Funny Money

Mark Singer

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780547526461
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Financial Services
• Index: Business

New York Times Bestseller: The "grandly entertaining" true story of an oil boom, an Oklahoma City bank, and a chain of crime, corruption, and collapse ( Texas Monthly ). The Penn Square Bank, located in an Oklahoma City shopping mall, started raking in money in the late 1970s making high-risk loans in the energy industry—and then selling them to other banks. Then came the summer of 1982, when the whole thing collapsed and took a lot of uninsured depositors down with it, as well as causing major losses at financial institutions coast to coast—and eventually sending an executive to jail. In this book, New Yorker writer Mark Singer recounts the whole spectacular story and makes brilliantly (and hilariously) clear what actually happened and why. Funny Money represents both a unique moment in the history of American banking and a timeless tale of frenzied, reckless greed. "[Singer] tells the tale with wonderful verve. He concentrates not on the financial complexities of the catastrophe but on the colorful people involved." — The New York Times "Superbly researched and clearly written." — The Cleveland Plain Dealer "Witty... This is a book that refutes anyone operating on the prejudice that business reporting must be dull." — The Washington Post

1

The auctioneer had a full beard and a self-confident rat-a-tat palaver and he wore a three-piece powder-blue suit. At first the powder-blue suit threw me because I had expected a more somber style, something closer to the hues of a funeral director, but then I realized that, next to the dean of the bankruptcy bar, the auctioneer was probably the most light-spirited workingman in town. Once the prices of crude oil and natural gas broke, life began to settle down to where it belonged, and the auction business thrived: deep rigs, workover rigs, rig-up trucks, lowboy trailers, derrick trailers, forklifts, heater treaters, separators, compressors, cranes, welders, graders, mixers, dumpers, crushers, chains, boomers, blocks, floats, frac tanks, pickups, jets, choppers, quarter horses, polo ponies, lithographs—they were all for sale.

This one was an automobile auction and these were not just anybody’s cars. “Everyone except the members of the news media behind the ropes,” the auctioneer commanded. He introduced himself as Donovan Arterburn, Jr. No need to spend a lot of time on a formal introduction of the merchandise. I did not intend to bid on any of it, nor did most of the three or four thousand other people who had turned out, but we knew why we were there. Most of us intended to elbow as close as possible to the rope barricades and gawk at what used to be the corporate fleet of the Penn Square Bank, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Two long rows of vehicles—forty-six late-model passenger cars and one three-wheeled utility truck—faced each other, ten yards apart. Hours earlier, the hoods had been raised for anyone who wanted to view the innards, but now they were closed and the bid spotters and security guards had ushered us away. I was reminded of news photos of captured war prisoners and matériel.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is a branch of the Department of the Treasury, determines when a national bank has failed. On July 5, 1982, the Comptroller declared the Penn Square Bank insolvent, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) moved in immediately to settle the bank’s affairs. According to the Comptroller, the Penn Square Bank owned a portfolio of uncollectible loans whose face value exceeded the bank’s capital; too many of the bank’s customers had borrowed more money than they could ever repay; liabilities considerably surpassed assets; the bank was bankrupt. Two months into the liquidation, the automobile auction took place. The bank building stood about three hundred yards due east, tucked into a corner of the Penn Square shopping center, and the FDIC auditors toiled there right now, sifting for clues. The auditors believed that the bank had designed its own demise. The bank’s owners, employees, customers, and admirers were convinced that liquidating the bank was a mistake. Whatever the case, Donovan Arterburn, Jr., had come to sell the cars.

Holding the auction in the Penn Square parking lot made good sense. It was not a puny parking lot. One of the newer shopping malls, further north into the suburbs, had a larger lot, but the one at Penn Square could handle a sizable crowd. And, after all, these had been the bank’s cars. Announcements in the newspapers had said that the auction would get underway at seven o’clock in the evening. Ever since the previous morning, when the cars had begun arriving, pensioners in knit shirts and straw fedoras—men with some time to kill while their wives canvassed the mall—had been dropping by, irritating the armed guards with the same questions, questions that the guards did not have answers to and would not have answered even if they had known the facts.

