Word: solness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Billie Sol Estes case was no laughing matter-to Freeman or anyone else. It was the case of a welfare-state Ponzi. It was a scandal that had already brought about the resignation or dismissal of four Kennedy Administration officials. It had politicians and bureaucrats of all degrees and of both parties shaking in their boots. It had set off investigations galore. It had called into question the whole administration of the mighty U.S. Department of Agriculture...
...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...
Down in Pecos, Texas, Federal Receiver Harry Moore, presiding over the ruins of the Estes empire, refused to let newsmen even peek at the "financial journal" in which Billie Sol had recorded his receipts and expenditures over the years. Until the full record was open to scrutiny, the Estes scandal was the hottest thing around...
Receiver Moore's office in Pecos was jammed with feds poring over Billie Sol's papers. "I have working in this office at the moment," said Moore, "six Senate investigators, five men from the FBI, and four auditors-and twelve more are on the way." In Washington, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations unanimously voted to hold a full-scale investigation of the Estes case, with public hearings to begin as soon as Chairman John McClellan sees fit, probably in June. In addition, a House Government Operations Subcommittee, newly supplied with a special $400,000 appropriation voted...
...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