Nation: Steam Cleaning

Billie Sol Estes strikes again

In 1971 Billie Sol Estes was paroled from a federal prison after serving six years for amassing a $ 150 million business empire through fraudulent land deals and nonexistent fertilizer tanks. He went to work in fundamentalist Abilene, Texas, as an overseer on his brother's cattle ranch and as a truck dispatcher for a petroleum company. Estes regularly assured his parole officer that, as required by the terms of his release, he was abstaining from business deals. He was happily working as a manual laborer, he said, and had "even washed trucks and fixed flats."

But the simple...

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