Keith Stanford

"Keith Stanford’s talent for knowing what information the Chairman would need long before he requested it became something of a legend within cuc. Stanford kept details of relevant business matters in an overstuffed briefcase. One day, called into a meeting at which several coc managers were present, Dobbin began firing questions at him. With each question Stanford would respond, “I have it right here,” withdraw a document from his briefcase and hand it to the Chairman, much to the amazement of the helicopter people present. Finally, one of them called across the table at Stanford, “Would you happen to have an operations manual for a Sikorsky s-76? You've got damn near everything else in there!”"

"When Mercantile Bank finally withdrew, Stanford was free to handle Highland on his own, which was something of a mixed blessing. Dobbin’s properties remained heavily mortgaged and the firm stumbled from month to month, somehow managing to remain solvent. The situation remained relatively unchanged for much of the next twenty years. “Until just a few years before he died,” Keith Stanford explained, “Craig Dobbin was often asset rich and cash poor.” Dobbin was also, at this stage of the game, not universally liked or trusted. “You either loved or hated the guy,” Stanford said. Lenders and mortgage holders usually lined up on the obvious side of the border between affection and dislike, though others had negative views as well. “Some people asked me how I could work for that S.O.B.,” Stanford says, “telling me he didn’t pay his bills and had gone through many financial officers before I came along.” Dobbin, Stanford would counter, was no deadbeat. “He just refused to accept the financial restrictions other people placed on him.” Stanford shrugs. “He was, to be sure now, sometimes difficult and demanding.”"

"The banks never lost their trust in Stanford, nor their expectation that he would keep Dobbin’s financial affairs in line. If Craig Dobbin was a riverboat gambler playing every game of chance in the house, Keith Stanford was a Calvinist preacher standing quietly in a corner, clenching coins within his tight fist. Dobbin’s bankers and creditors learned to trust Stanford’s assurances, and for several years Craig Dobbin’s file at the St. John’s branch of the Tp Bank carried the notation: “The day that Keith Stanford is no longer in the employ of Dobbin’s firm, call the loan.”"