“Which of these cars did Jennings drive?” the men in the summer fedoras wanted to know. “Which one was Patterson’s?” Bill P. Jennings had been the chairman of the board and the largest stockholder of the Penn Square Bank, and Bill Patterson, his protégé, had been the head of the bank’s oil-and-gas lending department. It had taken Jennings, Patterson, and the bank’s employees less than three years to book almost two and a half billion dollars in oil-and-gas loans—three exhilarating years which had brought to Oklahoma more out-of-towners in quest of fun and profit than anything since the land rush of ’89. If not for Bill Jennings and Bill Patterson, there would not have been an auction. All of us rubberneckers out for a free show appreciated that.

Frequently, the Oklahoma City cognoscenti described the scuttlebutt they fed one another as “just street talk.” That phrase always aroused my skepticism because I knew that in Oklahoma City a pedestrian was a person in transit to or from his automobile. I had picked up some street talk to the effect that Patterson drove a sea-green Porsche and Jennings was chauffeured in an oyster-white Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. Or perhaps I had heard something completely different. Keeping rumors straight was a task. In any event, I could look over the parking lot and see that there were no Porsches or Rollses for sale. There were some decent Lincoln Town Cars, a Continental, a Cadillac, plenty of smooth-riding Ford and GM sedans—loaded with options like cruise control, tilted steering wheels, FM with the AM, a few tape decks and CBs—but nothing truly ostentatious.

As big little cities go, Oklahoma City has some imperfections. During the 1960s, for instance, the downtown business center was subjected to an urban-renewal blitz that eliminated whatever looked uncontemporary. After the bulldozers had finished their work it became evident that no one had given much thought to what might replace the old structures that had just been destroyed. Ever since, no-there-there architecture has flourished. You do not see many human beings at street level because most of the buildings are connected by a network of air-conditioned pedestrian tunnels. Summer usually lasts five punitive months. On hazy days all of downtown threatens to disappear. A six-lane piece of east-west interstate forms a southern perimeter that can deposit you in the business district unless you prefer to keep driving until you hit Fort Smith or Amarillo. Fighting the brain-fogging heat, you pass the oilfield supply yards, heavy-metal industrial sprawl, idle pumping units, stacked rigs, gizmoid billboards. When the wind comes in from the south it carries the aroma of stockyards beyond the North Canadian River. The road surface elevates as downtown presents itself—a canned silhouette of undifferentiated boxes, many of them covered by aluminum foil or whatever that material is that buildings are wrapped with to divert attention from their missing details. The glare deprives the senses, and the whole place seems to evaporate. You look into the foil and try to reassure yourself that you can see where you are and that it is someplace.

The shopping center where the Penn Square Bank lived and died is about twenty minutes northwest of downtown and it sits a literal stone’s throw from Route 66, very centrally situated on the North American continent. It opened in 1960, the first satellite shopping center of its kind in Oklahoma City. Twenty-one years later, after a major renovation, it became an enclosed air-conditioned mall. When you cruise through one of those places you can easily fancy that you are comfortably outdoors, although climate-controlled shopping malls are not mentioned in the Bible and therefore, in the eyes of God, you are perhaps nowhere at all—just like downtown. This, for the sake of history, happens to matter. The Penn Square Bank did not vanish without a trace. Its fall resonated, with grotesque consequences. The largest bank in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle-First National Bank, turned to ash, courtesy of Penn Square. Then the Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Company, of Chicago—an institution that had lent more money to American business and industry than any other bank in the country—found itself so deep in the turbid backwash of Penn Square that only a multibillion-dollar government-sponsored rescue was able to prevent its failure. Defending this extreme intervention, federal banking regulators argued that neglecting to save Continental Illinois would lead to the demise of dozens and perhaps hundreds of other banks.

