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How do you get a 375-pound slide to Nantucket from war-torn Ukraine?
Getting anything delivered to Nantucket can feel like a gamble. Look no further than this spring when UPS forgot to make advanced reservations with the Steamship Authority and had to resort to hiring a fleet of tugboats to get their trucks on island for a sense of the logistical challenges of shipping here. Now imagine trying to ship a 375-pound hunk of twisted metal the size of a baby giraffe to Nantucket from a war-torn country 4,600 miles away. It’s nothing short of a mission impossible.
That was exactly what Chris Yates and his team from Nantucket Cares accomplished this September when they successfully transported a metal slide from the bombed Ukrainian village of Irpin to the Whaling Museum on Nantucket. Riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel scars, the children’s slide served as a visceral reminder of the violence taking place every day in Ukraine at the hands of Russian forces. When the slide was subsequently brought from Nantucket to Washington, D.C., as part of the Ukraine Action Summit, Congressman Bill Keating indicated that the slide stood as the first piece of evidence of war crimes.
Although the slide alone conjures a range of emotions, considering its unlikely journey from being plucked from its cement pilings in Ukraine to being reassembled weeks later on Nantucket boggles the imagination. Who exactly does one call in Ukraine to quarterback this effort? What delivery company is possibly willing to drive through a war zone to get anything but the absolute necessities in and out of the country? As you might imagine, it takes a person with a unique set of skills and background to accomplish this—and that person is Chris Yates.
There is an unmistakable air of mystery when talking to Yates, particularly when he explains how he manages to navigate through hot zones around the world. One might be quick to assume he’s ex-military. Yates, who owns East Wood Trading Company on Nantucket, is indeed from a decorated military family—his older brother, for instance, was a sniper in the Marine Corps—but he’s one of the few of his family to never have served in any branch of the military. Instead, Yates’ ability to operate in war-torn countries comes from a number of unlikely careers.
Decades before he was importing rare pieces of wood to Nantucket from far-flung countries around the world, Yates had become an expert in all kinds of delivery. Indeed, his resume reads like that of three or four men, beginning when he was twelve years old and would cut down Christmas trees on his family’s farm outside of Washington, D.C., and drive them into the city with his father’s truck to sell them door to door.
Fast forward ten years and Yates launched an enormously successful pizza franchise in D.C. that delivered thousands of tasty pies across the city. Owning multiple homes in his early twenties, Yates was living the high life, but he ultimately sold his stake in the pizza franchise, moved to Las Vegas and started a sports marketing agency called Par that was dedicated to delivering sponsorship deals and contracts to big-time athletes, most of them golfers. A one-man outfit, Yates developed a lucrative roster of clients that included the ever-colorful PGA champion John Daly. The business was thriving, the sky was the limit, but then 9/11 happened. Overnight, sponsorship deals for anyone but A-list athletes dried up and forced Yates to close his shop.
While he was trying to figure out what to do next, Yates reconnected with an immigration lawyer who used to help him get work visas for his employees back at the pizza franchise. Having had her business also upended by the September 11th attacks, the lawyer told Yates about a new opportunity she had discovered in which a retired doctor was creating a recruiting agency dedicated to delivering nurses and doctors from abroad to understaffed hospitals in the United States. Intrigued, Yates looked into the business and found that these kinds of agencies recruited from Romania, the Philippines and other countries. That gave him a novel idea. Why not target Spanish-speaking countries and recruit bilingual doctors and nurses? The former doctor who was launching the company thought Yates was crazy, but agreed to fund the operation, making Yates executive director and an equity holder. The next thing he knew, Yates was in Mexico City with an interpreter and security detail recruiting hundreds of medical professionals.
So began a heady two years of romping around Mexico in search of doctors and nurses. Everywhere he went, Yates garnered attention, much of it unwanted. Here was this gringo offering a golden ticket to the United States. Other locals wondered if this gringo could also get things into Mexico. Eventually, a Mexican national pulled him aside and said he was trying to get a shipping container full of flak jackets into Mexico to help fight the cartel. Could Yates help him with that? Long story short, Yates found a way—again and again.
