Читать книгу Gamble in The Devil's Chalk - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 8

His company was known as I. C. Deal Investments, but everyone throughout the burgeoning Dallas real estate industry knew and respected him simply as Irv Deal. He was, he said, nothing more than a good businessman who had long ago manufactured the foundation for his success while still in college – going from door to door and selling pots and pans for Alcoa. He sold so many of them that the company finally decided to let him go. Goodbye. Good luck. Irv Deal was, officials feared, making more money on commission fees than the president earned by running the company.

Deal ran a tight ship. He had a reputation for hiring the right people and making the right decisions. He kept a hard, unflinching eye on the devil that was in the details, as well as on the money coming in and going out, making sure the bottom line never varied or wavered from the financial game plan he had established for each of his projects.

He was never known as a tyrant, but Irv Deal did maintain dictatorial control over every aspect, large or small, of his investment firm. He depended on his own ability as a real estate developer and never bothered himself with any sudden swings or shifts in an unpredictable economic climate. Thus far, the economic winds had always blown in a favorable direction.

It was all about to change.

As far as Irv Deal was concerned, raw land was simply an over-priced commodity necessary for building apartment buildings. Dallas was his base of operation, and he built as many as ten thousand units throughout the sprawling Metroplex. But his influence and his holdings, during the mid-1960s, ranged from coast to coast, with apartments rising up alongside the streets of America’s most prominent cities from San Francisco to Tampa by way of Lake Tahoe. His I. C. Deal Investments had become universally recognized as the second or third largest apartment builder in the United States, depending on whichever report happened to be the latest to hit his desk.

For years, Irv Deal remained firmly entrenched as a major player who had found his niche and parlayed it into a small, or large, fortune, depending on whether he was talking to his tax man or his banker. Irv Deal preferred working from behind a desk and on the telephone. He was smooth. He was eloquent. He possessed a boyish charm and the reassuring style of a businessman who had figured all of the angles and knew how to turn pennies into dollars, great amounts of them.

He liked to make deals, and he was good at it. In one shrewd market-changing venture, he sold sixty-five hundred apartment units to the Great Southwest Corporation for twenty million dollars. For Irv Deal, it was indeed the best of times. The worst of times, however, was swiftly approaching, and it would catch him long before he realized that sudden and unexpected economic erosion was on the way.

Those prolific, fruitful years in real estate were just about as tempting and as seductive as a fashionable, beautiful woman on some other man’s arm, and just about as unpredictable. The good times had rolled in with minks and limousines and settled down around Dallas for good. No one doubted it, and no end lay in sight. There was plenty of raw land, and land begat money, and money begat fortunes, and fortunes begat Dallas. The power was intoxicating.

One morning, the elixir that had been so intoxicating left a bad taste and a hell of a hangover. Dallas Real Estate awoke and discovered that, virtually over-night, the good times had all loaded up and gone. No one had seen them slip out of town. A grand and glorious market had passed away sometime in its sleep, and not everyone at the funeral would be a pallbearer. So many had turned in that night as rich men and women. They opened their eyes and felt the shackles of debt draping heavily around their shoulders. It had been daylight for such a brief time. Then darkness. Pure, unadulterated darkness.

Real estate magnates called it building ahead of demand, but their crime had been to dramatically overbuild North Dallas and suddenly discover that banks no longer had construction loans to pass around. Interest rates were on the rise, and speculators were caught in a deadly financial trap, paying fourteen percent interest, and sometimes more, for property on which they were unable to build. Raw land became raw again. Dollar signs had faded from the fields of splintered promises. Boom to bust, riches to rags, power to poverty, good fortune to good riddance. The game of speculative real estate was simple. Buy land and flip it before they had to pay for it, and they all kept flipping it back and forth. Each time the price grew greater, and the odds went up. Whoever got caught with the final flip of the land last lost. A lot of men lost.

