Bryan Burrough

by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

  In fact, Hunt lived a spartan life, still driving himself to work six mornings a week, his lunch beside him in a brown paper bag. At Mount Vernon in the evenings he fed carrots to his deer and sat on the veranda holding hands with Ruth, often singing their favorite song, “Just Plain Folks.” In 1965 he had moved all the family offices into the new First National Bank skyscraper downtown. Hunt Oil took the twenty-ninth floor. Hunt moved his old furniture into a corner office; next door was an unoccupied room whose door still bore the nameplate “Hassie Hunt.”

  By the 1960s Hunt had given up on oil; even as Placid Oil, which remained controlled by the first family’s trusts, discovered the massive Black Lake oil field in southern Louisiana—a strike that probably made the first family’s six children billionaires for the first time—Hunt Oil found no significant new reserves in the 1960s. Instead Hunt focused much of his energy on writing, politics, and faddish health products, especially the plant derivative aloe vera, which he believed had all-but-mystical healing qualities. None of this did anything to increase his stature around Dallas. A case in point was the interview Hunt gave to a young Morning News reporter named Rena Pederson about his diet. At first everything appeared normal. Hunt, with Ruth at his side, sat in Mount Vernon’s dining room, chatting amiably as he gobbled down, and sang the praises of, apricots, dates, and pecans between sips of orange juice and bouillon. “I have lots of money,” Hunt mused. “So they call me the Billionaire Health Crank. Heh, heh, heh.”

  Suddenly, without warning, Hunt dropped to the floor and began furiously crawling around the table. He made one lap around, then two, before the startled Pederson asked what he was doing. Hunt replied that he was indulging in his favorite exercise activity, “creeping.” “I’m a crank about creeping!” he blurted, still circling the table.

  “Don’t go too fast,” Ruth pleaded.

  “Yes, please slow down,” Pederson’s photographer said. “I want to get your picture.” And that was the photo that appeared in the Morning News, the “world’s richest man” on his hands and knees, creeping around his dining room. “Yahoo!” Hunt yelled as he finished.

  What Hunt-the-philosopher lacked in credibility he made up for in literary output. All through the 1960s he continued to fire off letters to newspapers, almost all on tried-and-true ultraconservative themes; noting the rise of the hippie counterculture, he titled one “We CAN Turn Back the Clock.” He began writing a syndicated column, where he engaged in running one-way feuds with everyone from William F. Buckley to Senator William Fulbright, handed out political endorsements no one much wanted, and continued churning out new ideas and terms to describe them; he saw himself as a “freedomist,” all who opposed him “anti-freedomists,” and dubbed eastern elites “Fabians.” At their peak Hunt’s columns were carried in thirty-six daily newspapers and twenty-two weeklies, mostly in the South. Between 1964 and 1970 he followed Alpaca with ten more self-published books, several of them collections of his columns, but also a family history called Hunt Heritage and a second stab at the Alpaca story, Alpaca Revisited. None exactly roiled literary circles. LIFE LINE, meanwhile, kept chugging along. Despite an ongoing feud with several congressmen over its tax-exempt status, it continued broadcasting its mix of religion and right-wing propaganda all through the years of Woodstock and My Lai; in 1969 it was still carried on five hundred radio stations.

  Despite the stream of messages to the outside world, as the years wore on Hunt increasingly withdrew into a world of his own, disdaining the advice of his children in favor of two trusted security men, Paul Rothermel and John Currington, whose offices flanked his own. Rothermel’s investigation into the various Kennedy-conspiracy probes made him Hunt’s one indispensable aide; over the years he and Currington emerged as Hunt’s all-purpose fixers, supervising trust disbursements to all three families, running Hunt’s food company, HLH Products, even trying to collect old gambling debts. Whether it was his advancing age, the changing political climate, or the torrents of criticism he endured in the wake of Kennedy’s death, by the mid- 1960s Hunt began to evidence a mounting paranoia. As the decade wore on, Hunt began seeing vague threats everywhere, from hippies, left-wing politicians, even Hunt Oil employees. At one point, when Libya was threatening to nationalize Bunker’s oil fields, Hunt had Rothermel infiltrate a group of local Libyan exchange students, worried they might assassinate him. The real threat, however, came from within.

