HEAVEN'S GATE

WHO IS THIS MAN WHO SAYS HE'S BUILDING PARADISE IN KEY WEST? HE IS A RICH DEVELOPER. AN ENVIRONMENTALIST. A MAN OF THE SPIRIT. WE WANT TO KNOW: CAN A MAN ATTAIN NIRVANA IN THE FIELD OF REAL ESTATE?

Miami Herald, The (FL)
July 1, 1990
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH and WARREN GETLER Herald staff writers.

The man in the turban is delivering a monologue for the benefit of four silent men who smell of corporation. The four are on some kind of secret business mission. Everyone is on a first-name basis here: Pritam, Terry, Bob, Bob and Bob.

Pritam is giving the hard sell.

" . . . We'll be able to be totally in control of the retail. We can have three jewelry stores, seven clothing stores . . . We'll have six major restaurants . . . We'll have planned entertainment all day, with the first show starting at 12 noon . . . There'll be a restaurant out on that pier, it'll be a lot like Nantucket."

This is not idle chatter. Pritam Singh is the most powerful man in Key West. He owns the Truman Annex, a Navy base that he bought for $17 million in 1986 and is now turning into a $350 million resort. This despite the fact that he is only 37 years old, hasn't cut his hair since 1970 and until recently carried a dagger at all times. He converted to Sikhism as a young man and added Capitalism a few years later. He reconciles East and West by calling himself an Enlightened Capitalist, and depending on the audience, he can do either more of the Enlightened or more of the Capitalist. For environmentalists and do-gooders he will talk about his use of native vegetation, his affordable housing, his historic preservation. For this group, he's all Capitalist.

"We can make sure the quality is there, so you don't get in the scuzzmo element," he says.

Instead of scuzz there will be boaters. The yacht club will be in the old red brick Customs building. The white Navy administration headquarters will house the fanciest of the condos. The vacationers can sail right up to their door.

Pritam points to the water: "Water is magic."

He means that when people get near water they have an instinctive rush, as though flashing back to some primordial, submarine existence. He means that water inspires a spiritual healing. He means that if you are selling waterfront property, you can make a killing.

Pritam leads the group out on a pier and down onto a small purring boat. An underling steps aside and lets Pritam take the helm. The boat roars out of the harbor and across the Key West Channel, across the gleaming, choppy, magical water. The destination is several hundred yards to the west: an island. Pritam's island. The boat nuzzles onto what passes for a beach, a thin spit of gravel and muck.

The Key West locals call this Tank Island, because Navy fuel tanks used to be here. It has the greater significance of being directly in the line of the sunset when viewed from
Mallory Dock. Every night, in an authentic American tribal ritual, hundreds of people gather at the dock to watch the sun fall into Tank Island.

Now the island has a strange, butchered look. Pritam has cut down all of the big old trees.

He could do this because the island was tossed into the Truman Annex package, almost an afterthought. Pritam has gradually come to realize that it is his secret gem, that he'll make more money out here than back on Key West proper. He'll build luxury condos! And a Ritz-Carlton hotel! So what if you can't drive to it, you can arrive by Hovercraft or ferry. It will be the greatest vacation spot anywhere. Very lucrative. This perks up the ears of Terry, Bob, Bob and Bob.

At the moment, the 26 acres of land have nothing but rubble and young pine saplings, not so much as a wild dog, but the ecosystem can be radically changed, through strategic purchases. "There's some places in the Bahamas where there are like billions of tons of sand," he says. Want a beach? Pritam will buy one, and ship it here. "It's going to look like you died and went to heaven here," he says.

For the benefit of the reporter who is tagging along, Pritam adds an Enlightened comment: "Our sand will not be in contact with the water, so at no point will it get in the water to disturb the sea elements." He gives a complicated explanation of how this trick is done.

On the far side of the island is a luscious view of open water, disturbed only by a few lazy sailboats. This is where Pritam will build his own personal dream house, right here on the best spot of his dream island.

Pritam points to the horizon, trying to get his audience to marvel at the endless beauty. "You could be anywhere, but you're in America," he says. "Telephones work. People don't beg."

No scuzz, no beggars, a genuine imitation beach. In other words, Paradise. For a price.

