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Catholic Spirtual Growth » Personal Testimony of Louis P. Saia III

Printed with Permission of Louis P. Saia, III

He was on the ropes. He was millions in debt. A huge corporation was trying to take his patent, ruin his company, and break him legally. His marriage was full of tension. He wore a pattern on his kitchen floor, pacing. So desperate was Louis P. Saia III that he thought of stalking the executives trying to break him. There was nothing left for him and his wife (even his lawyers were dropping him) and he was so beside himself with anxiety -- an upheaval he describes as nearly worse than if a loved one died -- that he could think of nothing to do but put on his running shoes and try to run it off.

The legal battle -- a true struggle against Goliath -- is detailed in  an article that we linked to yesterday. But there was also an incredible spiritual element. Indeed, Saia's life and marriage and business were saved, as it turns out, by an apparition of the Virgin Mary. It was March 17, 1996, that Saia, of Houma, Louisiana, who operates Pallet Reefer Company, came to the end of his rope, and began running down a gravel road. He was not a religious man -- Catholic, yes, but the kind who thought nothing of missing Mass. That was about to dramatically change.

After dispelling the violent thoughts -- getting rid of what he now perceives as having come from the devil -- he jogged near his home.

"I began to run, and I get about 600 feet down this road and the road turns," he says of that fateful day. "When you make the turn, about 300 feet, is a little office building where we conducted the business that we were all fighting over [an invention for a new shipping container]. And I see someone on the porch. I was thinking, that's my secretary. I wondered why she'd be there on a Sunday. When I got about thirty feet at an angle, I look up to wave to my 'secretary,' but it's not her. On the porch, hands in prayer, is a woman with a white linen veil and a white gown. My thought was, gee, now I'm hallucinating. I rub my eyes and I'm still jogging and getting closer and I shake my head and now I'm 15 feet away -- and this time when I look, not only do I see her, with her hands in prayer, but I see a little bit of hair coming out from her veil and it's blowing in the breeze.

"I see her eyebrows, I see the wrinkles on her gown, and her eyes -- which were very blue. Blue, blue, blue. A blue like I've never seen. Her hair was a light brown, like a chestnut brown. She was dressed in clothes like women wore in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. She was rather short, about 5'3", and I got scared -- too close and I was seeing too much. I decide that I'm going to run past the porch as fast as I can, and that's what I did. I was scared. When I got directly across from the porch -- she was looking straight out -- I looked as I ran past and her eyes hit me and I was stopped cold in my tracks."

Now he was looking at her from only 12 feet away, and her eyes, her incredible eyes, were touching his. From them came a wave of love unlike any he had ever felt. "I mean, my mother loves me and my wife loves me but it wasn't even comparable, it wasn't an iota as compared to the kind of love I felt from her," says Louis, who spoke to Spirit Daily yesterday and has also presented his testimony at church meetings. "Her love, the compassion in her eyes: if you took all the mothers in the whole city of New Orleans and you bottled up their love for their children, maybe that doesn't even come close.

"I didn't get on my knees. I wasn't very religious. She looked like a holy person, and I just stood there and she read my mind. Her face was not smiling and wasn't frowning. It was serious. We were eye to eye and she says, 'I am praying to protect you.'  The thing she says was not only the answer to my problem at that point in time, but an answer to my life. She says, 'Just have faith in my Son Jesus.'"

That simple. That direct. "All these Harvard lawyers and Yale lawyers made my problem so complex, with the business situation, and she solves the business situation but more importantly the situation of losing my life from dying from stress and also my eternal life with one sentence: Just have faith in my Son Jesus."

Now Saia knew who she was -- the Mother of God -- and felt drawn like a magnet. The aroma of roses was so pervasive he could taste it in his saliva. "I walked up to her, not even thinking, and when I got close, she looked as human as anyone," says Louis. "After looking at her, I decided I want to touch her. I moved to do that and when I went to touch the bottom part of her arm, I realized that my hand would go through and I backed off. I had leaned forward and my eyes were four or five inches from her and that's when I could see through her, like translucent, you could still see the linen, but it was like liquid, and I backed off one arm's length, and when I did, she looked again like she was as much flesh as we are -- as human as anyone -- and that's when I decided I needed to get on my knees and pray, so I got on my knees and prayed the Hail Mary. And when I opened my eyes, she was gone."

