Once-garrulous Port of Seattle CEO Mic Dinsmore went into what he calls “hibernation” and was hospitalized for depression while under investigation by prosecutors. Though no charges were ever brought, Dinsmore says he has emerged a more humble man.
Mic Dinsmore used to strut his power on a global stage.
As the highest-paid port executive in the United States, peaking at $339,840 annually, he powered the Port of Seattle through the biggest infrastructure buildup in its history. He was among Seattle’s power elite.
And then the floor fell from under his world. During the past three years, Dinsmore came under the scrutiny of federal prosecutors and lost his new job, his third wife and his reputation. The result was an agonizing inner journey that included months in hospitals for treatment of depression. His swagger snuffed, the once-globetrotting deal maker is only now re-entering the business world by helping a daughter launch a fitness company.
In a series of interviews with the Puget Sound Business Journal, the 65-year-old Dinsmore talked frankly about his years hidden from view, and how he’s changed.
The fall
The assertive, barrel-chested port boss had always had his critics, but when Dinsmore announced on June 14, 2006, to Seattle Rotary that he would soon retire from the Port of Seattle after 16 years, he was treated like near-royalty.
“I thought I’d become a gray-haired senior statesman,” he says today.
Within nine months, Dinsmore would be shunned, even by former cronies.
In late 2007, State Auditor Brian Sonntag issued a report that the port had violated competitive bidding regulations and wasted up to $97 million in public funds. The scathing audit was followed by a federal criminal investigation that was to drag on for two years.
In Seattle, the community in which he had only recently been top dog, Dinsmore says he felt shunned.
By late spring 2008, Dinsmore’s post-retirement career with a $10 billion hedge fund called Stark Investments had ended after just a year. Dinsmore had been named president of global infrastructure investments, but as the economy slowed, Stark shelved the strategy.
Along with his career, his third marriage, to Jan Hendrickson, came apart, ending in February 2008.
Something also was changing inside Dinsmore.
“As I look back on it, in the beginning of 2008,” he says, “I had no idea what was going on inside me, but my systems were shutting down.”
The shutdown
Dinsmore spent the summer of 2008 inside Seattle hospitals — at Swedish, University of Washington and Virginia Mason — with what he says was a diagnosis of severe clinical depression.
He says he was nearly immobilized, his powerful voice faded to a whisper.
“There’s no way I can describe the empty feeling it created,” Dinsmore says. “The bounce in my walk, that went from a bounce to an almost shuffle, it was frightening. The enthusiasm I had for life just kind of dissipated.”
Dick Ford, a former Port of Seattle chief executive who visited him in the hospital, remembers this period well.
“Sometimes when even people you think are pretty tough and strong, when too many things roll up against them, it’s too tough to handle, emotionally and otherwise,” Ford says. “That was it, a whole bunch of bad news, that occurred at the same time.”
“I had one of my children, and/or one of my close friends on hospital calls — they were there every day,” he says.
Hibernation
By the fall of 2008, Dinsmore was out of the hospital, but hardly healed.
The federal investigation was still under way, and his lawyers told him to lie low. He felt that many people who knew him had “gone silent,” and that in most people’s minds he was guilty of breaking the law.
“For the last three years, while all this investigation was going on, I was … timid is not the right word, embarrassed is not the right word … to even walk the streets of Seattle,” he said. “It was one of the most painful three years of my entire life.”
After he came out of the hospital, in fall 2008 and for much of 2009, Dinsmore’s solace was his cabin on the shore of Washington’s Lake Chelan — a cabin that was the target of barbs from watchdogs during his port tenure, because Dinsmore had charged to taxpayers the cost of fueling his port-leased Infiniti for weekend trips there.
Just 1,100 square feet with two bedrooms, built in the 1920s, the cabin has a green metal roof and cedar shingles. Twenty-eight black walnut trees surround it.
“I absolutely went into hibernation, like a bear I disappeared,” Dinsmore says. “I just needed the serenity of the setting that I love in Chelan. I was very definitely going through the mending process.”