  II.

  For much of the 1960s the Hunt family’s most irksome headache was Hunt’s food business. Between its inception in 1960 and 1968 HLH Products posted losses totalling thirty million dollars, and was increasingly a point of contention between H.L. and the children of his first family, a relationship that had never fully recovered from H.L.’s decision to marry Ruth and adopt her children. Bunker and Herbert tried to persuade their father to close HLH any number of times, but he refused to listen. In time things got so bad that Herbert and his father briefly stopped speaking.

  Matters finally came to a head in March 1969, when Hunt Oil convened its annual meeting in a twenty-ninth-floor conference room. It appeared HLH would lose another twelve million dollars that year, and with Hunt Oil finding no new oil, its income from existing reserves had fallen to one million dollars a month, barely enough to cover HLH’s losses. If something wasn’t done, Hunt Oil’s chief financial officer, John Goodson, warned the family that day, HLH threatened to bankrupt Hunt Oil. “It is essential,” Goodson said, “that we stop these losses immediately.”1

  While Hunt himself appeared unconcerned, Lamar and Herbert were. As Hunt Oil board members, they pushed to form a “Committee of Four” to review HLH’s problems. As the committee’s point man they chose cousin Tom Hunt, who had been at Hunt Oil since the 1940s and, after H.L.’s rupture with Herbert, was closer to Hunt than his sons. That trust would be crucial; everyone involved knew HLH was a sensitive topic. All Hunt’s political activities, including LIFE LINE, ran through it, and the company was overseen by Hunt’s top men, Rothermel and Currington. At first, reviewing HLH’s financial documents, Tom couldn’t see any obvious problem. The unit operated fifteen factories, and all appeared to be running smoothly. Still, he decided to launch an inspection tour, and what he found startled him. Visiting a plant in Oxnard, California, he found nothing. Not a production line. Not a factory at all. Just an empty warehouse. He found one or two more just like it in coming weeks. Even several plants that appeared capable of production were operating below capacity, the victim of obsolete equipment or, as with a plant in Pennsylvania, lack of a sewer line.

  Back on the twenty-ninth floor, Tom reviewed his findings with the board and urged the closings of the inoperable factories. But Hunt, assured by Rothermel and Currington that his nephew was overreacting, refused. By that point Tom sensed something darker afoot. As he delved more deeply into HLH’s financials, he noticed a series of strange deals in which Rothermel and Currington had taken sales commissions of some sort. There were dozens of transactions involving companies Tom had never heard of. He didn’t understand it all, but the more he studied, the more he felt he was staring at a massive embezzlement. Once Herbert and Lamar were briefed, they began asking questions themselves.

  What they learned triggered a rare full-family intervention. Late one afternoon in June 1969, the five active first-family children—Bunker, Herbert, Lamar, Margaret, and Caroline—gathered in Lamar’s twenty-ninth-floor office. Waiting until 5:30, when most employees had left for the day, they filed into their father’s office. Herbert served as spokesman. HLH’s losses, he told his father, were now so bad that the only way Hunt Oil could meet payroll was to take a loan. Herbert had talked to First National about it. To his astonishment, the bank had turned him down—the first time in thirty-five years the Hunts had been rejected for a loan. It was humiliating—enough so that Herbert felt the embarrassment might rouse their father. “Obviously the food company is grossly mismanaged,” Herbert went on. “But the problem can’t be all mismanagement. There ha
s to be theft involved. We have to look into things and bring the situation under control.”

  Hunt asked who Herbert suspected. “We don’t have any concrete proof,” Herbert said. “But we think that Rothermel and Currington, being the two closest to the operation, have to be involved in it.”