But in the meantime, like a light switch, Saia had gone from the worst despair in his life -- a despair so bad he says that "death would have been welcome" -- to the best moment in his life. "It happened in a matter of a second," says the businessman. "The peace that I felt -- not only was there no panic, but I had never felt the joy and peace in my entire life like I felt then. And it wasn't leaving."

Indeed, soon after, when his wife saw him, she couldn't believe the transformation. He looked 15 years younger. Incredibly enough, from total misfortune, from abandonment by his lawyers, from what appeared to be sure defeat -- with a huge corporation taking away his invention, and leaving him bankrupt -- he went on to a miraculous victory, a victory so dramatic that it was featured in a national business magazine (click here to read the Business Week article).

Naturally, a business publication couldn't detail all the behind-the-scene miracles, and there were plenty of them. Indeed, Saia ended up winning a war no one thought he could -- truly, David versus Goliath, a stunning victory, as you will see in a moment  -- and he credits the Virgin, who, after the single apparition (which occurred in broad daylight on March 17, 1996), spoke to Louis in locutions.

She told him to "persevere." She told him to hold great faith in her Son. "I trusted," says Louis. "It was out of my hands from that day forward. All I did was pray."

And what happened to this businessman -- this businessman who now speaks in churches and who says his thoughts remain consumed by Jesus and Mary -- was astounding. His lawyers had abandoned him. Banks wouldn't lend him money. His own family wouldn't give him any more funds for his legal case, because it seemed so hopeless. But Saia had decided to persevere. He had invented a valuable product -- a shipping container -- that the corporation wanted to assume total control over, and he couldn't accept that. He couldn't accept someone taking his invention, his great accomplishment, his life's work.

And so Saia persevered and trusted and right after the apparition -- within days -- two new lawyers suddenly showed up on the scene, saying they'd heard of the case and would take it. They agreed to work on a contingency basis -- itself a little miracle -- but Saia was still in desperate need of money, virtually bankrupt, and here's where a second miracle occurred. It was the same week. A man from a financial group called Volvo Credit had come to see Louis for a previously scheduled meeting -- a meeting Saia had all but forgotten -- and now Louis poured out his heart to him, telling him of his financial desperation and about the appearance of Mary despite the fact that the executive was Protestant.

The story took three hours to tell and at the end of it the Volvo executive startled Louis by saying that he realized Saia's financial situation was hardly enough to loan him what he needed ($5 million), but that he believed he would win the case and would lend the money based on the story! "I think everything you've told me is true, and I think you're going to beat this mammoth company," he told Saia.

It turned out that the Volvo executive was a deeply religious man and although Saia and his wife Cindy both were initially in disbelief -- thought the man was joking -- the next day was a fax confirming the loan and talking about Jesus.

"Through my faith and my trust," says Saia, "I was back in action again."

But there was a court case to win, and soon, this again looked desperate. The large corporation he had been battling, which had been in a venture partnership with him, was trying to liquidate the company they had formed and, knowing Saia was broke, outbid him on his own invention (called a "pallet reefer," which allows shipment of perishables). The courtroom action was in Wilmington, Delaware, and one day his Delaware lawyers called with the sad news that the judge had told them he was going to rule to liquidate, granting the corporation its victory and fulfilling that corporation's vow to crush Louis.

But Saia, once a lukewarm Catholic, now praying constantly, claims he was still hearing from the Virgin, and that she told him to go to Delaware even though the judge himself told his lawyers to tell him not to bother coming! "I said, get me a ticket to get to Delaware. My wife said, 'look, we have $60 left in our checking account, and $400 in a drawer.' But I couldn't get Mary off my mind, and all I did was pray, pray, pray. Anytime I wanted to communicate with Mary, all I had to do was go to a quiet place and pray with my heart."

 Persevere. Have faith. It was off to Delaware on borrowed money and borrowed time, and then came the fateful hearing. It was May 6, 1996. "We got to the courtroom, and it was like a wedding," he told Spirit Daily. "Their side of the court is full of people, and they're laughing and jeering and making fun of us. We can overhear them, talking about the hotel and the band they hired and the hors d'oeuvres -- they had a party planned for when they got the ruling.

"Right before the judge walks in, I lost my faith," says Saia. "I told the lead attorney, you wanted to buy my half, you can have it, so I could take something rather than nothing. They look at me and say, it's too late for that, it's off the table, we're not going to negotiate anything. They were going to take it all their way. But what happens is I go back to my faith. I grab my wife Cindy by the hand, and I'm holding her with one hand and in my mind I'm praying. I never prayed like that in my life! I'm begging. I'm pleading over and over, 'Mary, please, ask your Son Jesus to touch the judge on his head and let him know they're using his court to steal innocent people's patents. Mary please.'"

