Word: sol
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...Billie Sol was largely financed by cotton price supports and grain-storage fees paid for by the taxpayers. If there had been no price-support programs, there would have been no inviting storage business for him to get into, no cotton allotments to obtain by fraud...
...marathon inquiry into the Teamsters Union, McClellan ominously summed up the Estes case as "the darnedest mess I've ever seen." Precocious Deals. The man who made the mess is a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes who makes Dr. Jekyll seem almost wholesome. Billie Sol (pronounced "soul" in West Texas) never smoked or drank. He considered dancing immoral, often delivered sermons as a Church of Christ lay preacher. But he ruthlessly ruined
...sheer gaudiness, the Estes mess dramatizes the farm scandal more vividly than ever before. If that dramatization were to result in something really being done about the farm fiasco, who knows but that the U.S. might even owe a vote of thanks to none other than Billie Sol Estes...
...broke but hopelessly in the red-by $12 million according to his own figures, by $20 million according to Texas' Attorney General Wilson. "The sad part of it," says a Pecos bank president, "is that he could have been an honest millionaire instead of a broke crook." Billie Sol grew up in an environment of a sort that is supposed to produce not crooks but plain, solid, honest people-the kind often referred to as the salt of the earth. One of six children, he was raised on a prairie farm near Clyde, Texas...
...never even gotten a parking ticket in my whole life." The father still refuses to believe that Billie Sol really did anything wrong: "The Constitution says a man ain't guilty until they prove it, and they ain't proved anything on Billie yet." The family was so poor that Billie Sol's mother sold home-churned butter from door to door to help meet the mortgage and insurance payments. Billie Sol made up his mind early in life that he was going to be rich. While other West Texas farm boys were thinking about shooting crows...