Where are the true con men today? Lord knows we have plenty of them, but they are seemingly normal people who partake in various larcenies for a living. Where are the kooks like Billie Sol Estes? A complete eccentric who somehow was able to bilk the government for big bucks in the most ridiculous schemes imaginable.

Billie Sol was from dirt poor beginnings but even from an early age showed a talent for making money, legally or otherwise. He had amassed his first fortune before he was 21, but he was never a normal person. He wanted to be "Murchison rich" as he phrased it, but even after he had money, he could never pull off the dress and manners to be accepted in the upper classes to which he aspired.

Trying to play in politics, he approached the Stevenson campaign with an idea of his own. He would get backers to purchase and train thousands of parakeets to say "I like Adlai" while flying in great flocks over rallies. He was completely serious and no one could make him understand that every phase of his plan was impossible.

The scam which eventually brought him down involved enlisting farmers to not build non-existent tanks to store anhydrous ammonia fertilizer. The government would pay for the storage. The farmers picked up a few bucks and had done nothing illegal. Billie on the other hand was being paid to store millions of gallons of non-existent fertilizer, which came from his non-existent plants, in non-existent tanks. The government, upon learning of all this, tried to subsidize him even more to rectify the situation! It was like Billie Sol was fond of saying, "Once you pass a certain point, you not only lose a creditor, but gain a pardner."

All the insider scandals and the Whitewater type things were nothing compared to Billie Sol Estes, a true con man with panache.

Spaw