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The world-wide reach of Sinclair Consolidated was flung out by the burly Destiny Man to Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama; to Angola, in Portuguese West Africa; to Russia. Sinclair's technique was to approach the government of a country with the flyleaf of his checkbook showing. "Men mumble but money talks," is an old oil adage. He would ask for a franchise to prospect for petroleum. If he found some, the government could have it all, except for a million or so acres. Sinclair always got his acres along the coast, where his tank-ships could put in. The oilfields he obtained this way soon brought Sinclair Consolidated's holdings up to $380,000,000. At the same time, Sinclair learned how to handle governments.
Soon after President Harding was inaugurated, Sinclair was a frequent visitor in Washington, D. C. He knew Edward Beale ("Ned") McLean, sportsman-publisher of the Washington Post, and Harry Micajah Daugherty, the U. S. Attorney-General. He cultivated Albert-Bacon Fall, whom he had known only casually as a Senator from New Mexico, but who now, in 1921, was Secretary of the Interior. Sinclair began to be invited to stay at the White House.
President Harding's favorite evening game was poker, but there came an evening when President Harding had to think about Oil instead of drawing to a straight flush. Sinclair and another big oilman, Edward L. Doheny from the Pacific Coast, an old friend of Fall's, were anxious for some leases on the naval oil reserves at Elk Hills, Calif., and the Teapot Dome in Natrona County, Wyo. To accommodate them, Secretary Fall and Edwin Denby, Secretary of the Navy, prepared an executive order, transferring these reserves from the Navy to the Department of the Interior. President Harding was badly worried, but he signed the orders. Then Fall signed the leases. "Well, I guess there'll be hell to pay," said President Harding, "but these fellows seem to know what they are doing."
After receiving the Elk Hills lease, Oilman Doheny loaned Fall $100,000 without security. Publisher McLean "went down the line" (i. e., acted as a blind) for this friendly transaction.
As for Sinclair, he took Fall's son-in-law, Mahlon T. Everhart, aboard his private car in the Washington railroad yards one night and handed over $198,000 in Liberty Bonds, supplementing this sum with $35,000 at his Manhattan office some days later. He was supposed to be buying a one-third interest in a run-down ranch of Fall's at Tres Rios (Three Rivers), N. Mex. They were going to turn the ranch into a country-club. But no club eventuated. Fall used the money to pay off debts and improve the property.