How Yates ended up on Nantucket was an act of fate. Or what he calls Montezuma. Revenge. After two years in Mexico, he suddenly came down with life-threatening salmonella. When he got back to the United States for treatment, doctors informed him that the concentration of salmonella was so high that it seemed unlikely that it came from spoiled food. The only other explanation was that he was intentionally poisoned. The writing was on the wall—his Mexico chapter was over. He had to get out before whoever tried to kill him got another chance.
To recover, Yates went to Nantucket where his extended family own Yates Island Gas. A six-month stay turned into twenty years and yet another hugely successful company, East Wood Trading Company. With much of his lumber coming from Europe, he has developed several relationships in counties like Poland and Ukraine over the last twenty years. When Russia attacked Ukraine, Yates was quick to get involved. He joined a small group of Nantucket residents known as Nantucket Cares led by Tom McCann and headed to Poland in April on a two-week humanitarian mission to bring aid to Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war. After listening to the refugees they encountered in Poland, Yates and the other members of Nantucket Cares were determined to do more. They wanted to bring aid directly into Ukraine, where larger aid groups were still struggling to deliver the items that were most needed by the people desperately fighting back against the Russians, or those simply trying to survive.
Building on the connections he had made in Warsaw with Nantucket Cares, Yates hatched a plan to launch humanitarian aid centers in Ukraine, working with contacts on the ground in the war zone. “I enlisted retired defense contractors and prior military subject matter experts specializing in reconnaissance and front-line supply chain logistics to form a warehouse and humanitarian aid supply chain to all regions of Ukraine, but first and foremost, to the most heavily engaged areas,” Yates said. “We met and formed partnerships with Alex [Korbut], a man serving as Ukrainian liaison with the front line and hardest hit areas in need. We started moving eighteen tons of medical supplies we had procured with the help of “JT,” our logistics specialist retired recon specialist into those areas to start.”
From there, the group went to the Ukrainian cities of Irpin and Bucha, discovering that residents were in dire need of food, water and everyday necessities. Korbut and other volunteers on the ground helped Nantucket Cares get connected with the Irpin Bible Church and the local city government.
Yates’ connections on the ground were recording videos of the devastation they found in Irpin—where hundreds of people had died amid the Russian incursion—when they came across a neighborhood that had been bombed. A series of buildings, now abandoned, surrounded a playground where the slide was located. “I thought, how is the world standing by and allowing these atrocities to take place? I saw that slide and thought it was a symbol that could bring that point across,” Yates said. “I made it my mission to get that equipment and bring it back out of there.”
The slide during its first stop at the Nantucket Whaling Musuem.
With the help of Korbut and the son of the pastor of Irpin Bible Church, as well as local Irpin officials and a former neighborhood resident named Victor, the process of removing the slide began in coordination with Yates and the Nantucket Cares team back in the U.S. The charitable fund Oberig-26 was also instrumental in organizing the trucks and drivers that would be necessary to move the slide. “Some residents were not happy we were removing this war crime evidence, and some were very grateful and hoped our idea would in fact prove to help them,” Yates said. “As one might imagine, they were apprehensive about trusting us after what happened to them.”
Island resident Galia Koteva served as the logistics coordinator for the effort to bring the slide to the U.S. Yates said Koteva sent and fielded roughly two hundred emails with Korbut, as well as border crossing agents and an international aid coordinator, to get the slide to Poland, then eventually to Boston and finally to Nantucket.
After its time in Washington, D.C., the slide is continuing to tour the country, serving as a fundraising tool for Nantucket Cares and a way to raise awareness around the fight in Ukraine that shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Most recently, there’s been talk about bringing the slide to Art Basel, where the fundraising opportunities are immense. Yates believes the slide’s ultimate destination should be the Smithsonian or possibly a war crimes museum. No matter where he and the Nantucket Cares team decide to send it, they can rest assured that Yates will find a way to get it there.
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