Investigations: Decline & Fall

(9 of 11)

cotton allotments in Texas, was found dead in a lonely pasture. He had been shot in the abdomen five times with his own .22-cal., bolt-action rifle, which lay near by. The local sheriff ruled it a suicide. Apart from the awkwardness of firing the rifle while holding the muzzle against his abdomen, Marshall would have had to pull the bolt back after each shot. Strange, too, was the death of George Krutilek, an accountant who had kept books for the farmers who signed bogus tank mortgages.

A few days after the Estes scandal broke, Krutilek was found dead in his car with the windows up and a rubber hose leading from the exhaust to the interior of the car. But an autopsy revealed no trace of carbon monoxide in his lungs, and local authorities ruled that he had died of a heart attack.

"A Lawyers' Quarrel." Secretary Freeman said that the Estes affair had been "ballooned out of all proportion." There was "no evidence," he insisted, that Estes had received special favors from the Agriculture Department.

On the contrary, there was evidence aplenty. Items: >-Grain-storage operators are required to post a bond as a prerequisite to getting federal storage. The amount of the bond is based on the capacity of the storage facilities, and other factors, including the operator's financial status. The better the risk, the lower the bond. Estes' bond was set at $700,000 back in 1960, and it remained at that level, although both the amount of grain he had in storage and his capital deficit increased enormously. A passing gesture toward upping the bond was made after the New Frontier took over the Agriculture Department, but Estes protested, and the bond remained at $700,000. Freeman explained the department's generosity to Estes by saying that he had filed a financial statement showing a net worth of $12 million to prove that he was a good risk. But that financial statement was grossly inflated, and could not have passed a reasonably careful scrutiny. Furthermore, a routine check with Internal Revenue would have shown that for 1959, 1960 and 1961 Estes reported no taxable income at all—just a steady stream of losses.

>-Freeman confirmed Estes' appointment to the National Cotton Advisory Committee in November 1961, two months after the department had already fined him $42,000 for planting cotton under illegally obtained acreage allotments.

Freeman's explanation: Estes had originally been appointed to the board in July 1961, and in November the department had merely "reconstituted" the old board. Furthermore, said Freeman, the issue of the legality of the allotments was a "lawyers' quarrel." Shortly after Freeman offered this explanation, the department belatedly got around to fining Estes $554,162 for additional cotton-allotment violations that had been under investigation since mid-1961.

> The pace of the department's handling of Estes' cotton-allotment case was glacial even by bureaucratic standards. On Jan. 6, two weeks before Kennedy's inauguration, at a time when it appeared that a decision adverse to Estes might be imminent, Senator Yarborough and J. T. Rutherford, the Democratic Congressmen from Estes' home district, went to the Agriculture Department and interceded for Billie Sol at a meeting with department officials. They succeeded in getting a