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)
(Page 4 of 4)
Over a period of months, the unsigned letter made its way across Houston, sometimes mailed, sometimes faxed with glee. Flawlessly typed and formally addressed to the station manager of Channel 13, it castigates the station for allowing Clyde Wilson to devastate the career of Sylvester Turner. It paints Wilson as the minister of a secret empire, a man who has too many cops on a hidden payroll and too much pull with the DA’s office, a man who brags that he can have anyone arrested at any time for any reason. Wilson denies the contents of the letter in their entirety—“There ain’t a word of truth in it, honey”—and he insists, like the toughest kid in the school yard, that it doesn’t bother him at all. “We get a death threat a week around here,” he snaps. But even if the letter lacks evidence for its specifics, it supports the belief of those who have been on the receiving end of Wilson’s tactics that his avenging angel act is phony and that he is really a dangerous man whose definition of what is good for the city just happens to coincide with what is good for Clyde Wilson.
An investigator is by nature a con artist. Because he lacks the gun and the badge of the police, he must rely on his contacts and his wits to get the job done. Friends and enemies alike will tell you that Wilson is a glorious liar, a fact he denies sometimes vehemently (“I am not a liar!”) and sometimes casually (“I have only lied in cases of love and war, and all my cases have been war”) and sometimes carelessly (“I will not admit that I lied to anybody, but if I did lie, I was good at it”). He is a magna cum laude graduate of the old school, where wiretapping was legal and where an investigator could impersonate anyone—even a law officer—with impunity. “There was no Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, or Sixth Amendment,” says one attorney who was close to Wilson in the sixties. “You could do anything.” Still, Wilson’s relentlessness has only rarely landed him in hot water publicly. He has been accused of representing clients on both sides of some high-profile cases, like the Joan Robinson Hill murder (“You can’t work both sides of a case when you don’t get paid by either one,” Wilson declares), and he has also been accused of using illegal tactics. In 1970 he pleaded no contest to government charges of wiretapping on behalf of the Hunt brothers and received a probated sentence, but he got a presidential pardon from Gerald Ford with the help of his corporate contacts. Wilson wastes no time visiting those back alleys of his past. “Our clients are interested in results,” he insists.
Wilson has been immensely successful at persuading Houstonians to forget that the qualities that have made him a folk hero—his dauntlessness, his resourcefulness, his ability to spin an elaborate and convincing yarn—have also been used in that alternate universe where people pay him to destroy the lives and careers of others. In Wilson’s eyes, the two worlds are one—a place where his own moral code rules, where the ends always justify the means. Other people are not so quick to agree. “In Texas we fall in love with these roguish types,” says attorney Valorie W. Davenport, who is now suing Wilson for fraud and conspiracy in the fabrication of evidence. “We forget how dangerous they are.”
Historically, Wilson’s morality has most comfortably meshed with the city’s entrenched powers. In the sixties, when he was a member of archconservative district attorney Frank Briscoe’s inner circle, an insurance company hired Wilson to disgrace one of the first black school board members, Asberry Butler, which he did with a campaign that foreshadowed his war against Sylvester Turner. When the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle were not interested in the results of Wilson’s investigation of University of Houston homosexuals and radicals, he took his material to right-winger Clymer Wright, who published the hyped-up tale of marijuana and sex parties in his ultraconservative newspaper, the Houston Tribune. Despite shrieking headlines and a grand jury investigation, eventually only one noncombative political science professor was run out of town. Clymer Wright asserts he helped Wilson dispose of Sylvester Turner last year.
Not all of Wilson’s work gets the headline treatment, of course. Over the years, he has quietly checked out the fiancés of the daughters of corporate CEOs, rounded up the runaway children of River Oaks, and served as go-between for former attorney general Jim Mattox’s threats to political opponents. Courthouse records reveal that some cases might have gotten out of hand—in one lawsuit, quietly settled, several of his investigators and an off-duty policeman were accused of falsely arresting and imprisoning the troublesome girlfriend of a longtime, and married, client.
One recent lawsuit spotlights just how far Wilson will go to win a case. In 1987 he was hired by attorney Tom Alexander to assist in a State Bar investigation of John O’Quinn, the high-profile personal-injury lawyer whose multimillion-dollar judgments and controversial tactics were a large thorn in the sides of defense attorneys. By then, O’Quinn had already been reprimanded on charges of ambulance chasing. Around the same time, however, defendants who had lost a huge judgment to O’Quinn and his clients in a stock fraud case hired Wilson to turn up evidence that might get them a new trial.
Wilson found O’Quinn’s driver, a young man named Arvind Tuffley, who, when interrogated, reported that O’Quinn had met with jurors in their homes during the trial and had given them money. Pressed later by O’Quinn’s side, Tuffley changed his story. Tuffley said that he had signed a false affidavit after Wilson had convinced him that the normally peaceable O’Quinn intended to do him harm. Wilson had even put Tuffley up in a hotel room with a shotgun-wielding guard for protection.
When Wilson heard that the young man had recanted, he hustled to the California naval base where Tuffley was stationed, and according to the sworn depositions of several officers there, passed himself off as a representative of the court to get access. Another interrogation ensued, in which Wilson extracted another affidavit from Tuffley. In a hearing before the judge a month or so later, however, Tuffley stated that he had again been frightened by Wilson into telling lies and that the affidavit had been altered after he had signed it. Subsequently, the judge threw the case out, citing no evidence of jury tampering, and wrote a letter reprimanding the plaintiffs for presenting specious evidence. (The State Bar’s investigation of O’Quinn also came to nothing.) Now attorney Valorie Davenport has sued Wilson on behalf of O’Quinn’s former clients in the stock fraud case. But Wilson’s network saved him from possible criminal charges. The Harris County district attorney’s office refused to look into whether he had impersonated a court official to get his results. “Felony lying isn’t a crime,” joked district attorney Johnny Holmes to reporters at the time.
For Wilson, that’s a satisfactory outcome. His is a world built on friendship as much as fear, on secrets kept as much as secrets exposed. It is a safe, cozy feeling to be allowed—and welcomed—into Wilson’s lair; the ordinary person will feel charmed by his wit and protected by his pugnaciousness. To become one of his so-called friends for life is to feel that the road ahead will be smoothed by favors and shielded from harm. To be on the inside is also, in the language of the day, empowering: The information available here is rich and uncut, pure enough to give an amateur gossip the equivalent of an information overdose. Almost everyone has a secret that could cost them and advance someone else.
But once you’ve been warmed by Wilson’s fire, the outside world is chillier. Reputations seem far more fragile and subject to the demands of the marketplace, and Houston seems, in turn, more troubled and treacherous, much less the city of its treasured bighearted myths. The ugly truth makes the place seem smaller than life; most people, after a few weeks in Wilson’s world, would be eager to return to the Houston they knew before encountering him. Wilson, of course, cannot make this return trip, because these darker truths perpetuate his own personal myths. Whether he’s acting as sinner or savior, the secrets keep him in business, they make him famous, they keep his network humming like a chorus of fallen angels.
Lazing back in his office chair, taking a long drag on a short cigarette, he recalls the man whose videotapes—which caught him with one hand having a private moment with his genitals—had been stolen by a thief-turned-blackmailer. An operative had delivered the message: Wilson’s client was prepared to settle this quietly—to spend $150,000 either to get the tape back or to hire a hit man. Not surprisingly, the tape was returned and the client was happy. “Say I call that man and ask for a favor,” Wilson begins. And then he grins and says no more, but his long white teeth gleam beneath his silver moustache.
My Library