This is not a story about condos.

This is about the soul of an unusual man.

And the fate of a great American town.

And maybe it's even about . . . Earth.

Pritam Singh will tell you that he is bravely sailing through uncharted waters, leading the people into a new, better, cleaner world; one in which no species puts itself before any other; one in which high-priced vacation homes fit in. Pritam -- we'll keep things on a first-name basis, in deference to Key West's small-town atmosphere -- wants to be the first man to reconcile ethics and profits. He wants to be the first envirodeveloper. He will show the way.

And the way is not easy. It is narrow and twisting and strewn with temptation. Pritam Singh sees this clearly. He knows that even the best-intentioned person can be quickly seduced and corrupted by money and power. He knows that it is easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than to get a rich man into heaven. But he thinks he has the dexterity.

"This is my last development. This is it. I'm out. I'm history," he says with a fervor designed to persuade his listeners, or perhaps to persuade Pritam. "What happens in this business is that people become addicted to it. They become addicted to the power. The only way that I can prove that I am not, to myself and to everyone else, is to walk away. And I think the human species needs to learn to walk away.

"In some ways I think I'm a metaphor for everyone else."

If not a metaphor, Pritam may at least be a test case. Can the fragile ideals of a generation -- altruism, egalitarianism, environmentalism -- be somehow melded with the powerful engine of capitalism? Or is such an effort doomed to end in failure or fraud?

Pritam has a habit of mentioning a certain other famous developer. The one who puts his name on everything. Pritam makes sure everyone knows that he is not a Trump. Trump is crass. Pritam is class. Trump is vulgar. Pritam is tasteful. Trump is New York. Pritam is Key West.

"He's consumed by his possessions," Pritam says of Trump. That's one of the great spiritual crises with the human race: Consumerism. He says he doesn't even think of himself as the owner of his property, just its custodian. Of course he is the custodian of a lot of stuff: "I have six cars and I have four boats and I have four houses and I have a farm and I have an island."

Pritam is a lesson in what happens when hippies get older and pick up business secrets from the squares. The most important secret of all is that the only way to get rich is to dive insanely into debt. At the same time, it is crucial that one avoid "selling out." This means that instead of using all that borrowed money to make obscene profits, one must use it for something . . . correct. Pritam Singh wants to be known as both a successful capitalist and a liberal good-guy who helps people, plants and animals.

"My goal is enlightenment," he says. "The goal of every Sikh is to merge into the light of God."

Unfortunately, he has discovered that merging into the light of God is rather difficult in the field of real estate.

In the past two years many of his top aides have quit or been fired. They say Pritam is not the good guy he pretends to be, that he's too egocentric, idiosyncratic, that he is constantly late for meetings and makes people wait for hours to see him, and that he doesn't pay his bills on time.

Meanwhile, the Truman Annex project has gradually changed, to something not nearly so egalitarian as Pritam Singh had originally promised.

At the same time, even his toughest critics admit that Pritam is a darn sight better than most developers. No one doubts his commitment to the environment. No one questions that he sincerely cares about what the public wants and needs. But as someone who wears his correctness on his sleeve -- as a self- proclaimed Sixties product who hasn't sold out -- he is held to a higher standard. He is expected to make good on his words, not just make profits.

Pritam has committed himself to a public performance on a tightrope. It's not yet clear, even to Pritam, if he can keep his balance.

Take the trees he cut down on Tank Island. He has publicly vowed never to tamper with virgin land. "I think that all land that is not already touched by human beings should be left alone," he says. And yet he has great ambitions for Tank Island, long a patch of green across the water from Mallory Dock. Pritam argues that Tank Island already had two big ugly fuel tanks on it when he bought it, and wasn't a natural island anyway. "I think a piece of land with an oil storage site is all right for our use." He points out that the state ordered him to chop down the trees -- an invasive species, Australian pines, which sap too much water from the ground. Pritam uses water-conserving native vegetation exclusively wherever he builds.