  “Well, you’ll have to prove it to me,” Hunt said. “I owe my life to Paul Rothermel. There is just no way he could be involved.”2

  In the ensuing weeks Tom Hunt burrowed deeper into HLH’s finances, but the complexity of the scheme he suspected was simply beyond his ability to unravel. Worse, Rothermel and Currington complained incessantly to H.L., who eventually told Tom to stay out of HLH operations and limit his investigation to paperwork. Tom appealed to Bunker and Herbert, but both were busy with their own affairs. Finally Bunker suggested they hire the Burns detective agency. “Burns is a national outfit,” he told Tom. “They can spot-check the plants in a hurry, and maybe get this thing to a head in a hurry, too.”3

  Once Burns was hired, Tom put HLH aside, joining Bunker and Herbert in preparations for Hunt Oil’s bid for acreage on Alaska’s northern slope. They were part of a five-company consortium that included Getty Oil and Amerada Hess; all five companies were to contribute $250 million toward the bids, but Hunt Oil was so strapped for cash that Herbert and Bunker were obliged to dip into their trusts to come up with the family’s share. Then, on the eve of bidding that autumn, Tom phoned Herbert with a startling discovery. He had found an extra line on his telephone. It appeared to be a “jumper line” that fed into another office. Tom was convinced someone was bugging his phone to stay abreast of the HLH investigation.

  Then on Friday, November 14, just as Bunker and Herbert were discussing what to do, Rothermel and Currington suddenly handed in letters of resignation. Later, Hunt attorneys would claim that boxes of HLH papers went missing at around the same time. When Tom found out, he scrambled to the twenty-ninth floor. Other than a single computer printout, almost all of HLH’s financial documents were simply gone. The following Wednesday an aide who worked closely with Rothermel and Currington, John Brown, telephoned H.L. and said he, too, would resign “if you people up there, and particularly Tom, don’t quit interfering.” Tom told Hunt to let Brown resign and he did.

  The three resignations, coupled with the vanished documents, meant it would be that much harder to ferret out an embezzlement if there was any there in the first place. The Burns agency had been working the case for several months by then, and had yet to find anything concrete. Bunker realized it was time to get serious. He remembered a talk with his old friend Bud Adams, Lamar’s partner in the AFL. Adams had talked of uncovering a kick-back scheme in his own organization by hiring a private detective to wiretap the suspect’s telephones. A call to Adams produced the detective’s name, Clyde Wilson. Wilson headed Houston’s top private-detective agency.

  A week later the president of Wilson’s firm, a onetime East Texas deputy sheriff named W. J. Everett, came to Dallas and listened as Bunker outlined the problem in the living room of his Highland Park home. Bunker said he wanted taps on all telephones being used by Rothermel, Currington, John Brown, and three other employees. Everett, a squat, no-nonsense man who wore his hair in a crew cut, suggested there might be an easier way to solve the case. No, Bunker said, he wanted wiretaps. The only way his father would ever believe these men had betrayed him was if he heard it in their own words. Everett nodded. There was just one problem. Bud Adams had used wiretaps when they were still legal. But the Omnibus Crime Act of 1968, passed into law that January, made wiretapping a federal crime punishable by up to four years in prison. By his own admission, Everett didn’t tell Bunker this. What he later claimed to have said was, “Mr. Hunt, if we do this and get caught, we could all be in trouble, criminally and civilly.”

  According to Everett, Bunker said the family could handle any legal repercussions. According to Bunker, this entire exchange never took place. Whatever the case, W. J. Everett left Bunker’s living room promising to talk it over with Clyde Wilson and get back to him. A few days later Everett returned to Dallas with one of his electronics men, and the two cruised the streets near Rothermel’s and Currington’s suburban homes to get a sense of what the job involved. It would be risky and technically complex—“a little ticklish,” he told Bunker—but they would do it. On Bunker’s okay, Everett brought a three-man team to Dallas to begin work in late November 1969. They swung by Herbert’s house to pick up a two-thousand-dollar down payment for their services.

