Investigations: Decline & Fall

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business competitors, practiced fraud and deceit on a massive scale, and even victimized Church of Christ schools that he was supposed to be helping as a fund raiser or financial adviser. He pursued money relentlessly but, despite energy, ingenuity, cunning and a dazzling gift of salesmanship, ended up not only broke but hopelessly in the red—by $12 million according to his own figures, by $20 million according to Texas' Attorney General Wilson. "The sad part of it," says a Pecos bank president, "is that he could have been an honest millionaire instead of a broke crook." Billie Sol grew up in an environment of a sort that is supposed to produce not crooks but plain, solid, honest people—the kind often referred to as the salt of the earth. One of six children, he was raised on a prairie farm near Clyde, Texas.

His sturdy, sunburned parents worked hard and went to Church of Christ services every Sunday. "We've never had any trouble in this family." says his father.

"Why, I've never even gotten a parking ticket in my whole life." The father still refuses to believe that Billie Sol really did anything wrong: "The Constitution says a man ain't guilty until they prove it, and they ain't proved anything on Billie yet." The family was so poor that Billie Sol's mother sold home-churned butter from door to door to help meet the mortgage and insurance payments. Billie Sol made up his mind early in life that he was going to be rich. While other West Texas farm boys were thinking about shooting crows or catching fish after the chores were done, Billie Sol was precociously thinking up deals. His father fondly remembers an event that took place when Billie was about twelve: "I was plowing behind a team of horses, and he came out there to talk to me. I remember he was barefoot.

He said he'd been thinking about a tractor and said he thought he could get one in a trade for a barn of oats we had. I told him to go ahead and try. He went off and came back with a tractor." How to Succeed. Billie Sol started out in farming, and he prospered at it. By the time he was 28 he was doing so well as a cotton farmer that the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named him one of the U.S.'s ten outstanding young men of 1953. Billie Sol traveled to Seattle to receive the award at a Jaycee dinner. While in Seattle he uttered some prophetic lines: 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." Another top-ten award winner that year was Tennessee's Frank Clement, then the youngest state Governor in the U.S., later famous in a way for his florid keynote speech ("How long, O how long?") at the 1956 Democratic Convention. With many similarities of temperament and style, Clement and Estes became fast friends.

Clement made Estes an honorary "colonel" on his staff ("One of your caliber adds distinction to my staff," he wrote to Estes), and Estes cut Clement, his father and his brother-in-law in on some of his deals.

One Estes venture into which Clement and his kinsmen put some money involved buying up surplus barracks at the Air Force base near Blytheville, Ark., having the buildings chain-sawed into sections, and, after a bit of nailing