But didn't those trees look pretty from a distance? Ask the folks on Mallory Dock. Like Betty Shirley, a tourist from Belton, S.C.: "It's unbelievable. It's terrible. Here the public can enjoy this great view. I don't want to have to get a room for $200 a night out there to enjoy it." Or Pat Macy, from Tampa: "It obviously will block the sunset. It's a shame. Who's going to use the hotel? The rich and famous? Certainly not me."

Not to worry, Pritam says. What these people don't realize is that his lovely Ritz-Carlton, which he hopes to complete in 1992, will actually make a better foreground for the sunset.

And if those folks on Mallory Dock don't agree, they can always get an unobstructed view of the sunset by taking a short walk to the south, to a new waterfront development with lots of shops and restaurants . . . Truman Annex.

He's not an Indian.

He was born Paul LaBombard Jr., in Fitchburg, Mass. His father was in the Navy, his mother a mill worker. They were divorced when he was 6, and young Paul lived for many years with relatives and family friends. He vowed to his grade school classmates that he'd never be poor.

After high school he wandered to Key West, an itinerant hippie, sleeping wherever he could, including on Christmas Tree Island, a patch of spoil just a few brisk breast strokes from Tank Island. He dabbled in yoga and Transcendental Meditation, and became a strict vegetarian. He was an anti-war radical. In 1971 he was arrested during a Vietnam protest march in Washington. But his political days were numbered. "I discovered that the Left was fundamentally as corrupt as the Right -- what they were all about was power and materialism. There had to be some broader, deeper guiding light. I looked for that."

He found it, in a long article in National Geographic about the Sikhs. After reviewing "all the world's philosophical, social and economic systems," he says he came to see Sikhism as "the most enlightened faith of all. For three reasons: its emphasis on spirituality, democracy and an egalitarian economic approach."

Once he glimpsed the spiritual light, Paul left Florida and headed for a Sikh ashram, in Montague, Mass. and changed his name to Pritam Singh. Pritam means "God's beloved." Singh, which means lion, is the common Sikh surname. At first he was entranced by the ashram's charismatic leader, Yogi Bhajan. After several years, the yogi's allure faded, then disappeared. "When my daughter was born, Yogi Bhajan had just instituted a program where children in the ashram were not to be brought up by their parents, but by the group. That had nothing to do with Sikhism. It was simply autocratic. He would say, 'You Americans don't know how to raise children. We'll do it for you.' Yogi Bhajan ended up like Richard Nixon. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Pritam left the ashram and eventually made his way into real estate. He bought a run-down 10-unit apartment building in Maine in 1979, using borrowed money. Then, in order to fix the place up, he got a $118,000 loan, at 3 percent interest, from the famously generous U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He appointed himself chief contractor and needed only $70,000 to do the job. The profit: $48,000.

Pritam lucked into a real estate boom in the early 1980s. He also had a smart strategy: He "created value" by rehabbing old buildings in historic districts. He developed the $12 million Inn-By-The-Sea hotel in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, a multimillion dollar farmhouse in Vermont, an office building in Boston and some smaller projects. Pritam says his income went
from $30,000 in 1982 to $1 million in 1983.

In 1986, Pritam read a New York Times article that said a certain chunk of old Navy property in Key West was about to be sold at auction. The auction was only three days away. That was time enough for Pritam. He flew to Key West, walked into the Jan McArt Theater, put up a $250,000 deposit to get the right to bid, and sat down. People looked at him and snickered. Wouldn't it be hilarious, wouldn't it be so Key West, they said, if this cat in the turban and blue jeans won the auction?

When he bid $17 million the snickers stopped. To this day, people all over town are kicking themselves for not realizing what a steal it was: A historic 103 acres right along the water and adjacent to the most prosperous section of Old Town.

"When he came to town, people saw him as a savior phenomenon," says Ron Herron, Key West assistant city manager and resident of the island since the raffish '70s. "It was 'Pritam this' and 'Pritam that.' He said he would build a historically correct development, integrated with the city, and not some isolated enclave."

Pritam promised to have lots of space for artists. There would be public parks. There would be affordable housing. There would be recreational space for the public along 75 percent of the perimeter of Tank Island, where he would build "40 or 50" little cottages with thatched roofs, like it was some place in the South Pacific. He even held a town meeting and took suggestions. "To hear him speak is an event," writer Jane O'Reilly told The Herald in 1987. "It's like going to a marvelous opera or a really beautiful sunset. It turns me on."