"Well what happens is that just like they predicted the judge cuts all the arguments short, and says he's going to rule on the matter," recalls Lou. "He has the gavel in his hand and I know he's going to rule against me, just like my lawyers had predicted, and all of a sudden, the gavel's in his hand, and raised -- that's how close it got -- and all of a sudden I see this light come from the window in the courtroom and go on the judge -- shine on him. I guess to everyone else it looked like a cloud moved and some light came in. To me, for some reason, I'm begging that prayer, and when I saw it, my heart leapt with joy, because I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that my prayer was being answered."

It was sunlight, but it was also a manifestation.

"The judge puts the gavel down when that light hits him, looks at my opponent's lawyer, and says, 'Hypothetically'-- then repeats my prayer! He says: 'Hypothetically, what if your client is using my court to steal these innocent people's patents?'"

"The same prayer I had been praying, the judge repeats it! Then he changes his mind and rules not to liquidate, but to 'stay' the action! My lawyers start crying, both of them, and my wife was crying, even the clerk knew something happened to the judge in those last seconds and even she looked choked up."

The others, the lawyers and executives from the corporation, evaporated.

Saia himself didn't weep until he was on a sidewalk outside the courtroom. Then he let loose with a torrent so loud that passersby thought he needed an ambulance. "I went down on one knee and put my hand over my eyes and began to weep, and I felt the feeling even stronger than when Mary appeared," he says. "The intensity of the joy was such that I can't describe it. The love I felt and the joy I felt are indescribable. People thought I was having a seizure -- 'Mr., can we get you an ambulance, can we help you?' I couldn't talk. I could only weep. It looks like I'm having a heart attack or a seizure, but it's the greatest moment of my life!"

The victory led to arbitration which soon led to a huge award that Louis used to pay his many debts and restart his company. He gave $700,000 of it to charity.

And oh yes: A few weeks after the May hearing, Louis got a call from a priest he had met, Father Paul Bergeron. The priest came over to say he'd had a spiritual dream with Louis in it. It had occurred the same day as the Delaware hearing.

"He said in the dream, it was misty and foggy and there was a bright light behind the mist and fog and he could see a source of light and he said I was in a field with this mist and fog and he said I was kneeling. He knelt exactly like I had knelt on that sidewalk in Delaware. He told me I was wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, and a yellow tie -- just what I was wearing that day. Then he tells me, he doesn't know why, but I had my hand over my eyes. Next to me was a figure nine-feet tall, with wings 15-feet high, the Archangel Michael. He said he had his sword out touching me on the head with it. He said it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life."

"When I was there and they read that verdict and they said you won the patents and you won the money ($25 million), although it was a happy feeling, nothing comes close to the real award, the real victory, which was my conversion," concludes Louis. "The cross I carried was small compared to people who have a child who's sick with a terminal illness, or compared to a spouse who has cancer, compared to a marriage that involves a lot of children and a divorce. Many people carry big crosses. I'm not the only one who has experienced anxiety. But I hope if nothing else the time I spent relating the story deepens appreciation for what the power of faith in Jesus Christ can do in the 'no-win' situations in life -- you know, where the doctors say there's nothing we can do, or these no-hope situations where you have a child on drugs. Let me tell you that there is no such thing as a 'no-hope' situation. I believe in the deepest parts of my heart that no matter how desperate you may be, and how 'no-hope,' no matter how extreme your situation may be, take it from me: wherever you have strong faith, you'll always have miracles."

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CẢM NGHIỆM THỨ HAI CŨNG CỦA ÔNG LOUIS SAIA: 
 
2  Trích từ : http://www.visionsofjesuschrist.com/weeping201.htm

How to Get Even with Goliath

Written by Stephanie B. Goldberg

Reported in BusinessWeek.com September 10,2003 - How to Get Even with Goliath Most people cave when a big corporation pushes them around. Louis Saia pushed back--and took away $25 million.

The day couldn't have gone better if he had scripted it himself, mused Louis P. Saia III. It was May 17, 1995, and the CEO of 12-employee Pallet Reefer Co. in Houma, La., had completed a long but productive meeting in Menlo Park, Calif., with his joint-venture partners and their biggest client. Afterward, they had all chatted amiably over dinner at an Italian restaurant.