Not since the Depression had there occurred a banking event so bizarre or so unsettling. Bad fantasies loomed within easy traveling distance. What if first the Penn Square Bank folded, followed closely by the largest banks in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest, and what if those failures were followed by the failures of the industrial economies of, say, Mexico and Argentina? What if Western capitalism took a dive? What if a global economic apocalypse started in an enclosed air-conditioned mall in Oklahoma City—out there in the company of the Stout Shoppe and the Peanut Shack and the video arcade and the gift store where for $12.95 you got a room freshener disguised as a porcelain duck? Exercising your imagination with that bad fantasy, you could be excused for thinking that the Penn Square Bank seemed like a peculiar first domino.

“Folks, we’re gonna have fun tonight, but you’ve got to realize this is a business proposition and this is no circus,” Donovan Arterburn, Jr., announced over the public-address system, which was loud enough to be heard in Arkansas. He explained the most important rules: To buy a car you had to pay with cash, a cashier’s check, or a certified check. Any buyer who was carrying less than the full purchase price could make a two-hundred-dollar deposit with cash, MasterCard, or Visa, but he had to show up with the balance before five o’clock the next day. And the balance, naturally, had to be in cash, cashier’s check, or certified check. That meant American dollars, no pesos, no personal checks, no promissory notes, no letters of credit, no IOUs. Donovan Arterburn, Jr., repeated the ground rules and then he repeated them about ten more times.

Arterburn stood now in the rear of an overpopulated yellow Toyota pickup truck that was idling between the two rows of cars. A policeman hugged the tailgate, another sat behind the steering wheel, a pretty young woman with dark hair and sunglasses rode shotgun, and three older women whose job would be to collect money sat around a folding table in the cargo space.

At last the bidding started. The serious spectators were poised with their used-car-buying reference books, and—bam bam bam—item number one took about ninety seconds to sell. It was a 1982 Lincoln Town Car with low mileage and it went for seventeen thousand dollars to a middle-aged man who transgressed the rope barrier and headed unsteadily for the yellow Toyota pickup. There was applause and busy whispering while the resident experts tried to figure out whether he had paid too dear a price—that depending, of course, upon the intangible value that the car would have if it had been driven previously by someone notorious.

The bidding on the second car got underway. Arterburn said, “This next car has an appraised value of thirteen thousand five hundred dollars. Who’ll give me fifteen thousand for it?” Arterburn’s bid spotters had spread themselves out and they surveyed the crowd with the beady circumspection of Secret Service agents. Whenever one of them saw a hand go up he gave a startled yell, like someone slamming a thumb in a drawer. When the bidding had reached half the appraised value, Arterburn interrupted.

“Hold everything,” he said. “The gentleman who bought the first car did not buy the first car after all. He did not have cash. He did not have a cashier’s check. He did not have a certified check. He did not have two hundred dollars. He did not pass Go. We’re going to have to resell the car. All right, let’s finish the bidding on this car and we’ll go back and resell the first one. Wait, no, excuse me, it seems he’s found someone in the crowd who’s going to lend him the money. He now has the two hundred dollars.”

There was laughter and more applause, and I contributed to it. As a gawker, I felt rewarded. On a late-summer evening I had gone to Penn Square to watch some used cars being liquidated. In no time at all I had witnessed an easy-money unsecured loan to someone who simply had not understood the rules.

The first productive oil well in Oklahoma was drilled by accident and stirred no enthusiasm. In the northeast corner of Indian Territory, in 1859, a Cherokee salt prospector named Lewis Ross used a spring pole—a percussion drilling device fashioned from a green sapling—to make a seven-hundred-foot hole. Instead of the brine he was hoping to find, Ross turned up some black gooey stuff that appeared to have useful applications only if you were suffering from rheumatism or a flesh wound. This happened the same year that Colonel Edwin Drake (who was infinitely less a real colonel than Lewis Ross was a real Indian) drilled his famous well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. For a few months, Ross’s well produced ten barrels of crude a day, and then it died. Almost four decades passed before a commercially successful well materialized in Oklahoma. This was the Nellie Johnstone No. 1, completed in 1897 in Bartlesville, along the Caney River.