There remained a few naysayers and skeptics. Mark Rossi, owner of Rick's Bar, was one of the naysayingest.

"You mean Turban Renewal?" he sneers when asked about the project. "He moves in here and expects us to do what he wants. I was here a long time before Pritam Singh." (Actually he was in town only a few years before Pritam. But Key West has become so transient that people assume they are Conchs if they've been in town more than five years.)

When Rossi made a 20-minute promotional video for the bar -- replete with bare breasts and drunk dudes chanting "Beaver! Beaver!" -- Pritam took action. He called an ad hoc meeting of city officials, where he stood up with Rossi's video cassette in hand and bellowed: "What kind of Key West do we want? A place where 10,000 kids can come down and puke?"

Rossi, in turn, held a "Turban Party" at Rick's. People wore towels on their heads. "That was killer," Rossi chuckles.

People like Rossi, who work in all the bars and all the T- shirt shops, are wondering if they will be driven out by the soaring costs of island life. Key West was once dubbed by Ernest Hemingway "the St. Moritz for the poor." But for the past decade the island has undergone a radical reconstruction. It is certainly more aesthetically pleasing to the cultured eye -- it's cleaner, for one thing, and there are more fine shops and restaurants than ever before -- but there has been a human cost, as the old-time residents, the "Conchs," have fled to cheaper and less hectic places upstate.

There is a new breed of animal in town, staying in $200-a- night rooms, dining in garden cafes. What scares people is the idea that Pritam Singh will upgrade Key West too far, that they will be priced out of their own homes. Key West is succumbing to a national trend, the gentrification of every last funky place in America. There are a finite number of spots where the rich can create a warm-weather resort and retain what they call authenticity and charm. Authenticity and charm essentially mean old houses and narrow streets. That's Key West. Like Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard and even the old mining town of Aspen, Key West is rooted in the 19th Century. Such history is priceless to Pritam Singh, who recognizes the craving of the rich for a taste of life in a poorer time, when people had to live close together because BMWs had not yet been invented.

In a town that has never been sure of its financial underpinnings -- which have included wrecking, sponging, shrimp harvesting, Navy construction and tourism -- money talks. Pritam was suddenly the biggest talker in town. The City Commission welcomed him by rewriting the Growth Management Ordinance that it had passed just three months earlier. The new version invented a concept called "bonus points" in which a developer could build extra units in exchange for other concessions, like public parks. One commissioner, George Halloran, didn't go along, saying they should have been called "bogus points." He was chased out of office the next year by Virginia Panico, who had heavy support from developers -- including Pritam.

Indeed, in 1987 and 1989 Pritam Singh was the top contributor to Key West commission races, if his wife and his companies and associates are counted. In a town where the contribution reports at the electoral office show $10 here and $25 there, Pritam et al gave $8,000 to Emma Cates in 1987. Panico got $5,000. Just to make sure no one gets too upset, Pritam usually offers a thousand bucks even to the candidates he doesn't support. All perfectly legal.

Doug Jones, a maverick Monroe County commissioner and critic of the Truman Annex plan, says with disgust, "I know of no developer in Monroe County or Key West who can get things done quicker and with less red tape than Pritam Singh."

Pritam concurs with that. His plan passed, he says, "like a hot knife through butter." He says that's because he listens to people, and builds responsibly.

Environmental groups that are normally radical opponents of developers have taken to Pritam Singh. He received an award from the Florida Audubon Society for not cutting down trees on Tank Island until after some tern eggs hatched. Even Pritam's most ardent critic on the City Commission, Harry Powell, says, considering all the other possible buyers of Truman Annex, the city "is glad he managed to get it."

So the public Pritam is a great charmer. Within his own organization, however, the charm hasn't always worked. In fact, it may have backfired.

His employees and friends become so swept up in Pritam's cult of personality that they can become more like followers than colleagues. They get a bit too transfixed by the blue eyes, too enticed by the prospect of all those politically correct dollars on the horizon. "His eyes and his religion make him totally charismatic. He has that edge. His eyes twinkle," says Durga Karen, his former public relations officer.

