To this day, Gallant remains convinced of his rectitude; he himself provided INC. with a copy of the Touche Ross letter and the lawyers' report. He had taken only the compensation he was entitled to, he said, the same as anyone else. Certainly there were problems at the airport, but these were not of his making.Yes, he had an AC check written to purchase Nutra-Source, but he had covered it from personal funds in five days "and at no time did the company have a nickel out." He insisted he had done only what it took to make the company grow. He had never crossed the line, and he had certainly never gotten rich.
"I should have gotten a lawyer, but that's not my style," Gallant says. "I argued that I ran it like it was mine, but for them. That's who I am. I didn't say I'd change. I couldn't.
"I didn't believe they would fire me; I'd have bet a huge amount of money they couldn't do it."
True or false, the charges were only a catalyst. Times had changed inside AC, even if Gallant couldn't. The era of pushing back the frontier had ended.
"Maybe the charges were petty, compared to whatever else was going on," Tim Frye said. "But there was a strong feeling we needed a different approach. We were in a very precarious position. Overhead was high. Morale was poor. It was public knowledge that the airport was leaving money on the table. I wanted a CEO who gave his staff an opportunity to look at these things.
"The employees weren't interested in growth. We wanted profits, and we talked to Allan about that. But Allan would never have been happy with that. He had us on the precipice of becoming a $100-million company."
For Perry Eaton and the board, the charges were one crisis too many. Eaton needed stability and order at AC to keep CEDC thriving -- and Gallant, finally, was as expendable as anyone else. "The needs of AC today are not growth related," he explains, echoing Frye. "Allan was a jovial genius who built an empire in spite of himself. But running the company never interested him, and that was all that was left.
"Nobody did him dirt; you have to know that. Whatever was done, he did to himself. Nobody got him; he got himself. He had a death wish."
The ending was decorous and discreet. The allegations would be overlooked; Gallant's dismissal would be without cause, and he would be entitled to 90 days' severance pay. But even as they negotiated the terms of the dismissal, the board members searched for one final compromise. They offered him a new job, "chairman of the executive committee," in a separate office, away from day-to-day operations. Gallant turned them down. "I cannot maintain my personal integrity, self-respect, and the confidence of my associates in the business world by supporting such a proposal," he wrote back with formal politeness. "I believe that a simply prepared press statement, approved by both of us, should be made to avoid any embarrassment to either party."
Then he packed up his desk and was gone, that same day. Still astonished. "I want you to know," he wrote, "that for the next three weeks I will be available to resume my full-time job should you so change your mind."
Allan Gallant's ghost was very much in evidence when the new AC store opened in Cordova last June. He had fought the board since 1978 to get it built, and now it was a 10,000-aquare-foot beauty, complete with a chicken broaster and optical scanners at the checkout. Construction delays had eaten into the company's profits and aggravated the board, but once the store opened it could compete with anything this side of Anchorage, an hour away by air.
The grand opening was a festive affair. Sam Salkin, Gallant's protege and successor as president and CEO, flew a group of some 40 employees, suppliers, and friends over for the day, for speeches and a ribbon cutting, followed by mimosas and tacos in the restaurant overlooking the fishing fleet. Outsiders were still surprised by the firing, and the company banker, Frank Kaufmann, was particularly apprehensive about the transition. But among AC's executives there was a feeling of relief, and an eagerness to put the trauma of the past few months behind them. Without Gallant, the company would be different -- more conservative, more attuned to building earnings, less concerned with charting new territory. Gallant had built an institution, and it would continue without him.
After all, there is no need for a pioneer once the frontier has been conquered. "There are people who think Perry set up the whole thing to get rid of me," Gallant muses. "I don't believe it. But he's a schemer. He could have stopped the process. Part of him was punishing me for pushing through the ESOP, hanging me on the rope I braided. He doesn't like my style. He doesn't like my visibility.
"I am not unique. There are six or seven guys who have gone through the same agony, entrepreneurs brought up from the lower 48 to run native corporations. We're a breed that went out and took a risk in a culture that doesn't reward risk-taking. There's a brief life span for all of us. If I had run the company quietly and nongrowth oriented, with no exposure, I'd still be there."
As to the future, Gallant is philosophical. "I'm a genius," he says cheerily. "I just have to figure out where to put that genius to work." He still has his dreams of a bush transformed, of helping to build a twenty-first-century retailer, and there will be other companies, although "never another where I'm not in control."
Meanwhile, he remains strangely tied to AC. For a few months, he moved only as far as a desk in a buddy's construction office just down the hall from AC headquarters. By now he has moved out. But he still feels tied to AC, his own brush with Alaskan history, and he still confers with Eaton and Salkin almost daily, "because after seven years I put a hell of an investment in there."
And Perry Eaton remains strangely tied to Allan Gallant. "I love that fat guy," he says. "We were blessed to have him while we had him. Losing him was my greatest failure.
"But Allan has a future to play in this state," Eaton promises. "I have great plans for him, if he'll play."
