, four months, and 21 days—a period of exile that ended only after Trujillo had been overthrown and assassinated.
Later, he enrolled at another Jesuit school for college, St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia. It was a pivotal time and place for a young man in his teens.
The early 1960s saw a sense of idealism surging in America, a notion that old limitations were in the past and that new thought and vigor could build not only a better America, but a better world.
Rainieri was caught up in it fully. He was attracted by the charisma and we-can-do-anything spirit embodied by President John F. Kennedy. He was forever changed by Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural speech and by those famous words for which Kennedy is still known:
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
It was an ethic he would be taking with him to the Dominican Republic when he returned—following his sophomore year of college at St. Joseph’s—to help his father establish a brewing company in the Dominican.
“It was a big mistake,” Rainieri says. “It is one of the things I really regret because I didn’t finish my school in the United States.”
He finished instead at Apec College in Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital. He had achieved his college degree. He had reason to feel gratified and even proud.
And yet, to this day, Rainieri believes he missed out on the irretrievable. Completing his college education in America during a time that was so impressionable on so many young people, himself included, would have provided for him a sense that he had tasted amply from what the world had to offer.
He may sell himself short here. Rainieri is, if anything, a dimensional and multi-faceted gentleman whose tastes and perspectives are clearly shaped by the world around him, and not only by his homeland.
But what he did not know as he left America—feeling far differently than he had felt upon arrival at age 13—was that deeper sadness would later grip him.
In 1970, his fiancée, Leslie, was flying from Santo Domingo to New York City to buy a wedding dress. The DC-9 airliner crashed after takeoff. She and all aboard were killed.
The grief spurred Rainieri to dive even more deeply into the PuntaCana project. He built the road, the cottages, and an airport, which allowed the resort to officially open in October 1971.
Months later he was at a cocktail party thrown by the Dominican Republic’s minister of tourism. Rainieri was asked, spontaneously, to keep a girl company while her friend—whom Rainieri had been talking with—ran an errand. The girl was Miss Dominican Republic.
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| Frank & Haydee Rainieri |
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A few months later, Rainieri was with a buddy and Miss Dominican Republic was with a girlfriend when their cars intersected unexpectedly on a Santo Domingo street which brought them together for a drink.
“She was 18 going on 19, but I found her very sharp, and very grown up for her age,” remembers Rainier, who was 27 at the time.
Her name was Haydee. It wasn’t long before Rainieri asked her to marry him—and forget the idea of a long engagement.
“I want to get married, and I want to get married right away,” remembers Rainieri, who decided on a Monday that he and Haydee would get married that Saturday—if she said yes.
Frankly, she had other plans. Haydee insisted on finishing college. She had decided against marriage until her career was established, no sooner than age 28. What she didn’t know is that the same man who had held out for company shares would be at least as demanding when it came to his choice for matrimony.
Haydee and Rainieri married that Saturday as Rainieri had insisted, and she finished her college degree, as she had vowed graduating summa cum laude from Pedro Henriquez Ureña University with a degree in physics. She followed up by doing special course work in Mexico on the use of radioisotopes on underground waters.
They were married in a Catholic church, with family and friends galore on hand for the vows and for the gala reception afterward.
Leaving for the wedding-night hotel, Rainieri turned to his new wife and said, solemnly:
“I have to tell you something. I have a mistress.”
He let the news sink in for a good 30 seconds. His bride’s gorgeous bronze complexion turned pale.
He looked at her and said: “It’s PuntaCana. So, you better join her.”
Haydee laughed, not only with relief, but because of the sheer daring of her husband’s wit. But there was an element of hard truth to what he had said.
“PuntaCana is not a business,” he says today, with the same sentiment he felt 33 years ago. “PuntaCana is a story of love.”
It is also the story of economic dividends to his homeland. He learned about social responsibility from his mother, when he was only 7 or 8 years old, and his mother organized a group of women to help children afflicted with tuberculosis.
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| The Rainieri family (from left): Frank Elias Rainieri, Juan Tomas Diaz, Paola Rainieri Diaz, Marcos De Parada, Francesca Rainieri De Parada, and Frank and Haydee Rainieri. |
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There were risks to being exposed as she and her children, Frank and his two brothers, and other women and children visited the wards.
“What she was trying to do was to show us that life is not always what you have at home,” Rainieri remembers. “I learned that, also, when I was alone in the United States and had to spend Christmas, or Thanksgiving, by myself.
“I realized that life is to share. I always thought that I should help others, because a lot of people helped me in my life.
“I am so fortunate that my wife is of the same thinking. We live in a wonderful country, and thank God, we have democracy.
“We have a country that’s growing fast and improving, but we still have a lot of people that go to bed with only one meal a day. We still have a lot of people who don’t own a house; who don’t have medical facilities.
“By providing jobs and paying taxes, we’re one of the biggest sources of revenue for our government.”
What Rainieri has done is significant, and ongoing: The Dominican Republic’s 30-percent illiteracy rate spurred him to develop classes for employees who could neither read nor write. It is a mandatory program for all PuntaCana employees.
There are computer courses, as well as classes in English, French and German classics. His was one of the first companies in the Dominican to have medical security for employees and their families.
He has done so much for his native Dominican Republic, and by extension the world around him, that in 1985 President Ronald Reagan made him the first non-U.S. citizen to win the Citation Award for his humanitarian efforts.
At age 60, his health is good, his marriage and his family (Francesca, Paolo, Frank Jr., and numerous grandchildren) is thriving. His business is flourishing. His desire to give back is unchecked.
President Kennedy, who asked that we shift our domestic energies from receiving to giving, would find in Frank Rainieri the inspiration he envisioned.
To contact Frank Rainieri, you may write to him at PuntaCana Resort & Golf Club, Punta Cana, Higuey, Dominican Republic; or visit their website at: puntacana.com. To contact Mark Pazdur, publisher, you may email him at: mark@executivegolfermagazine.com.
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