Billie Sol Estes--a wonderfully Southern name if ever there was one--has known the inside of the prison system for his wheeling and dealing in Texas. He is also known for the explosive charges he has leveled at the late President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Back in the 1940s, Estes made money by selling irrigation pumps that ran on natural gas. He added the fertilizer business to his holdings, adding to his wealth.
A big supporter of then Texas Senator LBJ, Estes concocted a scheme that used non-existent cotton and later fertilizer tanks as collateral for loans. The scheme took advantage of federal farm subsidies for cotton production.
In 1962 and 1963, Estes was confronted with multiple fraud charges, was found guilty, and was sent to prison for what might have been a good long stay, even though three individuals who were expected to testify against him kept turning up dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. This is not to suggest that Estes was responsible for their deaths, but the chain of events was odd indeed.
In 1965, in Estes v. Texas, Billie Sol's sentence was overturned because TV cameras had been allowed in his court trial; 5-4, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the cameras' presence had deprived him of a fair trial.
It was then that the freshly sprung Billie Sol claimed that he had shared a good bit of his cotton scam loot with LBJ, that Johnson had had a hand in the deaths of the three witnesses, and--most sensational of all by far--that LBJ had been in on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Due to his record as a felon, Estes and his various charges were not taken very seriously by authorities, although they provided conspiracy theorists a field day.
He has been a rascal, to be sure, but Billie Sol has been the stuff of Southern legend: a convicted scam artist who was at the same time a Church of Christ lay minister and a colorful Texas character of the first order.
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