Tap and Billy ran Black Dog out of a large A-frame garage they’d built in Tap’s backyard in southern New Hampshire. Whenever they weren’t out at a job site, Billy and Tap could usually be found there, working on equipment, preparing for the next assignment. For Billy, every piece of broken equipment was a personal challenge, so much so that he would not hesitate to spend four hours repairing something that could be replaced for eighteen dollars. “Billy,” Tap would gripe, “your time is worth more than that.” Like MacGyver, Billy never concerned himself with replacement costs. It was a pride thing.
Billy and Tap both knew their strengths. Tap would find and bid the jobs and handle client relations, while Billy would take care of equipment maintenance and supervise the job site, overseeing any divers brought on for a particular project. Billy often ate dinner with Tap and his wife and two kids, and he sometimes slept over.
Tap set a relentless schedule, usually fourteen-hour days, seven days a week, and Billy matched him hour for hour. Both of them had a lot invested in making Black Dog a success. For Billy, the company represented the answer to the question he had been wrestling with since high schooclass="underline" What should I do with my life?
His father, Bill, the son of Ukrainian-Russian immigrants, had managed to build a thriving trucking business despite having dropped out of school in the ninth grade. His mother, Olga, who had come to New York from Puerto Rico at age nine, had helped her husband grow their New Jersey company as office manager. She was a determined soul, having even persuaded her husband to change the way they pronounced the family surname of Juse, from Juice to Juss, because she preferred it that way79. Olga was deeply spiritual and a serious worrier. When Billy was a teenager, his daredevil ways on his dirt bike or behind the wheel of a car gave her plenty to fret about. Before bed, she would include a special prayer in her nightly list. Dear God, please let Billy live until he sees eighteen. When he made it that far, she and her husband hoped their son would build on his advantages by graduating from college and finding a good career. But Billy dropped out after a couple of semesters, retreating to the family business to work as a diesel mechanic. He grew a mustache to match his father’s, but other aspects of adulthood proved more elusive. Olga kept praying.
Billy then spent years bouncing around seasonal tourist areas in the Caribbean and New England, scuba diving for fun and working as a bartender for money, before settling in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. In that picturesque village on the banks of Lake Winnipesaukee, he made some side money as a diver, retrieving the occasional snowmobile that had fallen through the lake ice. Otherwise, bartending continued to pay the bills.
It was only at the prompting of his girlfriend, a go-getter marine biologist, that he had turned diving into something more than a hobby. She made it clear that she didn’t want to hitch herself to a barkeep drifting from pub to pub. Billy followed her lead in looking to the water to find a career. After graduating from dive school in California, he returned with a new sense of purpose and, before long, a new identity. Even though his relationship with the marine biologist didn’t last, he was immensely proud to be following his father into the ranks of small-business owner.
For his first few years as a Black Dog partner, Billy gave the company everything he had. He was away from his apartment so much, either at Tap’s or working on jobs in rivers and lakes all over New England, that it hardly made sense for him to keep paying rent. So when his closest friends in Wolfeboro, a married couple he’d originally met while he was tending bar, offered him a room at their place, he agreed. Even though the couple, Ken and Deb Jones, were not that much older than Billy, they took a parental interest in him. Before long Billy took to calling them “Ma and Pa Jones.” Deb had recently lost her brother to illness, so Billy filled a void for her. Billy only infrequently saw his own parents, who had moved to Florida and then separated. So the arrangement worked well all around, even if Billy’s impulsiveness sometimes drove Deb nuts. She still gave him grief for the time he had tried to MacGyver their clogged kitchen drain by blasting it with a scuba tank full of compressed air, only to blow out the whole plumbing line, leaving the walls in the bathroom covered with excrement.
Despite the traction he and Tap were beginning to get with Black Dog, Billy knew something important was missing in his life. That changed at a Fourth of July party, when he met a brown-haired, wholesome-looking pub manager named Michelle Rodrigue, and they quickly became a couple. Still, Billy’s punishing schedule gave them only stolen moments together. Billy had always felt most comfortable in his tan Carhartt work overalls, and he’d think nothing of wearing them out to eat with Michelle. She would jokingly ask if he’d give her “just one day a year” when he wore something else. But beneath that joke, Billy could detect the frustration in her voice. In some ways, the Carhartts were a reminder of how he always put his work ahead of his personal life.
Billy told Tap something had to give. Though he shared Tap’s commitment to their company, he needed more balance in his life. After all, Tap was in a different place—he had a wife, two kids, and a house. Was it too much for Billy to want that too? He told Tap80 he needed to stop working on Sundays so he could golf with Ken in the morning and spend the rest of the day with Michelle. Tap agreed, though Billy could sense his reluctance. Tap clearly felt that Black Dog was on the verge, and this was no time to be slowing down.
By the time they toured the Deer Island tunnel, both Billy and Tap saw how the project could be a game changer. The mission was so high stakes and so high profile that it truly could bring Black Dog to the next level without consuming their every waking hour.
On the last Thursday in May81 1998, Tap strode into a fifteen-story office building in Omaha’s Kiewit Plaza. The Nebraskan city was home to a handful of industry-leading corporations, yet it retained such a small-town feel that they all seemed to be connected in one way or another. Insurance giant Mutual of Omaha sat just a block away, and legendary investor Warren Buffett kept his Berkshire Hathaway offices on the fourteenth floor of the Kiewit building. Despite all its advances and riches, Kiewit continued to cherish reminders of its past, notably the company’s simple, black and yellow circular logo. While the exterior of the headquarters was spare and Brutalist-inspired, the interior revealed more of the company’s prosperity, with a sleek lobby featuring mahogany wall panels and a graceful waterfall of black granite. After checking in at the security desk, Tap idled by the bronze bust of Peter Kiewit, the founder of the modern company whose “Know your costs” motto continued to serve as a bumper-sticker version of its corporate philosophy.
In the three months since the company had asked Tap to bid on the job to remove the tunnel safety plugs, he had thought about little else, refining his plan again and again. He estimated that winning the contract would generate82 at least three-quarters of a million dollars for Black Dog, perhaps closer to one million—making it by far the biggest contract in his small company’s history. Moreover, it would establish Tap and Billy’s dive operation as a prized go-to problem solver for one of the country’s largest general contractors. Tap was already thinking of DJ and the other trusted divers he would recruit for the project. “This job,” Tap would tell people, “is going to launch us into the big leagues.”
79 (Chapter 4, note 1)
because she preferred it that way: Olga doesn’t recall being the one who came up with this alternate pronunciation of the surname, but Bill is sure she was. He said he pronounced it to sound like
81 (Chapter 4, note 3)
On the last Thursday in May: Tap Taylor interviews by author; Kiewit executives, interviews by author at the company’s Omaha headquarters; September 2011; Tom Corry, deposition, June 27, 2000.