The Man in the Black Hat
By mastering the mysterious ways of South Texas, Clinton Manges has built an empire, amassed political influence, declared war on the state establishment—and left bitter enemies in his wake.
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The first Guerra case finally put to rest in 1974. But new disputes over the mineral rights flared up almost immediately. To date the people who have profited the most from the whole affair are the lawyers; the Guerra deal has spawned more than twenty lawsuits in nine counties. The Guerras didn’t do so well. The promise of royalties Manges held out back in 1968 has yet to be realized, and four of the brothers never will realize it, because they died before the litigation did.
Vannie Cook, Manges’ partner, didn’t fare so well either. Cook and Manges had their usual handshake deal: when Manges won control of the Guerra properties, Cook would have the right to buy half of the lands and minerals. But, Cook later testified, he realized very early in the deal that Manges was looking for a way to shut him out of any of the minerals. Their dispute, like the Guerras’, lingered in the courts for years, not being resolved until 1982. Instead of half of Manges’ 50 per cent mineral interest, Cook settled for only 6 per cent. For the first time, but not the last, Manges had fallen out with a partner. He lost a backer, of course, but after the Guerra deal, he didn’t need Vannie Cook anymore. He had assets of his own, and soon he had the Duval County Ranch.
RIGHT MAN, RIGHT PLACE
West of Alice the topography changes abruptly. The flatness of the coastal plain contorts into a bumpy unevenness that is more than rolling, less than hilly. At the Duval County line, ten miles to the west, the black dirt of the cotton fields yields to sand, rocks, thorns, and brush. This is rough, isolated country, and as one travels west, it becomes rougher and more isolated. Freer, two thirds of the way across the county, is the most remote town in South Texas. To the west, Laredo is more than an hour away through the brush. Eight miles down the Laredo Highway, on the left, is a metal arch that marks the entry to the Duval County Ranch. Across the arch, red letters spell out “C-L-I-N-T-O-N M-A-N-G-E-S,” with the M in an open heart shape. Down below, guards maintain a vigil from an outpost just behind the entrance.
The ranch covers 100,000 acres, most of them in the shape of a north-south rectangle 14 miles long and 8 miles across. A large burl off the middle of the western side supplies the remaining acreage. As Texas spreads go, the Duval County Ranch is big but not great. It has none of the grand tradition of the XIT or the 6666 or the King Ranch. It was founded not as a nineteenth-century range empire but as a twentieth-century investment syndicate by speculators from Houston and New Orleans. Oil, not cattle, was their object when they put the ranch together in 1919. The country was too rugged for the usual cow-and-calf type of operation; in that era South Texas ranching consisted of dumping steers in the brushland, letting them run loose, and trying to find them several years later. The ranch’s absentee managers in Houston leased the land for grazing and waited for the oil boom.
The ranch’s owners had no intention of going into the oil business for themselves. Instead they planned to lease the mineral rights – the right to explore for and produce oil and gas. The ranch’s share, known as the royalty interest, would be one eighth of every barrel of oil produced, converted to money. In the twenties the investors signed a series of oil and gas leases, the largest of which was the 64,000-acre lease with Mobil that Clinton would one day challenge. But the land was no more hospitable for oil than it was for ranching. Roads into the brush were almost nonexistent. There was no water for steam power, so drilling crews used mules. Surveyors cleared sight lines by machete; operators cleared well sites with axes rather than bulldozers. Not until the thirties did the oil start coming out of the earth – just in time too, because by then the ranch was in serious financial trouble. Oil saved the ranch (actually, it saved only the southern pastures; another 44,000 acres were lost in a settlement after the ranch couldn’t pay off a loan from Humble), and for forty years the oil flowed and the investors prospered.
In the mid-sixties factions began to develop among the owners. A group of shareholders suspected that the ranch managers were about to buy up enough stock to secure a majority. The remaining owners, headed by a New Orleans lawyer, had no ambitions to run the ranch themselves, but neither did they want to lose voting control or the option of selling out. To protect the value of their holdings, they combined their stock into one bloc. That made it easy for an outsider to buy control of the ranch in a single deal. And around 1970 that’s exactly what an outsider named Manges set out to do.
