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The farm troubles often turn bankers into unwilling villains, a role they play in a recent crop of mortgage-melodrama movies, including Country and Places in the Heart. One case of real-life tragedy occurred in September 1983 in southwestern Minnesota, where a farmer and his 18-year-old son decided to get even with a small-town bank that had foreclosed on their land. The father and son lured two bankers to the farm and then shot them to death. One farmer in Nebraska was killed last month in a shootout with police who were serving him papers for a bank trying to collect on a loan.
Bankers got many of their current problems the old-fashioned way—they earned them. Says William Isaac, chairman of the FDIC: "The common thread in the industry's troubles is bad management. You can get away with a fair amount of poor management when the economy's in good shape, but if the economy turns sour, as it did in 1981-82, your mistakes are magnified." This does not mean that all bankers have turned into casino gamblers. "I don't think that bankers as a whole have become reckless," says Carlos Arboleya, vice chairman of Barnett Bank of South Florida. "But there will always be a certain percentage of wildcats."
In a business built largely on trust, a little wildness can be highly contagious. Consider the case of William G. Patterson, the highflying, unorthodox executive vice president of Oklahoma City's Penn Square Bank. While negotiating million-dollar deals in restaurants during the early 1980s, he would sometimes regale out-of-town clients with such stunts as drinking beer out of his cowboy boot or stuffing a roast quail into his pocket. In his office at Penn Square, he would sport Mickey Mouse ears or a hollowed-out duck decoy on his head. Patterson's lending ideas were just as madcap; his department invested 80% of the bank's lending portfolio in risky oil and gas ventures. Yet neither Patterson's antics nor his business bravura aroused much concern among officials of major banks, who bought $2 billion of Penn Square's loans. For large banks that want their business to grow in a hurry, buying loans helps them add new customers with minimal effort.
When Penn Square collapsed in July 1982, it blew the cover on the dubious management of more established banks. Penn Square's failure led directly to Continental Illinois' near disaster two years later; it also cost Chase Manhattan, the third largest U.S. bank, more than $200 million.
Most of Continental Illinois' troubles have been blamed on Roger Anderson, its ambitious chairman from 1973 until last April. Under Anderson, Continental was more interested in increasing its market share than in checking on the