There are lots of stories about Eugene Ji, a Chinese-born entrepreneur, trade broker and real estate investor who puts together multimillion- and maybe even billion-dollar deals from suburban Baton Rouge.
There is the story about how he taught himself English, one word at a time, by listening to Voice of America radio while tending a herd of water buffalo in the Chinese countryside during the waning years of the Great Revolution.
There is also the one about the first time he came to the U.S. on a business trip, how he was so mesmerized by Ronald Reagan speaking on TV about self-reliance that he missed the dinner he was supposed to attend and decided on the spot to defect to America.
Then there is the one about how he was enticed to move from New York to Baton Rouge in 1987 by then-Gov. Buddy Roemer, whom Ji says he met on his first trip to Louisiana when he was a translator for a Chinese trade delegation.
“I loved the warm climate and the spicy food, and everyone was so nice. I told Buddy I would like to live here and he said, ‘Then you should stay,'” Ji recalls. “I told him I didn’t know anyone here, but Buddy said, ‘You know me.’ So I decided if the governor wants me to stay, I will stay.”
With Eugene Ji, it is sometimes hard to determine where fact ends and storytelling begins because the details don’t quite square up all the time.
For instance, Roemer, who considers Ji a friend and has done many deals with him over the past 25 years, didn’t actually meet Ji until he was out of office.
And Ji didn’t defect to the U.S. in any political sense. He emigrated after Tiananmen Square in 1989.
As for how he learned English, we’ll take his word for it.
But the details of Ji’s stories matter less than the fact that the stories are good—real good. And Ji would not be the first self-made man with something of a mythic past.
Which helps explain how, over the years, he has managed to build a career in Baton Rouge brokering deals between companies on two continents. In the high-stakes world of international trade—where language and cultural differences can present impenetrable barriers—Ji is able to talk the talk, make the introductions and smooth things over with an always-affable smile in a way that brings parties together.
Not that they always stay together. Some of his deals have worked out well; others, not so much. In international trade between the world’s competing economic superpowers, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince.
Over the past few years Ji has shifted his focus away from finding opportunities in China for Louisiana companies and is concentrating instead on luring Chinese investors with billions to spend to Louisiana, a comparatively safe haven for their investment capital.
In recent months, he has invested on behalf of clients in two north Louisiana golf courses, in an energy company and in a dilapidated office tower on Florida Boulevard that he hopes to turn into a film school for budding Chinese filmmakers.
Those projects, just a few million dollars each, pale in comparison to his plans to build a deepwater mega-port 20 miles off the coast of St. Mary Parish in southwest Louisiana. It’s a $4 billion proposition, maybe more, and it would perfectly fit the mold of Chinese investments in projects that make it easier to sell Chinese goods abroad. So far, Ji says, he has more than $700 million committed from Chinese investors.
Whether it ever becomes reality is a long shot, according to those in the maritime industry. But those who know Ji says if the mega- port doesn’t pan out, he’ll find something else that does. He’s tenacious, entrepreneurial and persistent. More importantly, he has the trust of investors back in his native China who are hungry for opportunities in a country that is only too happy to welcome their investment capital.
“He understands the name of the game and the Chinese don’t, but they want to come here and invest,” says Ye Sho Chen, director of the emerging markets initiative at the E.J. Ourso College of Business at LSU. “They come here and they need someone to show them the rules. That is Ji.”
Ji’s contacts in China come from growing up in an elite family that lived in the Guizhou province in southwest China, a relatively temperate area with spicy food Ji likens to Louisiana’s cuisine. His dad was a doctor, he says. His mother and other relatives were professors.
He grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, during the years of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Like millions of other urban youths of his generation, he was sent to the countryside to be “re-educated” by the peasants, which explains how he would come to be tending water buffalo listening to VOA radio.
Those were also the years that higher education was forbidden in China. For more than a decade, Chinese universities were closed. They reopened in 1977, and Ji entered the University of Guizhou the next year, joining a highly competitive and well-connected group of China’s best and brightest young students. They would form bonds that would transcend geographic boundaries and last a lifetime.
“He knows the business leaders in China, the power brokers, the bankers and investment associations,” Roemer says. “There is not a month goes by that we don’t have a group of Chinese investors in this bank [Business First Bank] that Ji has brought.”
