Nation: Steam Cleaning

Billie Sol Estes strikes again

In 1971 Billie Sol Estes was paroled from a federal prison after serving six years for amassing a $ 150 million business empire through fraudulent land deals and nonexistent fertilizer tanks. He went to work in fundamentalist Abilene, Texas, as an overseer on his brother's cattle ranch and as a truck dispatcher for a petroleum company. Estes regularly assured his parole officer that, as required by the terms of his release, he was abstaining from business deals. He was happily working as a manual laborer, he said, and had "even washed trucks and fixed flats."

But the simple life portrayed by Estes turns out to have been an elaborate front. Last week federal prosecutors disclosed in a Fort Worth courtroom that as early as 1974, Estes was back wheeling and dealing. One deal involved conning a leasing operation of Borg-Warner Corp. of Chicago and other firms into paying for some nonexistent steam cleaners, used in washing down oilfield equipment. Estes then arranged for Wallace Oil Co. to pretend to lease some of the phantom cleaners. When the Chicago firm sent a representative to see its equipment, he was, according to a Justice Department official, "given a little bit of the run-around." Estes and associates are accused of taking the proceeds from the sale of the steam cleaners, paying the leasing cost and pocketing the remainder.

The federal investigators would not disclose how much money Estes made from the arrangement, but his partners have been ordered by a state court to repay $600,000 to the leasing companies. Said an investigator in the Texas attorney general's office: "The overall scheme bears a striking resemblance to the old fertilizer tanks. That was the first thing that caught our eye."

Federal prosecutors charge that Estes was also involved in eight or ten other deals. But after negotiations with Estes and his lawyers, the Justice Department decided to let him plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to defraud the Government, a blanket charge covering tax evasion and mail and wire fraud. He faces a $5,000 fine and up to five years in jail. Yet, through the same sort of sharp bargaining that made him his fortune, Estes is expected to be sent back to prison for only a couple of years at most. -