the country famously known as the Republic of Samsung.
The winners in this Korean drama of dalliances were easily sorted from
the losers, it seemed to me. The victors had played a Machiavellian game of
power, embracing methods more akin to Game of Thrones than to a Silicon
Valley start-up.
Many assumed Jay would likely get a presidential pardon—as his father
had twice before.
The chairman’s cousin Miky Lee (who’d tried to secure a deal for
Samsung with DreamWorks back in 1995, before securing the
DreamWorks deal for herself) left for California, citing health concerns.
She, too, had been targeted by President Park Geun-hye, who had put her
on a blacklist out of anger that the films produced by Miky’s CJ Group
were critical of her.
But the scandal continued to generate political fallout. Almost a month
after Jay Lee’s arrest, a South Korean court upheld President Park Geun-
hye’s impeachment and stripped her of immunity from arrest.
Before dawn on March 30, a convoy of black cars carrying the former
president pulled up at the detention center, where she entered police
custody.
And there they waited, the former president of South Korea and the
heir to the Samsung empire, with a trial date looming, a moment of
reckoning that might determine whether or not the Republic of Samsung
would live on in the same unfettered way.
—
“WE LOOK AROUND, AND our Samsung spirit exists no more,” a former
Samsung vice president lamented to me over coffee. “Our empire is not an
empire. We are becoming like any corporation.”
He reminded me of a dazzling tale from twenty-two years earlier, when
Chairman Lee II, furious at Samsung’s faulty phones, had organized his
famous bonfire and instigated a campaign of rejuvenation among his
employees. The same was not true in the burning embers of the Galaxy
Note 7 fires. The mood in the company wavered between dejection and
self-censorship. There were no grand spectacles, no eight-hour speeches, no
phalanxes of Samsung executives and employees ready to fight for their
company and country.