Over the years, those connections have proven key to Ji’s ability to broker deals in Louisiana, where he settled in the late 1980s and teamed up with Grady Smith, a Baton Rouge attorney involved in international trade. In those years, trade with China was just opening up to the U.S. for the first time in more than half a century. Ji and Smith took advantage of Ji’s connections to create opportunities for themselves and their clients.
Those opportunities ran the gamut. They were involved in processing Chinese crawfish meat and had a food manufacturing plant that, at one time, prepared frozen dishes for Piccadilly cafeteria. They were involved with manufacturing rugs for a high-end New Orleans designer and retailer. They were involved with selling chemicals for water treatment plants.
“We did several million dollars’ worth of business in potassium permanganate, which is used to treat and disinfect water,” Smith says. “We would procure the chemical over there, then sell it over here. … But in the early days we would basically broker deals, and Ji would get a brokerage fee.”
Some of those deals were unqualified successes. Businessman Joe Traigle recalls how the investment company he founded with Roemer and owned until 2008, The Sterling Group, did several deals with Ji’s help in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“We had various deals that involved buying chemicals, processing them, shipping them around the globe,” Traigle says. “Ji had contacts all over and would help us find places to ship the materials. …He brought a lot of skills to the table, and some of the deals worked out quite well.”
But some of those deals didn’t exactly pan out, although not necessarily as a result of Ji’s involvement. One of his clients was New Orleans rug designer Elay Doyle, whose Peel & Co. sells high-end, custom-designed rugs that are manufactured in China. Doyle says she met Ji and Smith in the mid-1990s at a seminar on doing business in China and that she hired them to help her establish a manufacturing site in China. At first, Doyle was pleased—until, she says, she found out she and the Chinese import-export company were both being charged agency fees.
“I told them they couldn’t work it from both ends,” she says. “We ended up going to court over it, and they lost.”
Ji says he has no recollection of the specifics of the deal or why it went sour. He also does not recall any litigation.
Whatever the details, the experience was not bad enough to prevent Doyle from again reaching out to Ji, in 2010, to help her find a facility to manufacture designer lanterns. That deal also cratered, among other reasons, Doyle says, because Ji’s connection to oversee the manufacturing was not doing what he was supposed to and the factory never received some $15,000 in payments she wired to it.
Again, not Ji’s doing, but, says Doyle, “There were all sorts of weird things about the deal. Ji is a very nice man, and he makes the introductions, but I think he toots his own horn louder than is warranted.”
There were other deals Ji touts that, while they didn’t go down in flames, apparently fizzled out. For instance, his work with Holden-based fire engine manufacturer Ferrara Fire Apparatus, and also with Covington-based South Central Pool/PoolCorp., one of the country’s largest distributors of swimming pool chemicals and equipment is difficult to assess. Both are companies he says he brought to China. But Ferrara executives decline to comment on their dealings with Ji, while South Central Pool officials will say only that their experience with Ji was very brief and many years ago.
Does that suggest anything about Ji’s ability to deliver on his promises?
Not necessarily, says LSU’s Chen. In China—where the return on investment is often measured in decades rather than years or quarters—deals can take a long time to gel. Just because a company didn’t sell any merchandise in China after trying for a few months doesn’t mean Ji misrepresented anything or did anything wrong.
“He does not have the ability to help you make sales,” Chen says. “It is up to the company to make its own sales. Ji only has the ability to make the connections. He is a resource.”
And a valuable resource, says Mayor Kip Holden, whom Ji accompanied on a couple of trade missions to China. The two first met several years ago at Sullivan’s, where Holden says he was approached by Ji.
“He was very nice and started telling me all about how he worked with Buddy Roemer and used to work closely with [the late U.S. Sen.] Bennett Johnston,” Holden recalls.
The two traveled to China in 2009 and again in 2010. Ji has also brought several Chinese trade delegations to Baton Rouge. Whether the visits have resulted in any concrete business deals, Holden cannot say.
“But they were worth it, and they are worth it because of the doors that were opened and the connections we have made,” Holden says. “He made contact for us in China and established the lines of communication, and that’s very valuable.”
