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As a teenage immigrant in Mobile, Alabama in the 1890s, Sam Zemurray bought 'ripes', bananas already too ripe to survive shipping inland, for almost nothing from the fruit docks. He raced them up the rail lines and telegraphed grocers in towns ahead to meet the train and buy off the boxcar before the fruit rotted. The waste product that established importers wrote off became the base of a fortune he had built by his early twenties.
In 1910–11, facing Honduran concessions and tariffs that threatened his Cuyamel Fruit Company, Zemurray financed exiled ex-president Manuel Bonilla's invasion. He supplied a ship and mercenaries including Lee Christmas and Guy 'Machine Gun' Molony. The invasion succeeded, and the new government granted Zemurray the land and tax concessions he wanted, a textbook case of a private firm buying a state's policy by replacing its rulers.
Zemurray sold Cuyamel to United Fruit in 1929 for stock and became its largest shareholder. He then watched Boston executives who had never worked the plantations run the company down in the Depression. In 1933 he was brushed off at a board meeting, returned with shareholder proxies and took control. The book's argument is that knowledge from direct contact with the land, the workers and the fruit outperforms the credentialed distance of inherited management.
The banana trade ran almost entirely on one cloned variety, the Gros Michel, grown in vast genetically identical plantations. This uniformity gave the trade predictable shipping and cheap scale. It also meant Panama disease, a soil fungus, could move through whole regions with nothing to stop it. Companies kept abandoning infected land and clearing new jungle, until the variety itself had to be replaced.