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Duncan-Scheman talks of life and ‘triumph’
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
Lucy Duncan-Scheman has been a high profile Charlestonian since she moved back to her hometown from Washington, D.C., in 2005, making a splash and inspiring controversy with a proposal to use barges and rail to transport cargo from the port here to an inland site in Orangeburg.
Even today, after completing what arguably could be the biggest financial transaction of her life, Duncan-Scheman continues to inspire a mixed response. On the one hand, as has been widely acknowledged, she’s the person who initiated the contacts that ultimately led Dubai-based Jafza International to make a $600 million commitment to the Palmetto State.
At almost the very same time, she also became the target of a civil complaint from the S.C. Attorney General’s office and a lawsuit by two investors of her company, Carolina Linkages.
The earliest published reference to Duncan-Scheman, then simply Lucy Duncan, is an article entitled “Rock’s Low-Key Pilgrims,” which appeared in The New York Times on July 16, 1978.
The article describes how members of the rock music business elite were migrating to northern Westchester County, and Duncan-Scheman is both pictured and quoted. It also identifies her as a “model.”
“I did enjoy modeling as my first job in my early 20s,” Duncan-Scheman said when asked about the article. “Then I moved on to be part of the record industry, where I focused on working with up and coming black artists like The Commodores, Earth Wind & Fire, LTD, Melba Moore and Phyllis Hyman.”
During this period, Duncan-Scheman maintained a vacation retreat on St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and while there on a visit she began talking to friends about the growing cruise line business emanating from the Port of Miami.
“At the time, St. Thomas was the primary beneficiary of the business, and there were conflicting opinions about what the future would hold,” she said. “Many islanders were worried about the potential negative effects the cruise vessels would have on the coral reefs surrounding the islands, yet others wanted to embrace the potential social and economic benefits that could spread from attracting the cruise ships to other areas.”
Duncan-Scheman subsequently traveled to the Port of Miami, where she met with the port’s director and, while making a pitch for new business for St. Croix, learned of his plans to triple embarkations out of Miami, she said.
“As the issues related to that endeavor piled higher and higher, I couldn’t wait to become part of his team,” she said. “It was challenging and I found myself hooked.”
Duncan-Scheman moved to Miami in 1983, and began working as a consultant for the port, while at the same time promoting economic development and combating longstanding race issues through the city’s Tourism Coalition, a group called The Beacon Council and the Coconut Grove Marketing Association.
By 1986, Duncan-Scheman had married a Cuban-American and moved to Caracas, Venezuela, while traveling extensively in Europe and Asia.
“While in Europe I became involved with CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and with my former husband underwrote numerous scientific studies in Latin America on the issue of alleviating rural poverty by sustainable means,” she said.
Following her divorce and return to the United States, Duncan-Scheman settled in Washington.
“While in Venezuela I had seen a pattern, that as U.S. companies began investing in various industries, they often ran into miles of red tape, and in many cases difficult if not egregiously negative outcomes,” she said. “I had taken a Ph.D. in terms of living and seeing the issues regarding doing business in a country famous for its corruption, and had learned that although there were rarely judicial solutions, pressure could be applied diplomatically to affect positive outcomes.”
That notion led to the formation of her consultancy, Diplomatic Resolutions Inc. That spring, while attending the American Association of Chambers of Commerce of Latin America in Washington, Duncan-Scheman met Bonsal Glascock of Tandem Computers who introduced her to the world of high-tech and its efforts to enter emerging markets.
“I built Diplomatic Resolutions around Tandem’s business needs in the emerging markets, which led later to working for many U.S. tech companies,” she said. “Our business focused on identifying and building large, complicated projects, and eventually our client list included Oracle, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Tyco Electronics, Cisco, Microsoft and many others.”
Duncan-Scheman said while engaged in these endeavors, her company won a $60 million contract from the World Bank to help modernize its central bank.
“This meant changing how the Chinese would migrate from an abacus based accounting system which had endured for centuries to a technical approach,” she said.
Diplomatic Resolutions eventually worked directly with China, helping to build its stock exchange, in Russia, modernizing its banking system, and in the Middle East on a multitude of projects.
“By 2000, I decided I needed to slow down,” Duncan-Scheman said.
It proved to be an auspicious time to do so. Many years earlier, at that AACLA meeting in Washington, she had met Ron Scheman, who had spent a career serving with numerous inter-American organizations, such as the Organizations of American States and the Inter-American agency for Cooperation and Development—in the interest of aiding the economically disadvantaged.
“We knew each other professionally; however, I was totally involved in my work and he in his. We were reintroduced years later and something clicked,” she said.
They married on Oct. 11, 2001.
Although still recovering from years of frenetic activity, Duncan-Scheman accepted her husband’s invitation to get involved with the Museum of the Americas, which he chaired and had tied to the OAS.
“It was to be a virtual museum, and he wanted my technical and project management expertise,” she said. “We were able to develop, and create and launch a digital museum connecting 300 museums in the Western Hemisphere in less than one year, written in four languages and in six different reading levels with the idea to show that we are all immigrants in the Western Hemisphere.”
Galvanized by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Duncan-Scheman decided to focus her time and talents on supporting Department of Homeland Security initiatives.
“I was retained by a major U.S. Defense Contractor, L-3 Communications, and rebooted Diplomatic Resolutions as dba Safe Ports, assembling a blue ribbon team of international defense specialists and went about work in Mexico and the Middle East,” she said.
“Our scope of work was purely on port security at both the seaport and national levels,” Duncan-Scheman said. “We learned a great deal about logistics, security and threats, which later proved useful in thinking through the ideas behind CaroLinks.”
Today, as she works to refocus CaroLinks as a national company, Duncan-Scheman thinks her Charleston-based enterprise is widely misunderstood.
“When I began CaroLinks it was in immediate response to my perception of the need to establish a private sector complement to the Port of Charleston with technically advanced rail service—to move cargo more efficiently—enabling the port to benefit from greater throughput in terms of containers/acre,” she said. “I only wish that we could have convinced the powers-that-be of this.”
CaroLinks then focused its attention on the other end of the project, assembling the tract of land in Santee, she said.
Duncan-Scheman said her focus on Orangeburg was not an accident.
“The site’s connectivity back to Charleston will likely remain limited to I-26 for the foreseeable future; however, the linkages to be established to other East Coast Ports, particularly Virginia and Jacksonville, is obvious—this means that the Santee site will emerge, I believe, as the major trans-shipment hub on the East Coast.”
In selling its land options to Dubai-based Jafza International, CaroLinks has accomplished “something amazing,” Duncan-Scheman said.
“Give me one other startup company that in less than 24 months has made so huge an impact anywhere,” she said. “On top of that, as we labored, and, yes, suffered a great deal in the process, we became an even more committed and coherent team.
“We are wired to be winners and we are just getting started. We know we are champions who went through hell to get Santee launched—we have much more to do before we are finished. And yes, CaroLinks is on very strong footings.”
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@setcommedia.com.
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