Max Watson

By any measure, Juan Terry Trippe was a remarkable business leader - a visionary, devious, shrewd, deeply flawed, and ultimately inscrutable genius. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Harvard man, once called him "the most fascinating Yale gangster I ever met." Trippe built Pan American Airways from a single scrap of paper - a license to fly airmail from Key West to Havana - into the world's largest airline. In the process, he all but single-handedly shaped the world of air travel. If Juan Trippe had never existed, it's safe to say that the world would look very different from the way it does today. Here's his extraordinary story.