Billy Sol Estes

Billy Sol Estes definitely falls under the surprise of, "he was alive on Monday?"

That's what happens when you go at 88, have spent time in jail, and outlived whoever it was you scammed, flim-flammed, bamboozled, or otherwise cheated. And if he did murder anyone, he surely outlived them as well.

Billy Sol was news so long ago Time magazine's cover story on him was over 50 years ago. Today's obituary in the NYT is bylined by Robert McFadden, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who I suspect retired some time ago. Any pictures associated with the obit are black and white.

Billy was colorful, in all the hues. My favorite story about him was when he fooled the auditors into believing he had more soy beans than he really did. He let them inspect one huge storage tank, and the inventory was there. He then delayed them from inspecting the second tank. When he did allow them to take a look, be had pumped the contents from the first tank into the second tank. Billy got certified.

Having done audit work in a prior segment of my life, I love this story. Most auditors will tell you they don't look for fraud, but instead concentrate on generally accepted accounting practices: GAAP. This hair-splitting approach has given us some colossal frauds that went undetected. Enron, anyone? Most auditors can't find their ass with either hand.

Billy's shenanigans were so long ago and so outrageous that a figure no less than Richard M. Nixon, running for governor of California at the time, called them the "biggest national scandal since Teapot Dome."

That's how long ago this was. Billy's exploits had so many politicians implicated that his doings were being compared to a Department of Interior petroleum reserve misappropriation during the Harding administration. Teapot Dome was the area of Wyoming where the reserves were held.

Teapot Dome is on no one's radar these days, but it is the second time I've read about it in the month of May. Re-reading Joseph Mitchell's piece, 'King of the Gypsies' gives us a head New York gypsy, Johnny Nikanov--King Cockeye Johnny-- who proclaims his relative innocence in fraudulent matters when he asserts that he never stole "no oil well," like Teapot Dome.

Mr. Mitchell wrote the piece in 1942, and first came in contact with King Cockeye in 1936, so Teapot Dome was less than 20 years before that. So it is easy to understand it was a fresh and gigantic incidence of high-up, political malfeasance that stayed in a Gypsy's mind and helped him rationalize.

One suspects living Gypsies have updated their comparisons to Bernie Madoff and perhaps Lance Armstrong.

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