When he first heard about the trouble at the Duval County Ranch, Manges must have found it familiar. It was like the battle he was then waging for the Guerra ranch. There was dissension, factions, bosses without solid control. What’s more, the circumstances were ripe for a sale. The owners no longer had to hold on to their stock to enjoy the royalties. In 1960 the ranch company’s board of directors, tired of watching double taxation eat up their royalties (taxed once as income to the corporation, once as dividends), permanently spun off 80 per cent of the royalties to the shareholders. The company’s main source of income was gone. Many of the shareholders lived far from South Texas, had never seen the ranch, did not share management’s enthusiasm for investing the company’s remaining income in Houston real estate, and because of the spin-off had no financial incentive to remain owners. All Manges had to do was come up with the right price. The ranch managers argued in vain that it was too soon to sell, that in time the real estate would pay off as the oil had. They were right, but their resistance was futile.
Manges found the right price – a little over $5 million, or $2500 a share. This time he needed no benefactor; with the help of two institutional loans the money, and the ranch, were all his. Of course, he wasn’t getting much in the way of mineral rights, just the remaining 20 per cent of the royalties, but there would be time to resolve that later. For the moment what mattered was that he had a power base at last. It was the ideal match of the right man and the right place. Clinton Manges and Duval County had found each other.
THE DUKE OF DUVAL
Duval County is probably the best-known county in Texas. Its name has been synonymous with political corruption for more than seventy years, ever since Archie Parr consolidated the power that he eventually passed to his son, George, who held it until his death in 1975. The mystique of Duval is heightened by its isolation. It looks entirely southward; no road enters San Diego, the county seat, from the north. Ironically, the incident that earned George Parr his greatest notoriety – the late returns from Box 13 that elected Lyndon Johnson to the U.S. Senate by 87 votes in 1948, earning him the sobriquet “Landslide Lyndon”—did not occur in Duval County at all. It actually happened next door, in Jim Wells County. (Appropriately, the first building on the Duval side of the line is the courthouse, a clear announcement that those who pass are entering another domain.)
The Parrs rarely had to resort to stealing elections. For the most part they produced voting majorities that would have made Richard Daley envious. The Mexicano underclass, its poll taxes paid by the Parrs, provided the votes, and the Parrs provided for the Mexicano underclass. The Parrs ran Duval County the way Robin Hood ran Sherwood Forest. As public officials, they took from the rich—the oil companies and the absentee landowners—through high taxes; as political bosses, they tapped the public treasury to give to the poor. Whenever a Mexicano family needed a little extra money—for a wedding, a funeral, an illness—el patrón was there with a handout. The support the Parrs received on election day was won not by intimidation but by friendship, and the affinity of the Mexicanos for the Parrs went all the way back to the time when Archie was the only Anglo in the county who deigned to learn Spanish. Of course, while the Parrs were dipping into the treasury, they managed to keep something for themselves. Once George bought a 55,000-acre ranch with county funds; on another occasion he used a county loan to solve one of his frequent problems with the IRS.
As a new arrival in Duval County, Clinton Manges knew he had to get on the good side of the Parrs. He had a head start; he and George Parr had hunted together and run quarter horses together, but that wasn’t the same as politicking together. Manges took out a little insurance. Adverse money was the only political enemy George Parr feared. The Parrs knew how to deal with reformers (one tactic was to cut off the water to their opponents), and they knew how to deal with investigators (the current Duval County courthouse replaced one that had burned immediately after the Texas Supreme Court ordered an audit of county books). But George never got over losing an early battle with the Klebergs about a highway they blocked that was to run through the King Ranch. Parr blamed his defeat on their wealth, and for the rest of his life he would refer to that loss and tell his friends, “You’ve got to go with the money.” Soon after Manges took over the Duval County Ranch, he loaned Parr’s nephew $100,000, and although a few people cautioned Parr about getting too close to Manges, his answer was, “You’ve got to go with the money.”
Manges quickly reaped the rewards of being on the inside. The county lowered the taxes on the Duval County Ranch – not that it made any difference, since the ranch didn’t pay up anyway. In 1974, at Parr’s direction and with the full complicity of an officer of Manges’ ranch, the tax assessor issued a fraudulent document certifying that all the ranch’s property taxes had been paid, when in fact they had not.
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