The Devil and Bob Bullock: Video 
Wyatt’s World: Slideshow 
The Devil and Bob Bullock
Can a womanizing, alcoholic, emotionally unstable elected official become one of the most powerful and feared figures in state government? A generation ago, before blogs, YouTube, and the 24-hour news cycle, one did.
Related Multimedia
Related Stories
(Page 3 of 4)
With all the glitches ironed out, Bullock arrived to harvest a public relations bumper crop. He spoke to the spectators and the press about businesses that hadn’t paid their taxes, about his commitment to doing what the comptroller’s office had always neglected, about how cheaters were a burden on everyone. “You pay the taxes,” he explained. “They collect it from you and pocket it.” He left and drove back to Austin, but work at the liquor store and warehouse went on through the night.
At midnight, the young man to whom Wood had served the seizure papers and who had remained at the store throughout asked for a favor. He wanted permission to drink one of the expensive whiskeys he had never been able to afford.
“You’re an employee of the store,” Wood shrugged. “If you’re willing to take responsibility for it, I don’t care.”
Pulling a bottle from a shelf, the young man unscrewed the cap and poured a generous shot into a paper cup. He walked outside, sat down on the curb, and polished off half the bottle by the time Wood and his crew locked the doors and headed home. The sun would be coming up soon.
News of the raid was splashed across the front pages the next morning, and the early reaction was mostly positive. Law-abiding businessmen and women expressed outrage that the cheaters had for so long defied the law with impunity. The ordinary Joes and Janes loved seeing the big guys taken down.
New targets were selected the day after the first raid, and in the future, the comptroller would ride at the head of the column when Bullock’s Raiders came to town. At Norma’s Café, in Dallas, an angry and sobbing Norma Manis confronted the Raiders, while television cameras recorded the emotion. Bullock’s response: He pointed out that she was driving a Lincoln Continental while owing $45,000 in back taxes. She paid up with a cashier’s check two hours later. In Houston, a nervous young manager of a music store tried to explain why he was in arrears to the tune of $8,638. “They took the nickels and dimes and quarters of the people of the State of Texas,” Bullock told the reporters who accompanied him there. “I don’t feel sorry for a damn one of them.”
On Thanksgiving Day, 1975, Buck Wood was at home preparing to have dinner with his family. In the eleven hectic months since he had joined Bullock in the comptroller’s office, leisure time had been rare, as holidays, weekends, and vacations were secondary to Bullock’s whims. Wood had spent months on the road, evaluating the comptroller’s field offices around the state and carrying out the unpleasant task of firing employees who did not measure up to the new performance standards. This was an uncommon and welcome day of rest.
In the middle of the afternoon, the phone rang, and Wood was not surprised to hear Bullock’s voice. “Buck, I need you to do something.”
What now? The office is closed. The Legislature is out of town. No raids are scheduled. “What is it?” Wood asked.
“I need you to go to the store, pick up some sage, and bring it to me,” Bullock said.
“Bullock, I’m getting ready to have dinner with my family,” Wood protested.
“This won’t take long. I really need it.”
“Why can’t you go get it? I’ve got a bunch of family here.”
Bullock stammered with an answer. “I’m just . . . I’m real busy, Buck. I need you to do this for me.”
Wood was baffled and more than a little put out by the request. He continued to plead his own family obligations and press his boss for an explanation. Finally, Bullock blurted out, “Dammit. Buck, I’m trying to cook two Thanksgiving dinners, and I can’t get away.” With a little more prodding, Wood learned that one dinner was for Bullock and his wife, Amelia, and the other he would share with Kathryn, the second wife he had continued to see after their divorce and his remarriage to Amelia.
In Bullock’s manic states, there was no risk that couldn’t be taken. In his private life, that was evident with whiskey and willing women; in his public life, it was evident in the manner in which he managed what was becoming a very important state office. Eventually, the public and private would merge into the makings of a full-blown scandal that could have finished him in politics. Women were part of the problem. Airplanes were another.
