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∙STOCK. Baker's fortunes began to grow when he first latched onto a 250-share hunk of stock in Milwaukee's Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp. (nicknamed "Magic"). He bought the stock before the SEC had registered it, eventually saw a $28,750 investment balloon to about $400,000. Why had Magic's president, Max Karl, catered to Bobby? As Karl later testified, "I was impressed with his title." It would be good for Magic, he added, to have "well-known stockholders," and Baker "knew a lot of people." Baker certainly did, and he touted many of them, including Robert F. Thompson, executive vice president of Tecon Corp., a Dallas construction firm headed by Clint Murchison Jr. When Thompson borrowed $110,000 from Dallas' First National to buy Magic stock and offered to cut Baker in fifty-fifty on profits or losses under a "gentleman's agreement," Baker cleared a cool $21,000 profit without investing a penny.
∙LAND. Bobby became a land speculator after Florida's Democratic Senator George Smathers sold both Baker and Scott Peek, at that time Smathers' administrative assistant, one-eighth shares in a 143-acre development near Orlando, Fla. Baker paid $1,500 for his share, has so far got back about $4,000.
∙BANKING. Baker got a seemingly inexhaustible line of credit through Bob Kerr's Fidelity National Bank in Oklahoma City. During 1962, Friend Fred Black Jr. testified, he and Baker borrowed more than $500,000 from Fidelity National, much of the money going to finance operations of Serv-U Corp. Through Baker's friendship with Kerr, Black said, he was able to borrow large sums. In 1962 he got one loan for $175,000 to purchase stock in the Farmers & Merchants State Bank in Tulsa, subsequently sold 1,500 shares to Edward Levinson and 1,600 shares to Ben Sigelbaum, a seldom-seen Miami pal of Levinson's. For his part, Baker had other well-oiled bank connections. Washington's District of Columbia National Bank lent him an unsecured $125,000 for the full cost of Baker's new Washington home because, a bank officer testified, Baker was "a gentleman with innumerable friendships and connections." Baker's house, into which he moved last fall with Wife Dorothy and the five Baker children, ages 13 to 1½, is near Lyndon Johnson's pre-White House mansion, and equally close to Fred Black's imposing pad, all in the Spring Valley section.
There were other enterprises, among them a travel agency in Washington and a Howard Johnson's motel in North Carolina, in both of which Baker had a piece of the action. But they were small potatoes compared with Serv-U, the Baker-Black-controlled vending-machine firm. Less than 24 months after it qualified to do business in California in January 1962, Serv U had been awarded chunks of the vending business at three major aerospace firms—North American Aviation, Northrop Corp., and Thompson Ramo Wooldridge's Space Technology Laboratories.