Irv Deal had been devastated by the sudden downturn of the real estate market. His world had crumbled around him, and the loss hit his personal life harder than his business life. He could ride out a slump. He had done it before. But real estate in Dallas had unexpectedly turned south, then exploded in his face, and left him trying to develop luxury apartment complexes and shopping centers when the buyers had all left the sellers grimly holding their “For Sale” signs. The ashes and debt were suffocating.

Money always had a curious way of finding Irv Deal. Money, he knew, wasn’t out looking for him anymore. Money had dried up and left him scrambling for one more roll with somebody else’s dice. His only salvation, he decided, would be to find another business where he could invest the funds he still had tucked away in the bank and crawl back to profitability again.

Irv Deal was standing at a financial crossroads filled with potholes and lined with detour signs, financial cul-de-sacs, and dead ends. What’s next? he wondered. He had no idea. But for a man who had mastered the science of running a sound and profitable business, something would turn up. It always did.

During Christmas of 1974, Irv Deal, with time on his hands and nothing better to do, wandered up to a holiday party hosted by Frank West. He ran across Pat Holloway, an attorney who ran with fast company and owned, or at least handled, the legal work for drilling funds. Deal and Holloway had been friends for years.

Well, they may not have been close friends, but they knew each other well enough to discuss the ups and downs of a business market gone awry.

Deal looked the way he felt, forlorn and downcast. What’s worst, he was standing around and drinking far too much, and he was drinking alone, a sad predicament, which, throughout the Dallas business community, was generally frowned upon and regarded as an unforgivable sin. In Dallas, when players got together for any occasion, the broke supped from the same cup as the rich, and it was virtually impossible to determine who had received their next check and who had written his last one, who had chicken and who was left with the feathers.

Holloway strode across the room. He was charismatic and had a commanding presence, especially at a social gathering. “What’s wrong?” Holloway asked.

“The real estate business is just terrible,” Deal answered, his shoulders slumped, his face shaded by the dim lights in the room. “I’m going broke,” he said. “The business is out there dying and taking us down with it. I’m not sure I’ll be able to hang on much longer.”

“Real estate will bounce back,” Holloway said.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“It always does.”

“I don’t want to wait for it,” Deal replied. “It looks to me like the oil business is the place where I need to be. The price is going up on a regular basis. There seems to be a lot of money to be made, and the rewards far outweigh the risks. I need to get myself in the oil business, Pat. It’s as simple as that. The trouble is, I don’t know how to get there. You run drilling funds. You’re on the inside of the oil business. Tell me. How’s the best way for me to become a player in the oil business?”

Holloway had no intention of encouraging a man down on his luck and looking for the next big play. It bordered on being criminal. A man like that was grasping for straws and easily tempted by the illusion of dollar signs. Sure, the rewards of oil were greater than the risks. Always had been. But, as he would say, the inherent dangers of a man losing his financial ass were just as plausible and infinitely more probable. The hidden costs could strangle him.

Holloway said as kindly as possible, “Irv, you don’t know a damn thing about the oil business. Let me tell you, it’s an entirely different world from the one in which you’ve always lived and worked. Building apartments is one thing. You’re damn good at it. Drilling for oil is quite another. Frankly, the oil business can eat you alive.”

It was as though Irv Deal had not heard a word the attorney said. “I like oil,” Deal replied. “Oil is money. And I can’t say that about real estate these days.”

Pat Holloway took a drink and let the warm whiskey slide down his throat. “I think you might be making a big mistake,” he said.

“Maybe I am.” Deal smiled. “But I’m a big boy,” he said. “I’ve made mistakes before. I’ll ask you the same question again. How’s the best way for me to get into the oil business?”

“Well, if you’re dead set on making the biggest blunder you’ve ever made, you need to get yourself a good geologist,” Holloway said. “Just do whatever he says, and let him find you some prospects. If you don’t know what kind of shit you’re looking for, you won’t stand a chance. The oil patch has chewed up a lot of beginners and spit them out in all directions. Without a good geologist, you might as well be drilling a water well. Your only hope is to tie yourself to some old boy who knows what he’s doing.”

“Okay,” Deal answered. “If I decide that oil is really the direction I want to go, that’s exactly what I’ll do.”

