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A. It depends on what you mean. No, I disagree with that. Let's take secretaries. We pay $40,000, generally speaking, which is real high in the Phoenix market. Our girls would come in, perfectly qualified in shorthand and typing. We got the best obviously because we were paying them high. These girls would come in at 6:30 and 7 in the morning, they'd work until 6:30 or 7 at night -- 5 1/2, six days a week. They had two rules. One rule is that we didn't have smoking on the premises. The other one was that they had to wear dresses or dress nicely. You couldn't come in in jumpsuits and so forth. I had seen too many cases where they dress down for one another. The girls like it; we paid them for it.
Q. What about your son who had no experience, but was reportedly making $866,000 a year by the time he was 26?
A. I don't know where the 26 came from. My son ran an extraordinarily profitable real estate company, probably the largest in the United States, or close to it. Similar operations for profit in the land industry in those years would have rewarded the persons responsible way more than he was rewarded. All of us had loans, all of us put in our own money.
Q. Didn't the accounting firm of Leventhal & Co. report that your profits were on paper only and came from sham deals?
A. First of all, it's not an audit, it's not certified, it's an opinion of Leventhal based on files. They didn't look at the property, didn't kick the dirt, didn't talk to the buyer or the seller. And they opined that way for their best client, namely the 11th District of the Bank Board in California. They wrote down assets by fiat -- take something worth, say, $175 million and claim, no, it's worth $150 million.
Q. Don't you see in looking back that you don't have the temperament to be in a regulated industry?
A. Your question ignores the fact that countless others -- Sears, "Bum" Bright in Texas, Gordon Luce of Great American -- who have succeeded magnificently, including myself, in everything they've done have been unable to succeed in the savings and loan business. Now when all of us fail, certainly, somewhere, somehow, someone like you must understand that it isn't the inability to operate or inability to cope with the regulator. There's something wrong with the regulator.
Q. But let's face it, the Arizona real estate market went bad.
A. Not at all. There were no losses in Lincoln when it was taken over. We sold 200 lots in about seven months in one project. Since the Government took over, they haven't sold five of them. Don't tell me I can't sell real estate in bad times. I've always sold real estate in bad times. We'd signed contracts with the best builder in the country to put in subdivisions. We had U.S. Home doing an adult community project and some higher-priced homes up in the hills. We got Rubbermaid to move here, McKesson to move in. We had an airport just like Ross Perot's down in Texas. What in the name of God else do we have to do?
Q. You mentioned your Phoenician resort earlier. There are hotel people who say that the cost per room, the cost per golf-course hole at that hotel was higher than anything else in the area and that you could have never made the money back.