Young Tom Monaghan builds his Domino's empire one pie at a time.

I came across this interesting Washington Monthly article entitled “Pie in the Sky” by Mariah Blake, which chronicles Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monghan’s self-defeating attempt to build the Ave Maria School of Law.

It’s always fascinating when the hubris and habits that allow people to amass great wealth prove to be their undoing. An excerpt about Monaghan’s controlling nature and propensity to throw around large sums of money:

“The key to Domino’s growth was a tightly controlled franchise system. When a new store opened, headquarters would send a truck stocked with everything from pizza ovens to forks and aprons. Store managers worked from a thick operations manual, known as ‘the Bible,’ which dictated every aspect of operations, down to the smallest detail. Monaghan also kept a tight rein on his employees: store workers were barred from sitting down during their shifts, and executives were expected to uproot their lives and move across the country on Monaghan’s whim. At headquarters, female staffers had to wear skirts or dresses that fell below the knees—pants were strictly forbidden.

As Monaghan’s business grew, so did his appetite for spending. He bought a Gulfstream jet, a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter, and a fleet of cars—among them the Packard that had ferried Franklin Roosevelt to his 1933 inauguration, and a handmade Bugatti Royale. (The latter cost him $8 million, the most ever paid for a classic car.) He also began buying up Frank Lloyd Wright homes, and assembled the world’s largest collection of Wright furniture. But his most famous purchase was the Detroit Tigers, which he bought in 1983. When the team won the World Series the following year, Monaghan had his private helicopter ferry hundreds of Domino’s pizzas to Tiger Stadium.

Even during his prodigal years, Monaghan never lost sight of his Catholic roots. And beginning in the mid-1980s, he started delving more deeply into his faith, and embracing conservative Catholic causes. Then, in 1989, at the suggestion of a Catholic scholar friend, he read a passage from the C. S. Lewis classic Mere Christianity that railed against pride as ‘the essential vice, the utmost evil.’ It dawned on Monaghan that his hunger for success and flashy belongings was pride in its purest form. He immediately swore what he called a ‘millionaire’s vow of poverty’ and began shedding his possessions. Finally, in 1998, he sold Domino’s for an estimated $1 billion and announced that he was retiring from the pizza business so he could devote his time and money to Catholic education. ‘I want to die broke,’ he declared.”