  While a series of detectives rotated through roles on the Hunt job in the coming weeks, the lead wiretappers remained two of the Wilson agency’s best men: Patrick McCann, a twentysomething electronics whiz, and his assistant, Jon Kelly. McCann was the brains of the operation. To do the job, he rigged up tiny transmitters that, when clipped onto a phone line, would broadcast to a nearby receiver. Installation was no problem: the detectives simply climbed to the tops of nearby telephone polls and snapped the bugs into place. The tricky part was the Blaupunkt FM receivers. McCann paired them with tape recorders he packed into briefcases painted in camouflage colors. He and Kelly then painted their faces with shoe polish and, working in the dead of night, dropped the suitcases into bushes near each of the homes. “It was just like a movie,” Kelly would recall. “We really got into it.”4

  The equipment required daily maintenance, mostly to replace batteries and tapes, so the detectives remained in the area, checking into nearby hotels and moving frequently to avoid suspicion. Everything went smoothly at first. After a week, McCann began sharing the recordings with Herbert. An initial batch turned up little of interest. But in the second week they began hearing terms that sounded promising, something about a “leg breaker,” then mention of a “big daddy.” Herbert gave the men more money and told them to keep at it.

  By the third week, in mid-December, Bunker became involved, and he showed far more enthusiasm than his brother, his ears perking up when the tapes carried a mention of gold bullion hidden in Mexico. The detectives repeated their warnings that this was all very risky. They had already picked up rumors that Rothermel had asked someone in the Houston police department about the Wilson agency. When Bunker asked Jon Kelly what he would do in the event of discovery, Kelly told him he kept a bucket of acid in his car for destroying evidence. “I was lying to him about the bucket of acid,” Kelly admitted later, “but it sounded like a good story, and Bunker really seemed to like it.”

  They broke for Christmas. Afterward, W. J. Everett told Bunker he was reluctant to continue the operation; there were enough rumors flying around police circles that he felt certain Rothermel was on to them. But Bunker insisted. Everett prevailed upon him to narrow the number of wiretaps from six to three, just Rothermel, Curry, and John Brown. Pat McCann, meanwhile, thought it wise to stop hiding briefcases in bushes. Instead, he recommended parking rental cars near the target homes and stowing the briefcases in the floorboards beneath newspapers. They would rotate the cars regularly in hopes of avoiding suspicion.

  Once the new setup was in place, in early January 1970, McCann returned to Houston, leaving twenty-five-year-old Jon Kelly in charge with another detective. Kelly constantly shuttled among the three target homes, sliding into the rental cars to retrieve the tapes. Everything was going smoothly enough, but for some reason Kelly found himself growing increasingly worried. At one point, he noticed a white chalk mark on one of the cars’ tires, suggesting someone was keeping tabs on its movements. When he checked in with Herbert—he used the code name “Kirkland” on these calls—he recommended backing off awhile. Herbert ignored him, telling him it was probably just a traffic cop.

  Then, late on the afternoon of January 16, 1970, his partner dropped Kelly on a sidestreet near Paul Rothermel’s home in suburban Richardson to retrieve a rented Mustang they had left behind. After checking for chalk marks, Kelly slid into the driver’s seat, started the engine—and saw the police car. It was parked in a driveway behind him. I
nside, a patrolman appeared to be lighting a cigarette.

  When Kelly pulled away, careful to drive the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, the patrolman followed. Just around the corner, there was a stop sign. The officer switched on his flashing lights. The patrolman, George Taylor, got out and approached the car. Kelly stepped out to meet him. As would become clear months later, Officer Taylor’s curiosity was no accident. One of Rothermel’s neighbors had noticed the Hunt team’s car-switching routine and called the Richardson police, who had been through enough domestic disputes to guess this was a private-detective surveillance. “We’ve been watching this car,” Officer Taylor told Kelly, “and we would like to know what’s going on.”

  Rather than lie, Kelly said nothing. Officer Taylor reached inside the Mustang, lifted a pile of newspapers on the backseat, and drew out a briefcase. Inside, he found a speaker and a tape machine.

  “Have you been doing some wiretapping?” he asked.

  Kelly said nothing.

  “Are you a private investigator?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you out working on a divorce case or something?”

  “I think I’d better talk to my attorney.”5

  It was then that Officer Taylor escorted Jon Kelly to the Richardson city jail, where he was booked as a suspicious person. The matter might have ended there, but the Richardson police weren’t stupid. They knew wiretapping was now a federal crime, and when they listened to the tapes found in Kelly’s car, they heard a mention of H. L. Hunt’s name—and called the FBI. When Herbert heard the news, he called Bunker in New Zealand, where he was bidding on some offshore acreage. “Well, that doesn’t concern us,” Bunker remarked.