Pat Holloway watched him walk away. He doubted seriously if Irv Deal would remember anything at all about the oil business by morning. Maybe he was wrong. But he just could not picture the suave, cosmopolitan Irv Deal out on a rig, his face spackled with mud, dirt, and grime. He laughed quietly to himself and poured another shot glass full of whiskey. Pat Holloway forgot all about Irv Deal.

Max Williams quietly and quickly began changing gears in his life and his business. He was still smitten with an unabashed and unbridled passion for raw land. The surface of the landscape lying within the shadows of Dallas skyscrapers had been good to him for years, but now he was once again more interested in what he might find buried deep within the recesses of the good earth than what he might earn by selling the top of it. A change of heart. A change of plan. A change period.

When real estate in Dallas headed over the far edge of the earth, Max Williams began moving quietly in another direction. Business had turned sour. He hadn’t. He had seen others become depressed with a slumping economy that offered few promises and little hope. But, as he said long ago, sometimes something bad simply puts you in a place for something good to happen. He had grown up with the smell of oil thick in his nostrils. To oil he would return. Oil had been good to a lot of people, but only if they knew where it was, how deep it lay, and were able to find it. Someone had once asked the legendary J. Paul Getty the secret of his success in discovering oilfields. “It’s simple,” Getty said. “I just keep drilling holes.”

Max Williams was already exploring the idea of branching off into the oil business when geologist Clayton Childress came to him, looking for some investors to back a few wells in the heralded Fort Worth Basin, particularly on some promising ranchlands tucked away within the tableau of knolls in Palo Pinto County. Good idea, Williams thought. Probably a good area. At least, Childress thought it was. And the timing could not have been better.

Williams had known the geologist since their boyhood days in the West Texas oil patch and had no reservations about working with a man whom, he remembered, was as honest as the day was long. But money throughout the marketplace was as tight as it had ever been. Those who still had cash were generally hanging onto to it for fear they might never find it again, and none of them had any idea about a precarious and unpredictable future looming before them like an ominous thunderhead. As a rule, the rich knew they were one bad and costly gamble removed from being poor.

Childress wasn’t having any luck at all raising the money, and he turned to the only man he knew who had been involved in high-finance deals before. Max Williams, it was said, ran in the right circles with the right crowd and rubbed shoulders with the real players of Dallas. Mostly in real estate. Seldom if ever in oil. To Childress, it did not matter. Money was money. Childress needed it, and someone else had possession of it. Max Williams would probably know who did. Childress drove to Dallas and explained his plight to the man he had always called Little Exxon because of his childhood days in the Humble Oil camp.

“I’ve been around a few years, drilled some wells, and seen my share of good locations,” Childress said. “The basin looks to be a solid bet and a good prospect to drill.”

“How much money do you need to raise?” Williams asked.

“Well, Little Exxon,” the geologist told him, “I think we can drill several shallow wells for two hundred and sixty thousand dollars. We may even be able to drill them for less. Raise what you can. Any money we have left over is yours.”

“How deep?”

“I’m figuring about four thousand feet.”

“I don’t know much about oil,” Williams admitted.

“You know money.”

Max Williams nodded. If anything, he knew money. He had watched it flood Dallas, then leak out like the last drop of rain in a West Texas drought.

To Childress, especially during hard times when men were as depressed as their bank accounts, two hundred and sixty thousand dollars seemed like a lot of money, and the challenge of raising it loomed over him like a formidable if not an impossible task.

In reality, Williams knew, it wasn’t that much money at all. Not really. Long ago, Bob Folsum had given him the secret to fundraising. Line up a bunch of investors, take a few dollars from each of them, not enough to hurt anybody, and get them all involved in a deal that potentially offers a nice return. Williams knew immediately what he needed. Twenty-six investors. Ten thousand dollars each. And he had his money. Of course, nothing was ever as easy as it looked when brainstorming an idea. But he thought he had a good strategy that might just work in far-ranging field known as the Fort Worth Basin.