"They think they get religion when they join up," Pritam says, and he does not mean that jokingly. The Truman Annex organization is in some ways an ashram in the heart of American capitalism.

But then some followers discover that the "master" is not always perfect. Many of Pritam's top lieutenants have quit or been fired. He has been sued by six of his real estate salesmen, who thought Pritam didn't deliver on his promise of big money, a charge Pritam denies.

Durga Karen lasted three years, until one Friday afternoon she was told by Pritam's secretary that her services were no longer desired. "It shocked me because I did an excellent job for him, I got more press for him than the New York Yankees in three years," she says.

He changed, she says.

"Maybe he got too full of himself . . . It happened about the third year. He wasn't the same Pritam who showed up at the auction."

Pritam responds, "Durga should say I'm the greatest guy in the world, the way I treated her. I gave these guys severance pay like you wouldn't believe. Unbelievable generosity."

John Cole -- a man who was a virtual surrogate father to Pritam when he was growing up in Massachusetts -- was another casualty. Cole also worked in public relations, which included writing an authorized biography of Pritam. Pritam didn't like the book, though, and unauthorized it. Eventually he fired Cole. Cole says, "All you have to do is look at the number of people who have left the company to know that Pritam is not an easy person to work for . . . He's never been Mr. Nice Guy."

Pritam says, "I will admit that I am a difficult person to get along with sometimes." But on the whole he thinks the accusations against him are unfair. The issue, as he sees it, was that he tended to keep too many personal friends on the payroll, even ones that spent half their days fishing. "The professionals in the company complained. I had to respond. I'm trying now to make the running of the company less of a personal affair."

He wishes this soiled laundry did not have to be aired, but he is willing to cast it in a more cosmic light: "How do you fire someone as an Enlightened Capitalist? That's a very tough thing to do. I'm not sure I've been that successful at it . . . A lot of people when they leave feel they are being cut off from -- that they are being pushed away from -- the Vision. It's like kicking them out of the religion."

Pritam Singh has changed his mind a bit about Truman Annex.

It's bigger now. It's fancier. Among other things, anyone who wants to come out to Tank Island will have to pay $12 for the 500-yard trip across the water.

One of the first things Pritam needed to do after he bought the property was to get Tank Island out of Monroe County. The county has strict development laws, and the little spoil island would be limited to no more than 26 housing units. Pritam first tried to get the county to pass a law changing the rules for spoil islands in the Key West Channel -- a special Pritam Singh law, in other words. When the county refused, Pritam went to the Key West City Commission in 1987 and asked it to annex Tank Island to the city. It did so gladly.

Every nine months or so Pritam has submitted an "amendment" to his Truman Annex site plan, and won City Commission approval. Only the most attentive person can keep track of the Annex's evolution, the subtle chipping away of previous promises, of that wonderful vision of green space and artists' studios.

By the time his fourth revised plan was approved by the commission last September, there had been a number of noteworthy changes:

* Instead of "free" access to the Annex, the public will have "convenient" access. Guards will be able to enforce a dress code and noise code, and no one can bring alcohol onto the property.

* Only 650 feet of the Tank Island perimeter will be available to the public, less than a quarter of what was originally promised.

* The much-mentioned "artists' studios" would be defined so broadly that they could be anything from an architect's office to a retail store selling wicker baskets.

* The project is much bigger. Instead of 465 housing units there will be 577, and of those, many will have much more square footage. A conference center will be added, as well as a port for cruise ships.

Pritam says he has remained true to his original promises, by and large. The wicker baskets can only be sold if they're handmade, he says. Pritam can still point out that most of his project is open to the public, that he has beautiful landscaping, that he designed a first-rate storm-water drainage system, that he even lets a stray dog named Blackie stay on the grounds. And it's not just Pritam bragging. A lot of people appreciate his style of development. Marguerite Gandolfo, 82, a native born Conch: "I love the flowers on the property. It's almost next to heaven." When Pritam needs more concessions from the city, he offers in return an increase in "affordable" housing, as defined by a standard city formula. He now wants to build more than 220 such units on the opposite end of the property from his high-priced condos and waterfront shops. A typical affordable two-bedroom apartment will sell for $108,000. In Key West that's considered a deal.

