January 1, 2002
PECOS — Billie Sol Estes was back in the news for being back in Pecos last week. According to the Pecos Enterprise, Estes was in town for the first time in nearly four decades, seeing friends, reminiscing and driving past the sites of his former home and businesses there.
“It hasn’t changed that much, but it’s changing for the good all the time,” Estes told the Enterprise about Pecos. The 76-year old businessman apparently hung out at Alfredo’s Restaurant one day last week, visiting the Alfredo Gomez family and greeting other friends as they stopped by his table. While he lived in Pecos, Estes built a fortune in cotton and land. He also owned the Pecos Funeral Home and started a paper called the Pecos Daily News.
Then he went to prison for fraud. His strange life has been a mix of the brazen and the cornpone, and Estes is such a compelling figure that he almost seems fictional, inspiring loyalty in some folks and conspiracy theorizing in others. Estes was a compatriot of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. In the ‘60s he was the subject of an enormous federal investigation regarding his Reeves County business dealings. His well-placed political allies meant that he was the recipient of different federal grain contracts, but what eventually got Estes into big trouble was his scam to make millions of dollars in loans on ammonia fertilizer tanks that didn’t exist. The tanks were supposed to be located around Pecos, and he funneled the money made from the tanks to finance other ventures.
His hinky dealings sent him to a stint at La Tuna federal correctional facility near El Paso, and he returned to prison a few years later for mail fraud and his attempt to conceal assets. Several years after that, Estes was investigated for reportedly stealing trade secrets from a rival company. Estes was in trouble again a couple years ago, when a grand jury indicted him for allegedly running a for-profit business out of a non-profit Abilene halfway house. At one point in his trial, he entered and then withdrew a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The charges — which would have sent him to prison for life if convicted — were thrown out in
May 1998.
He has long hinted at writing a tell-all book that covers his 1984 grand jury testimony in which he implicated President Johnson in the murder of federal investigator Harry Marshall. Estes doesn’t shrink from the mantle of conspiracy: The billiesolestes.com website invites readers to “read between the lines. What dark, untold memories, clear as the day they were made, still linger in the razor-sharp mind of this most notorious, yet arguably benevolent historical political figure,” the web page asks.
Estes now lives in the Fort Worth-Dallas area. His daughter runs a Billie Sol Estes bed and
breakfast and museum in Granbury.