To the first small plane obtained from the Department of Public Safety, which had confiscated it in a drug bust, Bullock added a Mitsubishi MU-2, which, while larger and faster, soon proved inadequate for his travels. He traded it for a more spacious Beechcraft King Air 100. At a frantic pace, he winged around the country, ostensibly to study the tax-collecting methods of other states. Those information-seeking forays soon became little more than high-altitude parties.
After being told that Louisiana was a model of tax enforcement, Bullock put together a crew—staff lawyers and enforcement experts—and lit out on a Friday for Baton Rouge, the state capital. After spending most of the day there, Bullock’s group realized they were in the wrong place; Louisiana’s out-of-state audits were handled in the New Orleans office. Back at their hotel, they gathered in the bar to plan their next move.
“We’ve got to go to New Orleans,” Bullock said. “Let’s go this afternoon. We’ll spend the night, and we’ll go to the audit office tomorrow.”
“This is Friday,” Wood said. “They’re not going to be open tomorrow.”
“Wrong,” Bullock said. “Their offices are open half a day on Saturday. We’ll just fly over there and have a good time.”
While they were talking, a young lawyer in their group was busy flirting with their eighteen-year-old Cajun cocktail waitress, something that had not escaped Bullock’s notice.
“Paul, you like that waitress. Ask her if she wants to go with us,” Bullock said.
For God’s sake, what are we doing? Wood thought. “Paul, don’t do it,” he said.
“Why not?” an assistant said. “I’ll pay for everything.”
“Well, it’s your poison, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
The next time the waitress visited their table, Paul asked, “How would you like to go to New Orleans?”
“Yeah, I would like that,” she said. Looking down at her abbreviated cocktail dress, she added, “But I don’t have any clothes. I’d have to go home.”
“We don’t have time to do that,” Bullock said. “Paul, find out where a dress shop is and go buy her some clothes.”
At a nearby shopping center, while Paul and the waitress fetched clothing and the others waited in the car, Wood received a phone call from his wife, telling him that their son was sick and would probably have to be hospitalized. He informed Bullock.
“Drop us off in New Orleans,” Bullock told the pilots, “and fly him home and fly back to pick us up.”
In New Orleans, the party continued until the cocktail waitress became ill and had to be flown back to Baton Rouge. The plane then returned to New Orleans and flew Bullock’s group back to Texas the next day. The following Monday morning, Bullock told Wood that everyone was too hung over to go to the New Orleans tax office—except him. When he got there, Wood said, Bullock found that it was the wrong division and that no one there could help with out-of-state audits. But that conversation with Wood later kept Bullock from being indicted for the New Orleans trip. Bullock’s lawyer, Roy Minton, asked Wood to relate the story to a grand jury investigating Bullock’s travels. Wood testified that Bullock had told him about the Saturday visit two days later. Asked if he believed that Bullock was telling the truth, Wood said yes.
The trips became a pattern. Bullock would select a destination—Phoenix, Santa Fe, Denver, sixteen in all before the binge ended—and assemble a crew to accompany him, a crew that usually included his concubine of the moment. His practice was to send his staff to meet with the local officials while he and his female friend took in the sights and saloons. To the professional staff, it sometimes seemed that their primary mission on those trips was not to bone up on the science of tax collecting but to keep Bullock out of trouble.
At a tax conference in Denver, attended by representatives of the western states, Bullock was manic and restless. Sitting in the hotel bar at eight o’clock on the first evening, he announced, “This place is boring.” Turning to one of the pilots, he asked, “Is the plane where we can use it?”
“Sure, I can make a phone call and it will be ready in thirty minutes.”
“Call and get it warmed up. We’re going to Vegas,” Bullock said.
Wood sat quietly, waiting for one of the other lawyers to object. Instead they said, “Let’s go.”
So Wood spoke up: “We’re not going to take a state plane to Las Vegas.”
“You just hide and watch,” Bullock snapped at him.
My Library