Saia was confident that his patented invention called the "pallet reefer" would make him and his wife, Cindy, multimillionaires. The "reefer" is a stackable shipping container, cooled with a compressor like a refrigerator. Saia believed it would revolutionize the trucking industry because it can be used to ship small loads of perishables alongside other cargo. In the daylong meeting with the client, Con-Way Transportation Services, it seemed they had cleared up to Con-Way's satisfaction how certain design flaws could be corrected. Now, surely, thought Saia, his joint-venture partners--the big truck manufacturer Grumman Allied Industries--would finally jump-start the project, which had stalled in 1994 when the parent company, Grumman Corp., merged with Northrop Industries. Little did he know he was standing on the edge of an abyss.

There in the Con-Way parking lot at twilight, Saia stopped his Grumman Allied partners as they were leaving. James McConnell, CEO of Grumman Allied and its representative in Allied Transportation Products--the entity created by Grumman for the joint venture in 1992--rolled down his window. "I said, 'Hey, fellas, what do you think? Have you reached a decision?"' recalls Saia. Yes, said McConnell. They wanted to proceed with the Pallet Reefer--just not with Saia. Stunned, Saia begged them to reconsider. "That was the moment I realized they were trying to muscle me out of my company," says Saia, now 45. He had reason to think so: McConnell would admit later in legal proceedings he didn't like Saia, was irritated by the man's emotional personality, and had decided earlier Saia had to go.

That September, Saia made a wrenching decision--to sue his corporate partner for breach of contract. The ensuing legal battle would drive him and his wife to near-bankruptcy, imperil their marriage, and engulf him in anxiety. Yet, the couple later realized, it would have been far worse to give up without a fight. "If Grumman won," says Cindy Saia, 39, a chemical engineer and vice-president of the company, "it would mean our hard work was for nothing and there was no justice. In my heart, I knew that wasn't so." Saia's own father, a wealthy Louisiana trucker, scoffed at the notion that his son could beat Goliath. "He told me I had a better chance of winning the lottery," says Saia.

How often does a big company breach a contract--as in Saia's case--or not pay a vendor, or push a small rival out of the market, or try to acquire an inventor's technology on the cheap? Surely often enough to generate horror stories in every industry. But usually entrepreneurs surrender quietly and move on. The reason is simple: "The chance of a small business being able to outlast a large business in litigation is practically nil," says Bob Meade, senior vice-president of the American Arbitration Assn. To pursue a lawsuit, "you almost have to be a little loony," says Richard M. Leisner, a Tampa lawyer and former chair of the American Business Assn.'s small-business subcommittee. "You have to be a driven-CEO type who's going to make the lawsuit your baby."

The cost alone is daunting. Litigators capable of taking on a big corporation charge around $400 an hour, and a patent case that goes to trial can cost more than $500,000, says Inventors' Digest. So most entrepreneurs need a lawyer willing to work for a contingency fee. But that means you'll lose 25% to 40% of any recovery, plus expenses. Even then, lawyers frequently demand clients share the ongoing costs of a suit. That's assuming you can find one. "I reject about 90% of the cases offered to me," says Raymond P. Niro Sr., a Chicago lawyer renowned in intellectual property circles as a giant-slayer. And many top litigators will take a case on contingency only if they expect to earn millions.

What's more, the emotional stress and time consumed by litigation can be overwhelming. "We had no idea what it was going to take," says San Francisco architect Glenn A. Storek, whose battle against a Citigroup real estate subsidiary has dragged on for eight years. Last year, he and his brother Richard, also an architect, won $41.8 million after convincing a jury that they had been pushed into bankruptcy by Citicorp Real Estate Inc., which served as bond agent on an Oakland (Calif.) project. But the case isn't over. Citicorp attorney R. Paul Wickes says he's confident his client will prevail on appeal. "An enormous amount of time has gone into keeping the lawsuit going," laments Richard Storek. "In the process, we lost our homes and our personal possessions."

Builders, telecom resellers, convenience stores--no small business is immune to a face-off with a giant. The companies most at risk are ones that share information with prospective backers or clients, lawyers say. "The big company makes promises to compensate them. Then when they get their hands on the idea, they cut the little guys loose," says Niro, one of the few lawyers who specializes in David vs. Goliath suits.