Ten years after the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 came in, Oklahoma joined the United States. Oklahoma Territory—roughly speaking, the western half of what became the state, comprising a mixture of rankled Native American plains roamers, pious European immigrant soil-scrapers, and Dixie interlopers who had shown up for the land rush of 1889—merged with Indian Territory, which was populated by civilized Native Americans who had been forced to abandon their homes in the Deep South and by more Dixie interlopers and their spiritual kinfolk from other neighborhoods—creatures who resented having to work for a living but were nevertheless willing to put in a few hours a day devising ways to rook the Indians out of some more land. The new state needed a capital, and a town called Guthrie, which had been the capital of Oklahoma Territory, was chosen. In 1910, however, the site was changed to Oklahoma City, which was selected though it had no natural physical beauty and very little water. Worse than that, it gave the impression as the years passed of having no oil. It did happen to be smack-dab in the center of the state, but that mainly gave rise to unflattering comparisons, as whopper oil and gas discoveries erupted everywhere else—near Tulsa and in the Osage and along the Cimarron River at Drumright and Cushing, all to the northeast; in Garfield County, due north; in Seminole, to the east; in Healdton, to the south. Vindication finally arrived in 1928. The discovery well of the Oklahoma City Field, the Oklahoma City No. 1, produced oil from dolomite sediments six thousand four hundred feet beneath the surface, and in the first twenty-four hours it flowed almost five thousand barrels. Shortly thereafter the well was deepened, and it began to gush more than sixty-five hundred barrels a day.

The Oklahoma City No. 1, was a perfectly accurate harbinger. One historian has written that the Oklahoma City Field “was characterized by wild wells, floods of crude, and almost uncontrollable flows of natural gas.” Overproduction got so far out of hand that within four years the price per barrel had fallen from a dollar and a half to fifteen cents. On three occasions during the nineteen-thirties, the governor dispatched the Oklahoma National Guard to enforce orders to curtail production. Five years after the discovery well was drilled, the Oklahoma City Field’s annual output peaked; within the first ten years, more oil was produced than has been produced in the succeeding four and a half decades. There has been one estimate that during those first ten years one trillion two hundred billion cubic feet of natural gas escaped into the atmosphere: three and a half billion dollars at today’s somewhat depressed prices. In its lifetime, it has yielded more than seven hundred thirty-five million barrels of oil and more than two trillion cubic feet of gas. The entire Oklahoma City Field—comprising about two hundred active wells—currently produces less than twenty-five hundred barrels a day. Surveying the landscape now, you would hardly assume that production had been declining for such a long stretch and had reached such a low level. In the Oklahoma City suburbs, where there are two taco joints for every tree, you see wellheads surrounded by high fences in undeveloped residential zones, you see pumping units in strip-shopping-center parking lots. Four-story derricks straddle the wells on the grounds of the state capitol and the governor’s mansion, and it matters very little that so many of the wells are just barely oozing crude—that the derricks’ main function is to provide a remembrance of things past. Appearances count. Mythology counts.

There is a fact not of regional character but of geography and geology that makes Oklahoma City a place where a Penn Square Bank could happen. Forty minutes south and west of town by car (fifteen by helicopter), lies an imaginary rectangle 125 miles by 250 miles. On a map, the rectangle runs on a southeast-to-northwest axis, covers roughly equal portions of the southwest and northwest quadrants of Oklahoma, extends into the Texas panhandle, and thus bounds the surface above what geologists know as the Anadarko Basin—a rising arid plain of red-orange Oklahoma dirt, mostly clay, but high in iron oxide, passable for growing wheat and peanuts and cotton if you can figure out a way to water it. What makes the arid plain worthwhile is that beneath its surface is an almost inconceivably large volume of methane. As an Oklahoman might put it, there is a whole bunch of natural gas down there. The usual Ordovician and Pennsylvanian remains are concentrated in an unusual way. Perhaps one hundred fifty thousand cubic miles of hydrocarbon-bearing limestone, sandstone, dolomite, chert, gravel, and shale make up the sub-strata, an accumulation that stretches back five hundred million years. Liberating the Anadarko’s deep reserves, in the view of a prominent school of current thinking, could render trivial the wastage of gas that occurred in the Oklahoma City Field.