Over the past few years, Ji has shifted his focus from bringing local companies over to China. Instead, he’s trying to bring Chinese investors here. Those investors are plentiful and have money to burn. China invested $5 billion in the U.S. economy last year and currently owns about $28 billion worth of American assets.
Among the Louisiana deals in which Ji has recently invested Chinese capital is an equity investment company managed by Shreveport-based O’Brien Energy, which develops exploration and production opportunities in the oil and gas industry. Earlier this year, Ji brought a group of 10 or so Chinese investors to O’Brien’s offices to meet with company president William O’Brien IV. They liked what they heard and ended up putting about $3 million into the $207 million company.
“This is what he does now,” Roemer says. “He has evolved from representing Americans in China to representing Chinese who want to invest in America. It’s an evolution that has taken him a generation, 20 years.”
Ji himself has also invested in two north Louisiana golf courses, which he bought from a state retirement system earlier this year for $3 million. Both the Golf Club at StoneBridge in Bossier City and Olde Oaks Golf Course near Shreveport had been owned by the Municipal Police Employees Retirement System and were losing money. Ji, however, sees them as great opportunities and has big plans to renovate the two courses.
Those plans include upgrading the course at StoneBridge and developing 100 rental cottages at Olde Oaks that will be marketed to vacationing families, business groups and international travelers. He envisions the golf club resort as a travel destination that will capitalize on access to the nearby casinos.
He views it as a place where international trade deals could be negotiated. He also would like to use the course as a training camp for budding young golfers from China, where golf is a growing sport and few top-flight courses exist.
“We can have more than 100 Chinese kids come for months for camp, and in the morning they can learn English,” Ji says. “Then, in the afternoon we will bring in pros to work with them” on their golf.
Another of Ji’s recent investments is the Wooddale Towers office building on Florida Boulevard that he picked up for a mere $250,000. Real estate observers say Ji has gotten himself a white elephant, as it would cost more to put the building back into commerce than it would be worth when completed, and it would cost more to demolish than the land on which it sits is worth.
Ji sees the property becoming the site of a film school for budding filmmakers from both the U.S. and China. He has talked with officials at Southern University about partnering on the project and is also trying to get executives from the local film industry on board. He has raised nearly $1 million and is hoping Southern will help come up with grant funds to cover the rest.
“This is something I want to do for the community,” Ji says. “There is nothing like this here, and there is a need.”
Ji’s most ambitious project involves billions of dollars, most of which would come from China. He wants to develop a deepwater port off the coast of St. Mary Parish in southwest Louisiana. Though Louisiana has several deepwater ports, Ji envisions one that is deeper—able to accommodate the growing number of super-freighters that increasingly dominate the maritime trade and require ports that are at least 50 feet deep.
Ji believes—correctly, say experts—the demand for such ports will increase once the widening of the Panama Canal locks is completed in 2015, opening the way for the New Panamax-sized ships: the largest vessels ever to enter the Gulf of Mexico. The St. Mary Parish port would be able to handle 5 million containers a year and would connect to land via a four-lane causeway that would link to railroads, U.S. Highway 90, the Atchafalaya River and, eventually, the Mississippi River. Ji is waiting on various regulatory approvals before feasibility and cost studies can begin.
As of now, those huge ships and their cargoes couldn’t reach New Orleans or Baton Rouge—two of the largest ports in the United States—because their draft is too deep for the Mississippi River. That would make Ji’s deepwater offshore port extremely valuable.
Officials with LED decline to comment on the proposal. Economic development officials in St. Mary Parish, however, are firmly behind it. They’ve been working with Ji for three years and believe the port would be a boon to the state, to say nothing of what it would mean for their area. But they are realistic that it won’t happen overnight, if ever.
“A project of this size will take some time to evolve,” says Frank Fink, St. Mary Parish director of economic development. “Eugene knows that. He doesn’t chase windmills.”
For his part, Ji is optimistic and says he believes it can happen if local, state and federal officials all work together. If it doesn’t pan out, though, he is already looking ahead to the next deal. On Nov. 26, Madison Parish named him as economic development consultant for north Louisiana.
“All the parishes are cooperating, and we are getting ready to take a big trip to China,” he says. “There are lots of opportunities in north Louisiana.”