Occasionally, though, Goliaths underestimate the mettle--and the fury--of a scorned entrepreneur. Take Joseph Freda, president of C&F Packing Co. in Elk Grove Village, Ill., a 120-employee meatpacker with $40 million in revenues, a Niro client. "I was determined I wasn't going to let anybody destroy what my father had worked his tail off for," says Freda. So in 1993 he sued Pizza Hut Inc., once a major customer, alleging it had stolen his family's sausage recipe and technology and passed it along to the $16.9 billion meat processing giant IBP Inc. He sued IBP, too, and after a seven-year battle, an appeals court last year upheld a $10.9 million judgment against the packer.

And Pizza Hut? In a series of twists and turns typical of high-stakes litigation, Pizza Hut was dismissed from the original suit, then reinstated on appeal. Robert W. Millen, general counsel of Pizza Hut in Dallas, denies all of C&F's charges. The trial is now scheduled for January, 2002--more than eight years after the suit was first filed. "The name of the game is delay, delay, delay," says an exasperated Freda.

There were nights when Louis Saia paced his kitchen floor, popping Valiums that no longer had any effect on him, and wondering if he had made a terrible mistake. Certainly nothing had gone smoothly in the months after the parking lot encounter. He says he had rejected Grumman Allied's offer for a $2 million buyout as an "insult." His personality conflict with McConnell had grown sharper. And in August, Grumman Allied, which had provided much of the capital and manufacturing expertise for the joint venture, largely shut down Pallet Reefer's operations, prompting Saia to file his suit. Later in the legal proceeding, Grumman alleged--and Saia denied--that Saia lost $12 million for the joint venture through mismanagement and by funneling business to a small trucking company he owned.

Then things got worse. In January, 1996, Allied Transportation petitioned a Delaware court to liquidate the company, citing a boardroom deadlock between the Saias and the Grumman Allied representatives. Had Grumman succeeded, speculates Saia, it "would have forced a sale of my patent, which they could have inexpensively acquired." Next, Allied Transportation laid off all of Pallet Reefer's employees, including Saia, leading Con-Way to cancel its contract the next day, according to an arbitrator's findings. McConnell, who now heads up a management spin-off of Grumman Allied, declined comment, noting that his company is no longer part of Northrop Grumman. Northrup Grumman officials also declined comment.

As spring approached, Saia's despair deepened. His lawyers had bailed out in January when he could no longer pay them. He had run through $2 million in assets, and at one point the family checking account held just $60. "I was waking up at night hopeless, broke," says Saia. "My marriage was on the rocks."

There's no question when Saia hit bottom. The day is etched in his memory. On Mar. 16, 1996, he says he had "violent thoughts" about "stalking" Northrop Grumman's executives. "I gave thought to a trip to Los Angeles to pursue my vendetta," he says. But on Mar. 17, as he was out jogging to relieve his despair, Saia says he experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary on the steps of his office. He says she told him "to just have faith in my son," and from that moment on, he felt a sense of peace.

Call it faith or coincidence, but the Saias saw their fortunes improve. That month, New Orleans lawyer Jack M. Alltmont agreed to take the case on contingency. "I frankly thought, 'Well, we'll get into it and we'll settle,"' says Alltmont, who instead spent the next year on the case. Saia also hired a lawyer in Delaware--using borrowed funds--to block the liquidation of the company. Ultimately, the Delaware judge ruled that liquidation wouldn't resolve the breach of contract issue. At that point, both sides agreed to arbitration, which began in New York on June 2. "If we lost, we would have gone bankrupt," says Saia. "But we knew we weren't going to lose."

For a year, as they commuted to New York for monthly hearings, the Saias lived on credit cards and prayer. Finally, on Dec. 2, 1997, the arbitrator awarded Saia $18 million, finding Allied Transportation had breached its contract and rejecting Grumman Allied's allegations against Saia. He had just $2 million left after the lawyers took $4.5 million, and he paid off his creditors. Six months later, he sued Allied Transportation again, charging his ex-partner failed to return his patents on time as ordered by the arbitrator. The result: Allied Transportation settled for $7 million.

Flush with cash, Saia moved quickly to revive his beloved Pallet Reefer. He poured $3 million into the business, including the purchase of an abandoned factory from the local parish for $700,000. His goal: to begin producing 15 pallet reefers a day starting this fall. This time, no outsiders will get any equity.

That's the business. The Saias also gave $700,000 of their winnings to charity. "I feel God has something planned for us, and we don't yet know the end of the story," says Cindy Saia. For now, though, the curtain has come down on their legal drama. And for that, they say: Amen.

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