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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Still, if he was a little vain, a little overly entranced with seeing his name in print (“Clyde’s deal,” snaps competing investigator Bobby Newman, “is that the only bad publicity is his obituary”), well, it was part of the package, it added to his charm. A sure sign of his success was his roast in 1987, held at the River Oaks Country Club. Three district attorneys—two former, one current—paid tribute, along with former governor Mark White. Media stars Shara Fryer and Marvin Zindler were there too, as well as hotshot trial attorneys Tom Alexander and Joe Jamail. The speakers joked about Wilson’s elastic ethics, his gift for impersonating law enforcement officials, his passion for the spotlight. When Jamail took to the podium, he told the joke of the evening: “‘You think all these people want to be here?’” Jamail quoted his friend Wilson as saying. “‘I’ve got something on all the bastards.’” Then everyone roared, the way people do when the truth catches them by surprise.
Amanda, how are ya?” Clyde Wilson asks his latest captive. “Ya wanna cuppa coffee? Coke? Glass a whiskey?” Amanda, a round woman with salon-styled hair and an outfit adapted from Mademoiselle—studded jean jacket, blue-and-white striped stretch pants, and a blue-and-white blouse, contrasting red lipstick and nails—declines the offer. In fact, she hardly gives him a glance as she takes a seat at the head of a conference table, facing him from a distance of about eight feet. To her left is her lawyer; to her right is her former boss and his accountant. Wilson’s son Tim, an investigator in the firm, operates a video camera adjacent to the table. No one looks at anyone else. Everyone, including Amanda, feigns boredom.
This meeting represents a mop-up operation. Over the past four years, Amanda had stolen about $199,000 while serving as a bookkeeper at a small real estate firm. Her boss, a short, anxious man, had assumed she had stolen only a few thousand dollars, but Wilson had correctly predicted the damage would come to about $200,000. (“If you can steal a little, you can steal a lot,” Wilson explained.) Confronted with the evidence, Amanda confessed immediately and without remorse; she is a young woman from a well-known Houston family whose husband could not help her maintain the lifestyle to which she was accustomed. Hence, she stole pin money—enough to make her car payment, buy clothes, and redecorate her house. She has since submitted an affidavit attesting to her theft, but it is Wilson’s standard procedure to get the confession on videotape.
Methodically, she goes through the checks, separating those signatures she forged from those she traced, anxiety apparent only in the way she occasionally sucks on her upper lip. The only other sounds in the room are the squawking of Wilson’s cockatoo and the squeak of his office chair as he shifts restlessly.
Outside of extracting confessions, this bread-and-butter stuff holds little interest for Wilson anymore. These days he leaves most of the footwork to the ten investigators who work for him. He springs to life only when Amanda finishes her taping. Wilson then excuses all of us except Amanda and her lawyer. Ten minutes later, when Wilson’s client reenters the room, they are gone.
Wilson presents him with a deal for making restitution: Amanda has agreed to pay the money back in monthly installments over ten years. The client throws up his hands. “Automatically, I want to say no,” he says, adding that because of the slow payment schedule he’ll lose even more money in lost interest.
Wilson immediately backpedals; he has another deal in reserve. “I already said no for you,” he says, and then presents deal number two: a large lump-sum payment now, with a note for the rest paid over five years. Amanda’s parents will cosign the note. The client agrees, and Wilson prepares to take the case to the district attorney’s office, where he will ask for, and get, a probated sentence. “I make my own deals,” Wilson says.
He always has. For more than thirty years, he has been true to his renegade persona, structuring his business to suit himself, making and breaking the rules as he went along. Just as important as solving cases is maintaining his far-flung network. Wilson learned in the military that an investigator is only as good as his sources, and he built his life on that advice. From the beginning, he cultivated the press, the police, and lawyers, especially the young prosecutors in the district attorney’s office, whom he often presented with completed investigations they could take to the grand jury. “He gets ‘em by the ying-yangs,” says Harris County DA Johnny Holmes. Wilson developed a reputation for flamboyance, but he also created a business based on white-collar clients—oil companies and large corporations like Continental Can that could pay handsomely—that gave him the cachet (and access to society clients) other investigators lacked. Then he put it all together. He took his corporate clients to meet his friends, who happened to be judges; he courted reporters by leaking scandals when he knew that the publicity would be advantageous to his clients. Over time, he created a hidden world that flourished on information. And always at the center of that world was Clyde Wilson. He became not just an investigator but a consummate fixer.
Houston’s complex wiring is exposed in Wilson’s office, providing a view of the city that few are usually allowed. Here it is possible to learn whether there might be any partiality shown by the judge in the upcoming Sakowitz-Wyatt trial; which television station executive will soon be departing and why; how the lover of the most famous kept woman in Houston funneled money to her; where the deposed leader of an out-of-state charitable organization is hiding out; how Mark White agonizes over his financial troubles. Cases overlap and feed into one another, like one enormous interlocking memory board. A thief Wilson had apprehended suddenly interests him anew, for instance, when the person winds up living a few blocks from a family victimized by a brutal unsolved murder.
Wilson seems almost reassured by such ongoing coincidences. They validate the existence of that hidden world in which he thrives. He evaluates the mayhem with a professional’s practiced eye (“It’s an interesting case, not an exciting case,” he says of the thief-turned-murder-suspect), affecting the experienced investigator’s pose that he is not really surprised by anything. What’s most important is that every day he gets to play the role he has chosen for himself, that of avenging angel. A friend shuffles in, begging Wilson to help him get a son moved from a public psychiatric hospital to a private one. A client calls, hysterical, saying she has unwittingly signed away the deed to her house to borrow money to finance a rock video. The parents of a young man who vanished after going out for coffee want Wilson to hold a press conference to announce his disappearance. A woman calls from Deer Park to say that she has the evidence to solve her husband’s murder (“I think it was a hit, and I know who hired it done”). A well-known businessman calls to confess that the man who burglarized his office also found some sexually compromising videotapes and now wants to be paid off.
In each case, Wilson makes the usual calls. A place is made for the young man in the private hospital (“I’ll call the judge and get him transferred,” Wilson reports to his friend). A banker is found who can lend the woman enough to get her house back. A lawyer is found for the woman whose husband was murdered (“The case might even get you some publicity,” Wilson suggests to the lawyer). He calls his friends at the TV stations, his friends at the sheriff’s office. The troubles vanish, and Clyde Wilson remains the hero of his own tales.
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