Hit with some titillating charges, the Pentagon's No. 2 exits
The 43-page complaint from the Securities and Exchange Commission was written in the usual dry legalese. But the bare facts that it laid out would make a fitting plot for J.R. and his cronies. The former chief executive of a $4 billion Dallas-based conglomerate, 64, has a "private personal relationship" with a company receptionist and provides her with "monetary support." He shares "lunches, dinners, trips, vacations, and social gatherings" with a small circle of high-living Southerners and their women friends. Generously, but illegally, he also shares stock tips worth $1.9 million with his friends.
Adding piquancy to the plot are the identity of the executive and his most recent job: Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Thayer. Last week the SEC charged that Thayer, as chairman of LTV Corp. and board member of Anheuser-Busch Cos. and Allied Corp., improperly passed along inside information to his friends. The day before the SEC filed its civil complaint in a New York federal court, Thayer resigned as the Pentagon's No. 2 man. Thayer termed the charges "entirely without merit" and vowed to fight them. At week's end his replacement had been named: William Howard Taft IV, the self-effacing chief counsel of the Defense Department, a protégé of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and great-grandson of the 27th President of the U.S.
The SEC complaint follows a ten-month investigation. It alleges that Thayer, who is married, has had a "personal relationship" since 1979 with Sandra Ryno, now 38, a divorcee and a former receptionist at LTV, the company he left a year ago for Washington. During 1981 and 1982, the SEC claims, Thayer passed stock tips to Ryno and seven other defendants in the suit. All seemed to come from soap-opera central casting.
One is Stockbroker Billy Bob Harris, 44, who is "a regular celebrity groupie," says Writer Edwin ("Bud") Shrake, a former Dallas sports columnist. Harris is friendly with Don Meredith, former Dallas Cowboy quarterback, ABC Monday Night Football commentator and TV pitchman; former Cowboy and Denver Bronco Quarterback Craig Morton, his onetime roommate; and country-and-western Singer Kenny Rogers. The broker's parties are known for "wall-to-wall girls, champagne, hot tubs and more girls," says Shrake. They were vividly portrayed in fictionalized form in the movie North Dallas Forty. Harris, who gave stock reports on Dallas TV, announced on television that he had undergone a lie-detector test, which, he claimed, proved his innocence.
According to the SEC, Harris used the stock tips to benefit Julie Williams, 26, a public relations firm employee who also teaches aerobic dancing at a health spa.
Williams, the complaint alleges, has a "close personal relationship" with Harris.
Others who profited from Thayer's stock tips, the complaint goes on, included Gayle Schroder, 46, chairman of First American Bank and Trust of Baytown, Texas; Malcolm Davis, 48, a convicted gambler and president of a Dallas insurance agency; Dr.