Here’s to the man who brought down The Man

Billie Sol Estes

I was in college when the Billy Sol Estes "scandal" broke and, at the time, I didn’t think it was any big deal. It had to do with non-existent anhydrous ammonia tanks in West Texas. Somehow Estes convinced gullible farmers in the Pecos area to purchase the tanks and then he would lease the tanks from them for the same amount as the mortgage payments. Got it? What’s the big friggin’ deal? The farmers really weren’t out anything. The problem was that Estes used the fraudulent mortgages on these tanks to obtain loans from banks outside Texas that could not easily verify the existence of the tanks.

Still, back then it didn’t seem to me the stuff to make national headlines. He didn't kill anyone. He didn't even rob banks. (OK, maybe in some form, he did. It just wasn't armed robbery.) But there were some other extenuating circumstances.

One was the fact that Estes was well connected politically. He displayed personally autographed pictures of then President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson on his office wall. Johnson, it was said, even convinced the Agriculture Department to look the other way when it came to Estes’s business dealings.

Another was the fact that Estes, for all practical purposes, literally owned the town of Pecos and most of the land around it, financing his purchases with the bank loans. The one thing he didn’t own was the town’s newspaper, a semi-weekly publication called the Pecos Independent and Enterprise. However, in 1961, when the paper refused to endorse Estes when he was running for a place on the local school board, he simply started his own newspaper, the Pecos Daily News. He established ridiculously low advertising rates in an attempt to run the Independent out of business. His plan seemed to be working. The Independent slashed the number of reporters on its payroll from five to two.

Oscar Griffin Jr.

One of those two was Oscar Griffin Jr., someone I had never heard of until my ever vigilant South Florida correspondent alerted me about him a couple of days ago. Seems that Griffin was in a small Pecos café one day when he overheard a conversation about Estes between two local farmers. He said one of the farmers described Estes’s easy money scheme as "like pennies from heaven."

Griffin decided to check into this a little more and went into his own newspaper’s records. There he found detailed information left by a previous owner, Dr. John Dunn, who discovered that Estes had borrowed $24 million (that would be $180 million in today’s dollars) using the non-existing tanks as collateral.

Griffin put together an investigative series that ran in the Independent, incredibly without much fanfare, in February and March of 1962. Few people paid attention to the revelations and the overwhelming majority of them were not disturbed by it. "You have to remember that Billy Sol was like a god in this town," a Pecos resident told a New York Times reporter later that year, adding "Anyone opposed to him might just as well pack up their bags and leave town."

Somehow, the series did catch the attention of the F.B..I., which launched an investigation that resulted in (1) Estes receiving a 24-year prison sentence (that was later overturned) on a number of fraud charges, (2) Kennedy deciding Johnson’s association with Estes was the reason he needed and desperately wanted to drop LBJ from the ticket in 1964 and (3) Griffin and the Independent winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for distinguished local reporting.

I bring all this up now because Griffin died Nov. 23 at the age of 78 and it seems to me that his passing went unnoticed by too many institutions, especially those in the journalistic field. It was noticed, however, by one Billie Sol Estes who said in a telephone interview with the Times from his home in Granbury, Texas, "It’s a good riddance that he left this world."

By the way. Today there is only one newspaper in Pecos, The Pecos Enterprise. It is a direct descent of the Independent and Enterprise. The Daily News went into receivership soon after the scandal broke.