The Man Who Knows Everything
Private investigator Clyde Wilson collects all of Houston’s dirty little secrets—and that makes him the most feared man in town.
Don says: My wife and I was wondering what happened to Shara Fryer that use to be on channel 13? Thanks (April 7th, 2009 at 5:07pm)
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Wilson’s next step was, therefore, exposure. Channel 13 was the likely vehicle. The station and the investigator go way back: Wilson is old friends with Marvin Zindler (to whom Wilson leaked the Hermann Hospital Estate scandal); he has starred in one of anchorwoman Shara Fryer’s “Up Close and Personal” interviews; Wilson was hired by weatherman Ed Brandon to save him from a blackmailer who was accusing him of sexual assault—a rescue that resulted in substantial publicity for both men, including revelations about Brandon’s cocaine addiction. In other words, Eyewitness News and Wilson were made for each other. Both reflect Houston’s fundamental looniness. To carry out his plan, Wilson related the story of the insurance scam to Dolcefino and told him how to get investigative reports from the insurance company. Then, the media did the rest: Turner’s reputation was compromised, and Lanier won the election. Turner was left to consult libel attorneys and to take every public opportunity to call Wilson a racist. Finally, in a weekly newspaper Wilson made allegations about Turner that infuriated the legislator; Turner called him to complain. During their conversation, Wilson extended his standard invitation for a cup of coffee—and, of course, a look at his file. Turner refused and the war was on.
Whether Wilson saved the city from a corrupt administration, as he asserts, or unfairly smeared the career of a promising black leader, as Turner’s supporters insist, remains to be seen—Sylvester Foster, discovered alive in a Spanish prison, has just been extradited back home. Still, a much larger secret was exposed by Wilson’s involvement in the mayor’s race: Houston’s preciously held belief that it is a city free of the racial tensions that have divided other cities was summarily debunked. Clyde Wilson had struck again.
What kind of people are you, really?” Clyde Wilson asks, passing his gaze over his audience. “How many of you have ever stolen anything?” When only a few hands drift into the air, Wilson snorts and volleys: “It’s very obvious that I’m talking to a roomful of thieves and liars.”
The audience titters, partly from embarrassment and partly from absurdity. Today Wilson is speaking on the stage of Temple Beth Yeshurun, addressing the combined sisterhood of seven congregations. Even in his good gray suit, he looks out of place. He is virtually the only man in the room, and at six feet two, he stands a head taller than almost everyone in this well-dressed, well-coiffed, well-jeweled audience.
After being introduced as “our intriguing speaker,” Wilson hooks an elbow onto the podium and launches into his stock speech, and if it is a little worn from wear, no one seems to mind. He tells the audience how, while chief of security at Tenneco during the seventies, he rescued five of the oil company’s employees held hostage in Ethiopia. He tells them about the 1984 Campbell murder case, in which he used female operative Kim Paris to lure a young man into confessing that he murdered a prominent Houston couple at the behest of their daughter. Finally, Wilson tells them how he found Marla Maples’ love nest in Atlantic City’s Trump Plaza by befriending a hotel maid loyal to Ivana. “That’s how we hung Donald out to dry,” he says.
The stories might not pass the most stringent truth-in-advertising test—Kim Paris has not gone to Hollywood, as Wilson asserts, but to far less glamorous St. Louis—but they are true enough that the women fall under Wilson’s spell. Sure, they seem a little uneasy when Wilson tells an off-color joke and a little startled when he dumps on soon-to-be-deposed chief of police Elizabeth Watson (“Get a good police chief who’s got some guts in him!”). But that edginess just confirms their notion of what they imagine Houston’s most famous private investigator to be: gruff but charming, a big man with big stories, whose oversized features—the surly bulbous nose and the blue eyes magnified by bifocals—perfectly complete the picture. It’s even okay that Wilson is kind of scary. You see the fear in the way people occasionally hold themselves back just slightly, as they wonder what he might have on them. Still, adulation triumphs in the end. The women reward him with grateful applause and congratulate him on his success; tugging at his sleeve, they remind him of previous meetings he does not remember.
Such appearances make up much of Wilson’s life now. In what he calls semi-retirement, he remains in demand by women’s clubs, breakfast clubs, Rotary clubs, and as a roaster of his equally prominent friends. These tributes to his enormous success not so coincidentally also serve to perpetuate it. He is, to many, a bona fide folk hero: a man who may be wealthy but doesn’t seem at all interested in wealth’s trappings (his fee begins at $100 an hour, but he sometimes works for free); a man who prefers weekends in Wimberley with his wife, Agnes Jane, 7 children, and 25 grandchildren to society-page parties; a man totally without fear, who, according to attorney David Berg, “has a real obsession with righting things.”
This is the persona that Wilson has fashioned for himself, a character shaped by westerns, TV detectives, and boys’ adventure stories. He grew up poor and pugilistic in Austin, a restless, ambitious, imaginative boy who lost his father at seven and, after dropping out of high school, was drafted into the Army at nineteen. Fighting in World War II, he found his rebelliousness tempered by the rigors of combat and his creativity—the gift of gab, a flair for impersonation—perfectly suited to the world of military intelligence. He took his training to Houston in the late fifties and styled himself as something of a Wild West war hero: Sporting a stubby sidekick and a sexy blond operative, he marched into places like Lufkin and ran corrupt civic officials out of town. In Houston he hired shotgun squads to work in dry cleaning establishments to halt a string of armed robberies. When the chairman of Tenneco asked him to rescue five employees who had been kidnapped by Ethiopian rebels, Wilson replied, “No sweat,” and spent months traveling from Beirut to Khartoum to Athens to Cairo, painstakingly negotiating their release. (At one point, Wilson had to prove to the rebels that former Newsweek reporter Hugh Aynseworth was a famous journalist. Since Aynseworth’s clips had been lost on the trip, Wilson showed the rebels Aynesworth’s library card and told them that only the most exalted American citizens could have such privileges.)
He worked against criminal lawyer Percy Foreman and for the district attorney’s office to try to nail Candace Mossler, who was accused of murdering her rich husband with the help of her nephew Mel Powers (both got off). He worked for the Harris County grand jury to clean up theft in the Port of Houston (which resulted in few indictments but a precipitous drop in pilferage and big headlines for Wilson). He matched wits with Joe Jamail, bugging the bedroom of a carnival owner’s daughter and recording her postcoital revelations about a jewel heist.
Wilson liked to say that he wasn’t afraid of anybody, from street punks to the rich and powerful to his own clients. In 1984 he boasted to prominent Vinson and Elkins attorney A. Frank Smith that he could crack the Hermann Hospital Estate case in a day—and did so by ambushing the prime suspect in a lunch meeting at the Warwick Hotel and then extracting a confession by bluffing about the scope of his investigation. Later, when Wilson’s research showed that some of his own clients had also used the hospital’s charity fund for their own gain, members of the board told him to back off; instead, Wilson took his work to the district attorney and started investigating them. He turned on Galveston financier Shearn Moody, Jr., too. Employed by the Moody Foundation in 1986 to look into financial abuses, Wilson deemed scion Shearn to be a guilty party and turned over his info to Galveston and Houston prosecutors as well as to the U.S. and state attorneys general. These are the kinds of stories that have given Wilson a cinematic aura, so much so that he once refused to option the movie rights to his life unless Robert Mitchum played him.
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