A king of sorts
The death of Billie Sol Estes ushers him onto the list of infamous Texas personalities.
“Texas is a land of contradictions,” the late UT-Austin historian Joe Frantz once wrote, “capable of expanding the soul and equally capable of being mean and petty.”
The Texan Frantz had in mind when he made that observation was Billie Sol Estes, the flamboyant wheeler-dealer, con-man and swindler who died Tuesday while eating a chocolate chip cookie at his home in DeCordova Bend southwest of Dallas. Out of prison since 1983, he had lived a quiet life in Granbury until his death at 88.
With Estes, whose place alongside Bernie Madoff in the swindler hall of infamy is assured, contradictions abounded. He was a Church of Christ lay minister who neither smoke nor drank nor took the Lord’s name in vain, even as he conned Church of Christ schools that relied on him as a financial adviser and fund-raiser. He would not allow his daughter to attend dances or indulge in mixed bathing in the swimming pool of the luxurious Estes home in Pecos, even as he destroyed business competitors and defrauded the federal government of millions. In a 1962 cover story, Time magazine described him as “a welfare-state Ponzi ... a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes who makes Dr. Jekyll seem almost wholesome.”
One more contradiction: The man who once was worth perhaps $400 million, the man who relentlessly, obsessively pursued what some of his former Church of Christ brethren would have called filthy lucre, was flat broke, even before he went to prison for the first time in 1964.
Fertilizer tanks are in the news again in the wake of the West tragedy. Estes defrauded the U.S. Department of Agriculture (and, by extension, the American taxpayer) with imaginary fertilizer tanks. He collected more than $30 million on the non-existent tanks and used bogus mortgages on them as collateral to borrow roughly $22 million from commercial finance companies. And that was only one of his convoluted schemes involving the Agriculture Department, fraudulent schemes that cost several bureaucrats their jobs and that splattered onto several politicians from both parties when they finally came to light. (And that’s not to mention a mail-fraud scheme and the mysterious deaths of two men who crossed him.)
Named by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1953 as one of the nation’s 10 outstanding young men, Estes, 28 at the time, offered the group, according to Time, words to live by at the awards dinner in Seattle: To be successful, he said, “you have to walk out on a limb to the far end, for that’s where the fruit is. If it breaks, you learn how far to go next time.”
Only he didn’t learn, perhaps, for whatever reason, couldn’t learn. For this go-getter gone wild, this brazen Texan whose dreams and schemes metastasized, the sky, not a tree, was the limit — until it came crashing down around him.