Pritam is at a crucial juncture in his project. Now, it's mostly just a sketch on the drawing board. Pritam needs money. In early June he was close to signing a deal with a major U.S. pension fund and other investors that would deliver $50 million in cash. That explains the silent corporate men who visited Tank Island -- Terry, Bob, Bob and Bob. The investment, Pritam hopes, will help him secure another $100 million in loans. Without that money, there could well be no Ritz-Carlton, no marina, no yacht club. What makes it all the more dicey is that the real estate market nationally is in a slump, with failed savings-and-loans dumping property everywhere. Pritam has to convince potential lenders and investors that what he's building is so special, so exotic, it will attract the relatively few people who are in need of a $600,000 second home.

Affordable housing aside, the Truman Annex is the most exclusive kind of luxury development. Stephen Surowiecki, the Annex's former real estate broker, doesn't think Pritam is quite as egalitarian as he is portrayed in the more glowing press accounts. "He's just a miniature Donald Trump. His project is not any different than Trump Towers or Trump Plaza, it's for the select 1/10 of 1 percent of buyers."

Pritam answers, "I'm not saying I'm on a mission from God here and everything I'm doing is to the satisfaction of everyone else. I'm saying that, in the context of what I'm doing, I'm doing the best job I can."

"I'm a developer. That's what I do."

On Earth Day, Pritam got tired of the criticism. He lost his cool.

A singer was on stage at Fort Zachary Taylor in Key West, performing a homemade protest tune against the town's new noise ordinance. The ordinance was pushed by many citizens, but became identified with its wealthiest proponent, Pritam Singh. In Key West, bar owners think it's a virtual Right of Man to attend an open-air saloon and hear music at brain-decaying volume. And so did this musician, a certain Mickey James. He sang: Duval Street is quiet and dark/ There ain't no music coming from the bars/ Now if we can't pick our guitar strings/ we'll all go home and let Pritam sing, Pritam sing, Pritam sing . . .

Pritam Singh happened to be walking by with his wife and child. He snapped. He jumped on stage. Different witnesses give different accounts of what happened, with some saying Pritam grabbed the microphone, others saying he grabbed the singer's guitar, the singer saying he was roughed up, and Pritam saying he barely touched the guy.

In any case it became an embarrassing newspaper story. James threatened to file assault charges and a civil lawsuit. Pritam did the noble thing: He apologized formally to James. And he cut him a check. Pritam says it was for between $5,000 and $10,000. James' attorney, Lynne Hankins-Fielder, wouldn't confirm that; part of the deal, she said, was that no one would say anything about it.

Morgan Hill Farm, Pritam Singh's 200-acre estate in the lush Vermont countryside, looks like the kind of place that would grace the cover of an expensive coffee-table picture book about New England. With a few exceptions. Four furry llamas roam the hills. And Stonehenge has moved to Vermont. Pritam has erected about a dozen oblong boulders in a man-made, grassy crater about a hundred yards from his farmhouse. The largest piece weighs 75 tons, another 60 tons.

Singh doesn't offer much explanation for this Druid-like creation. "I like the space. It's wonderful with the moonlight."

Singh's cook, Gerry Weiner, puts it best: "He's got stuff like this all over the place to freak out on."

For example, a delicate Japanese Teahouse sits next to a fish pond. Not a single nail defiles the construction. Four carpenters needed two years to fit it together. Most of the materials, including the rice-paper coverings and the ceramic- tile roofing, were imported from Japan. "It's beautiful. But so incongruous to a 19th Century Vermont farm," Pritam says, sitting Buddha-like at water's edge, stroking his beard.

Singh wasn't satisfied with the look of the surrounding hills. He will move them, at a cost of thousands of dollars, when Truman Annex winds down in the next two to three years. He says the completion of the Key West project will finally allow him time to perfect his little nuggets of "sacredness." Pritam says that his earth-moving perfectionism cannot be deemed extravagance, or anti-environment, because it is a form of artistic and spiritual expression.

