Crime
Other People’s Money
A man with big ambitions, Paul Rush bought his way into San Antonio society. Too bad the money he spent wasn’t his.
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At Frost Bank, Rush became the fair-haired boy. As one loan officer noted, “Paul literally had management—even bank chairman Tom Frost—under his spell.” If there was resentment among some of his co-workers, it was because Rush had a tendency to ignore anyone who couldn’t be useful to him. He also could be impeccably polite to a person, only to tear him apart behind his back.
But politics, not banking, was Paul Rush’s real love, and it was in that realm that another, less pleasant side more often surfaced. When Bexar County’s 1980 winner-take-all convention was narrowly won by the Reagan forces, Rush—who was then a leader of the Bush campaign at Trinity—was irate. On the floor of a precinct convention, he shouted at the Reagan group’s leader, Anglican Church minister Knox Duncan, and poked him in the chest. The mild-mannered man of God turned the other cheek as long as he could but finally slapped the younger man. Rush was also an expert political opportunist, sometimes pledging his support to opposing candidates. Everything was part of his plan to become a major player, but as his profile increased, so did his expenses.
The demand on his bank account required a bigger cash flow. In 1983 Rush began buying and renovating homes, then flipping them for resale. By that time, however, the real estate market was too flat to provide quick profits. Rush then decided to speculate in the stock market and started taking out loans from Frost Bank and other institutions. “He was totally obsessed with making money,” says a Frost banker. “Paul never mentioned his family without making fevered comparisons about who was making how much.”
Soon Rush was spending as if he had won the New York lottery. He would buy three or four custom-made suits at a time from Satel’s, along with $300 shoes. In 1984 he traded in his Saab for a Jaguar. Before long, he had major credit card debts and fell behind on his loan payments. He couldn’t even keep up his payments on a $10,000 to $15,000 loan from Frost loan officer Tom Hawkes. A few months later, however, Rush paid the note off, explaining that his grandmother had died and left him a lot of money, Hawkes recalls.
The truth of the matter was that Paul Rush had gotten in so far over his head that by 1986, he could see only one way out. In May of that year, according to court documents, he began to systematically embezzle money from Frost Bank. He did it by charging fictitious fees to commercial clients who came to him for loans or other services. The fees were interest charges, letter-of-credit charges, or commitment fees, which some banks levy, but Frost Bank usually did not. If clients complained that the fees—generally 1 to 2 percent of the principal—were too high, Rush would earn brownie points by returning a portion of that amount, boasting that he had talked his superiors into lowering the fee. After collecting the money, Rush would deposit it in an account he titled “Texans for a Responsible America.”
For a time, it seemed that his scheme was succeeding. Acceptance by San Antonio’s Old Guard, an insular group of families, required a blood connection, which Rush secured in 1987 when he married Sarah Sawtelle, a former Alamo Heights cheerleader, debutante, and Fiesta Duchess. Though no longer wealthy, the Sawtelles remained well-regarded members of San Antonio society. Paul fit readily into their world. “We just accepted him for what he appeared to be,” recalls family member George Ames. A year later, Rush was appointed by Governor Bill Clements to the Texas Motor Vehicle Commission and the Texas Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. He was also an alternate delegate to the 1988 Republican Convention. Finally, Rush’s years of tireless campaign work paid off when George Bush was elected president. Rush was just a couple of phone calls away from the most important Republican in the free world.
But five months later, on a fateful day in April, that hard-won influence came to a cataclysmic end. A small group of Frost Bank’s officers and its top auditor called Rush into a room at the bank. As Rush recalls, the interrogators then “locked the door and grilled me for an hour and a half without an attorney.” A colleague who saw Rush standing at the elevator at the time said his face was ashen. Three days later, Rush was fired.
After he was confronted with the evidence, Rush admitted that he had “misapplied” fees from numerous loans. In exchange for that admission and a promise to make eventual restitution to the bank in the amount of $537,446, federal authorities dropped all but one misapplication charge and one tax evasion charge. Rush was sentenced to 27 months in a federal facility and two years of supervised release in a halfway house—the maximum allowed by law.
When I visited Rush at his home in August 1990, a month before he began serving his sentence, he had been forced to lease out the spacious Colonial-style house he owned in Terrell Hills (the comparatively humble rental cottage he and his family occupied was still deep in the heart of upper-class Alamo Heights, however). The flashy Jaguar had been replaced by a leased Jeep Cherokee, and the dozens of framed photographs of Rush with George Bush, Bill Clements, and other political heavyweights had been discreetly packed away.
Rush, dressed with starched correctness in a madras shirt, khaki slacks, and loafers, was as round-cheeked as a Cabbage Patch doll. His slightly pursed lips gave him a smug look, but his manner was courteous and soft-spoken. Rush’s wife, Sarah, seemed more relaxed, interjecting remarks as she sat beside him, lending moral support while tending to their lively nine-month-old son.
Characteristically, Rush was more eager to talk about the friends and prominent people who had stood by him than of the crime that caused his downfall. Ron Calgaard had written to federal judge H. F. “Hippo” Garcia on his behalf, he said, as had Louis Zbinden.
“You know,” Rush remarked, a bit self-righteously, “Louis told me something that helps me: Everyone knows what my sins are, but we don’t know what most other people’s sins are.” For his part, Zbinden concedes that “a lot of people feel they have Paul’s footprints all over their backs,” but he still regards his young deacon as a serious Christian.
I had a question. Had Rush felt like a hypocrite, going to church week after week, even teaching Sunday school, while repeatedly breaking a major commandment? “Yeah,” he admitted. The ensuing silence was broken by his wife: “But he asked for forgiveness every Sunday.”
Like most white-collar thieves, Rush insisted that he intended to pay the money back but that once he got into his scam, it became an addictive illness. “Several times I did stop,” he said with a sigh, “but then I would start again.”
As our conversation wound down, I found myself thinking about how Rush’s rise and fall had been driven by a tragic internal logic: He was simply a little man who wanted to be a big man. Rush himself even acknowledged that his altruism was not totally pure. “I think most of my motives were good, but some of them were self-serving,” he said. Was that because he wanted to be accepted by the “in” crowd? He nodded as if affirming the obvious. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”
Kathy Lowry is a freelance writer who lives in San Antonio.
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