Signs of change
During his years at the port helm, Dinsmore was known as a sometimes-domineering deal maker who expanded the marine terminals, spent billions enlarging Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and ushered in an exploding cruise industry.
Since Dinsmore’s departure, port commissioners have tightened contracting loopholes that the state auditor pointed out, although Dinsmore and current CEO Tay Yoshitani still dispute some of Sonntag’s conclusions on whether taxpayers lost out from the port’s use of specialized consultants on the Sea-Tac third runway project.
The passions that Dinsmore generated had begun to recede in the public mind when, in January 2010, the U.S. attorney’s office quietly told the port and Dinsmore’s attorneys that its investigation had concluded without criminal charges.
Dinsmore said the lack of charges after such a lengthy investigation proves he did nothing wrong.
“I surely was aggressive in moving issues forward politically and substantively, but never knowingly at the cost of doing anything that wasn’t absolutely aboveboard,” he said. “We never violated any known statute or law; those allegations were really unfounded.”
Ford, the former port executive, who at 80 is a senior counsel for law firm K&L Gates, said that much of Dinsmore’s bullish style came out of his childhood in Butte, Mont., and coming-of-age in the mid-’60s as a Teamsters union truck driver in Anchorage.
“He ran the port the way he did his first job… It was full speed ahead,” says Ford. “They (critics) partly thought he was too arrogant, because he wanted to get the project done, and he never lost sight of what he wanted to get done.”
Reflecting his drive, Dinsmore started as port CEO in 1992 with no college degree at all, but by 1999 he’d earned an MBA from the University of Washington.
“What I learned is I could have been equally as effective, in a quantitative substantive manner, but been a whole lot less aggressive, forward,” he says. “I could have done a better job of understanding the lack of enthusiasm by folks in various interest groups, without a doubt.”
Dinsmore says he has felt bitterness about the accusations against his character but has instead chosen to look ahead.
“I know people who get stuck in history,” he says. “I know the only thing I can change is looking forward.”
Back to business
It wasn’t until last fall that Dinsmore started to see the possibility of a new direction. He’d gone to visit daughter Sami Dinsmore and her husband, Brandon Sweeney, for Thanksgiving at their home in Nashville, where Sweeney was finishing law school.
Sami Dinsmore, 25, was a trainer for the Pure Barre women’s fitness chain. She wanted to harness her degree in finance and macroeconomics to operate her own franchise.
Dinsmore went with his daughter to Denver to visit Pure Barre founder and CEO Carrie Rezabek, investigated the business plan and books, and decided it was a good investment. He proposed a partnership to his daughter, and they formed a new company, Imas Holdings LLC (Sami spelled backwards), to bring the chain to the Seattle area.
The first studio, tucked into a business center next to the West Seattle Bridge, cost the elder Dinsmore $40,000 for the franchise and nearly $60,000 for outfitting the 980-square-foot mirrored exercise room, he says.
He sits on the boards of the University of Washington Foster School of Business, the Institute of Prostate Cancer Research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Fujiki Transportation & Stevedoring Co. Ltd. of Yokohama, Japan. He says he’s soon to join a fourth board, whose identity he declines to divulge.
Dinsmore still looks much like he did when he was port CEO, with a well-tailored jacket accenting his broad frame. He still likes fine cars, and has indulged himself with a black Porsche 911 Carrera.
But he has also changed — appearing at moments even hesitant.
“I’m at a point now, I’m still going through the mending and healing process, I’m not back to being whole yet,” he says. “The unlimited energy I used to have, I get tired.”
He added that with his temperament of a few years ago, he probably couldn’t have so harmoniously taken a back seat to his daughter and Rezabek in the Pure Barre venture.
“I’m absolutely more humble, more sensitive to pushiness, without a doubt,” he said.
Ford is surprised by the women’s fitness venture, but says he can understand its origins in Dinsmore’s changed temperament.
“He’s a lot less hard-driving and less cocky than he was,” Ford says. “Let’s put it that way.”