Word: sol
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...anyone had any doubt left that the sprawling, messy Department of Agriculture needs a thorough overhauling, it was dispelled last week. Billie Sol Estes may be the farm program's biggest bad boy to date, but it became obvious that he has plenty of company. So far. the FBI has used 452 special agents from 46 cities in its Estes investigation, at a cost of $236,200; congressional investigations are expected to cost another halfmillion. But scandal was piling on scandal with such regularity that the price to the taxpayer of investigating them all might yet become a scandal...
...Freeman was trying to lay this burden on Republican doorsteps, another turned up in his lap: two more suspensions of minor Agriculture officials came to light. The men were office managers for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service-the agency embroiled in Billie Sol's fraudulent cotton-allotment dealings. They were ousted in connection with $28,000 worth of illegal rice-allotment sales in Texas' Brazoria and Matagorda counties over the past three years. Both cotton and rice allotments are valuable, since without them farmers are subject to unprofitably stiff penalties for planting and marketing-but their sale...
...Senate Investigations Subcommittee, chaired by Arkansas' implacable old John McClellan, began its long-awaited probe into the affairs of Billie Sol Estes-and, to be sure, Billie Sol's name got mentioned a few times. But top billing in the first days' hearings was bestowed on the bureaucratic maze of the Agriculture Department...
...material relevant to the Estes case, said Kamerick, subcommittee investigators found papers in no fewer than 16 Agriculture Department offices. Said he wearily: "I must say at this point that we are not sure yet that we have all the documents in the Department of Agriculture pertinent to Billie Sol Estes." In his specific comments on the Estes case, Kamerick singled out Under Secretary Charles Murphy as the official who overruled a decision to cancel Billie Sol's 1961 cotton allotments-which had been obtained from farmers through land trans actions carried out in evident violation of a legal...
...roses had faded from his chubby cheeks, and Billie Sol Estes looked like a beaten man when he appeared before a federal grand jury in El Paso last week. Estes showed up toting neatly tied bundles of magazines and newspapers to serve as props for the plea of Attorney John Cofer, who argued that the reams of unfavorable publicity about his client made a fair hearing impossible. Unmoved, the grand jury handed down a new indictment against Estes, which raised the total number of his pending charges to 16 counts of mail fraud, twelve counts of illegally transporting securities...