Incongruity has staked a third claim to the sprawling farm. At the edge of a forested incline, a hexagonal, domed Sikh temple stands vacant, looking strangely like a small Jeffersonian library. Above the cherry-wood doors is inscribed a Sikh prayer in Punjabi. Pritam seems proud of the structure's aesthetic form, but embarrassed by its limited utility. "As a temple, it doesn't work." Sikh prayer is based on song, but the Western-style dome created a huge echo and made coherent prayer impossible for the scores of Sikhs who used to visit during the past five years, he says. "I'm going to turn it into a library."

The transformation of the temple into a secular structure is a pointer to something deeper. The man who had spent more than a year in the holiest Sikh shrine, The Golden Temple of Amritsar, and the benefactor who had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Sikh humanitarian and educational causes, has now lost some of the passion for his adopted religion.

Where is the obligatory dagger? A year ago he stopped carrying it -- abandoning the Sikh belief that one must be armed at all times. Symbols, he said, sometimes outlive their usefulness. His new bag is science. He's read A Brief History of Time and Coming of Age in the Milky Way and Dolphin Dreamtime: The Art and Science of Interspecies Communication. The combination of science and mysticism has given his old religion a New Age tinge.

"It was an absolutely revolutionary thing for me when I began to read science in the last year," he says.

Ann Johnston, his wife, a Wall Street executive he met in 1983, tries to explain Singh's outlook: "He's finding personal ways to get spiritual, without the dogma. He's not as orthodox as he used to be. But I don't think he's ever going to stop wearing the turban." Occasionally, while working late at Truman Annex headquarters, he will take it off, as he does with family at home. His knee-length hair, which must not be cut, is tied neatly in a bun.

Pritam says having a cook, whom he pays handsomely and takes with him on family outings to Europe and elsewhere, is not a contradiction to the Sikh idea of equality. "I would be hypocritical if I treated Gerry like a servant."

Yet one morning over breakfast with a reporter Pritam sent Gerry back to the kitchen not once, but twice -- with a flick of the wrist -- because the toast wasn't quite brown enough. Gerry returned with a smile each time.

Later, heading back to Boston in a rented Toyota, Pritam waved his arm at an expanse of tree-lined hills. "See that. These hills were all deforested decades ago."

What Vermont -- an environmentally hip state that thumbs its nose at development and bans billboards -- has done to regenerate its forests represents something holy to the enlightened capitalist developer of the '90s.

"What will you do after Key West?" the tag-along reporter asked.

"Plant trees," he whispered.

Some people drift their whole lives until they find their own personal island. This is the impulse that has lured so many people to Key West, the final key, the last bit of terra firma on the Eastern seaboard before you hit open water.

Pritam had the vision to realize that he could go a step farther, out to Tank Island, to build a whole new key, a self- contained, environmentally perfect fusion of wealth, fun and ethical living.

He's renamed the island. It's now Sunset Island.

Perfect?

Not perfect enough. A few weeks ago he decided to go even farther. In the Florida Keys, the only legally habitable island west of Tank Island is a solitary dot called Ballast Key.

Ballast Key is a half-hour powerboat ride from Key West. It has a single two-story wooden-frame house set up on stilts, with a sloping roof. Palm trees sway in the breeze and the beaches have the kind of sandiness that other Florida Keys only dream about. The grounds are posted with No Trespassing signs and are patrolled by a geriatric black Labrador.

The island is owned by Key West architect David Wolkowsky. But not for much longer, says Pritam Singh. He's buying it, for well over a million dollars.

He must own this island.

"It's has the most beautiful beach in the Florida Keys," Pritam says proudly, Trumpishly.

This is where he'll build his final destination. Here, on the ultimate island, he will turn his back on power and money, turn his gaze to . . . water. The spawning ground of humanity.

"I spent so much time meditating and chanting and trying to get away from this planet," he says. "Now, I thought up my own meditation. With my breath, I mimic ocean. It goes in and out." To demonstrate he breathes in and out, symbolizing the tide.

Of course if he lives on Ballast Key, that means he probably won't build that other dream house on Tank -- er, Sunset -- Island. Nice place, but not quite good enough.

Too developed. Memo: COVER STORY
Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 8 Copyright (c) 1990 The Miami Herald