Widespread oil production in the Anadarko Basin began during the 1920s—shallow wells, in the two- to three-thousand-foot range—and along with the oil there was methane that is referred to as “casinghead gas” or “associated gas.” For decades, geologists and petroleum engineers with the least imagination, viewing oil production histories and knowing how far the remaining reserves had descended the slope of the bell curve, would look at the Anadarko and conclude that the gas was running out along with the oil. And they were correct: the gas that was associated with the oil was running out. Relatively shallow formations where oil was not plentiful also produced commercial quantities of gas. This could be found generally in the eastern part of the basin, at depths ranging from seven thousand to twelve thousand feet. The shallow gas and casinghead gas, however, were not what made the Anadarko Basin fascinating. Its most ardent partisans believed that to reach the most gratifying zones you had to go to great depths—fifteen thousand or twenty-five thousand or thirty-five thousand feet. A more prevalent belief, one that was current well into the 1970s, held that the geological “overburden” made the deep-gas hypothesis unlikely because the very deep sediments could not possibly be porous or permeable enough to contain hydrocarbons or to permit their flow. The cumulative weight of a three- or five-or seven-mile-thick crust, it was presumed, would slam shut the pores in the rocks—just as depressing a damp kitchen sponge with a one-ton marble pillar would squeeze out all the moisture.

Someone was going to have to drill and produce from a deep-gas well before the skeptics would accept the idea that the gas was there. And even if it was there technological limitations would mean coping with erratic pressures and extremely high temperatures that could make the available tools about as effective as Lewis Ross’s spring pole. Not that anyone gave a lot of thought to testing the equipment. In the absence of serious complications, a fifteen-thousand-foot well would cost three to four million dollars. As long as the price of gas that traveled through interstate pipelines remained regulated by the federal government, which kept it very low in relation to the price of crude oil, no gambler with an inclination to see his money again cared to roll the dice.

During the late seventies and early eighties, however, the value of fossil fuels changed, the odds changed, and a new mythology emerged. Oil and gas assumed an urgent aura of manifest destiny. It was not like high technology or any other growth industry that seemed headed toward a blindingly bright horizon. It involved mining a finite resource. The thought of running out of oil promised that an enormous amount of money could be made between now and when the last economical drop came out of the ground, and to enjoy the benefits an opportunist did not necessarily have to take heroic chances. An acquaintance of mine, a bankruptcy lawyer, once pointed out, “You’ve got thirteen thousand oil and gas companies in Oklahoma. Maybe fifteen hundred of them are looking for oil and gas. The rest are looking for investors.” Another friend once endeavored to explain to me how Oklahoma City is distinctive—how it differs from, say, Tulsa, which is regarded as sleek and “Eastern” by Oklahomans who have never tasted the delights of a St. Louis or an Indianapolis. “Three years ago I bought a new Mercedes,” my friend said. “I asked the salesman to deliver it to my house. He drives it out on a Friday afternoon and I meet him in the driveway. He parks the new car and gives me the keys, and then I give him the keys to my old car because I’m trading it in. Then he hands me a business card and says, ‘Well, that’s the last car I’ll ever have to sell. I’m going into a new business Monday morning.’ I look at the card and it says ‘Fraley Oil & Gas.’ That was his name—Wyman Fraley. He said that before he sold cars he’d been a preacher. The last thing I heard about him was he owed the bank a million dollars and he’d been accused of torching his office to collect on the insurance and he was telling people the Atlanta mob was looking for him. A guy like that could never get banked in Tulsa.” Oklahoma City was blessed with a novel strain of cosmopolitanism. If you pursued a dollar there and persevered in a special way, you might be able to get yourself tailed by gangsters. But, inevitably, they would be gangsters from Atlanta—in other words, too small to make the varsity. Wyman Fraley banked at Penn Square. So did my friend who bought the new Mercedes-Benz from him. An institution such as the Penn Square Bank could have dar...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Characters in This Book
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• 23
• Afterword
• About the Author