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.

by Jim Henderson and Dave McNeely

January 2008

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Wood looked at the pilots and said, “Boys, you ain’t taking Bullock to Vegas.”

“What’s the flying time?” Bullock asked, ignoring Wood’s protests.

“We can be there in the morning,” a pilot said.

“Call and get us some hotel rooms,” Bullock told another of his aides.

“Whoa,” Wood said. “We are not going to Vegas.” Addressing the pilots, he said, “It’s a felony to take that plane to Vegas, and it’s going to cost thousands in state money to make that trip. Do you want to be part of a conspiracy to commit a felony?”

Bullock acted angry, but he acquiesced. After lobbing a few choice and profane epithets at Wood, he ordered more whiskey and didn’t mention Vegas again. Wood never knew if Bullock had been serious about the Vegas trip or had been putting him on.

By early 1976, reporters had taken note of the comptroller’s frequent travels and were making inquiries, requesting copies of his expense accounts and the flight logs kept by the pilots. Those documents should have told them where Bullock went, why he went, and who went with him. What they got was less than the full story and a doctored one at that.

After receiving requests from reporters for the documents, Bill Collier looked them over and found stark discrepancies that the newsmen would have easily detected. For example, some of the reporters knew that one woman who worked for Bullock had made many of the trips, but her name did not appear on the flight logs. The pilots had been fearful of recording the names of Bullock’s female companions.

“With Bullock’s help, the logs were reconstructed as accurately as possible—or as accurately as he wanted them to be—and forged onto new flight log forms,” Collier later wrote. The woman’s name was added to the reconstructed logs, which, invariably and often falsely, reflected that the purpose of the travel was “to confer with tax officials” or “to confer with area taxpayers.” Because state law did not require it, dates of the flights were not included on the forms, making it nearly impossible to verify their veracity. In actuality, according to Collier, some of the trips had been to meet friends, to conduct private business, or to hunt on the South Texas ranch of his friend and former client Clinton Manges. While Bullock played, the planes were not idle: They flew onto and off the ranch daily, delivering the major Texas newspapers to him.

Even with doctored records, reporters were able to piece together the rudiments of Bullock’s extravagances and misuse of state funds. Read one early headline: “Bullock Spends Freely on Luxury.” Attempts to explain the travel costs were ineffective; the press smelled blood and was in full arousal. On April 19, 1976, the Austin Citizen, a five-day-a-week, free distribution paper, wrote: “The Austin Citizen today requested access to key state documents from the office of State Comptroller Bob Bullock as part of a three-week investigation into allegations of mismanagement, high living and apparent violations of both the State Appropriations Act and Senate Bill 1. Allegations leveled by former state employees and backed by some documentation include: Falsification of airplane flight logs. Keeping more high-salaried employees on the comptroller’s payroll than authorized by the Legislature. Using funds allocated for pay raises for employees to hire new personnel. Expensive remodeling and furnishing of Bullock’s office in the Lyndon B. Johnson building.”

The article noted that in just over one year, Bullock’s payroll had ballooned by 50 percent, to 1,877 employees, and that the state auditor was looking into misuse of funds in many of the hires. It mentioned flight log discrepancies and the lavish renovation of his office (a $225 antique clock and the addition of a shower, kitchen, and bar). For several days, the newspaper hammered away at Bullock’s spending, reporting that his expense claims topped those of all other elected officials—including the governor—and pointing out that those expenses did not include the costs associated with maintaining two airplanes and four pilots.

Bullock responded with a lengthy, astringent letter to the Citizen’s executive editor, Thomas Reay. “I’ve had better flyers stuck under my windshield wipers at the grocery store than the pathetic rag you’ve been littering my yard with,” he wrote in part. “When the people of this state want to return to the old days of having a do-nothing Comptroller, a Comptroller afraid to do his job for fear of asinine criticism, when they want delinquent sales taxes they paid to stay in the hands of some disreputable merchant and tax cheaters to get off without paying their fair share, they’ll do what you can’t do—vote me out of office.”

Four months later, with the stories of extravagance still popping up in the newspapers and at Austin watering holes, Bullock ditched his $9,000-a-month leased MU-2. In what seemed to be defiance of the negative publicity and his editorial critics, he replaced it with the roomier $13,999-a-month twin-engine Beechcraft King Air.

For the next few years, Bullock seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. His second marriage to Amelia was spiraling toward another divorce, and drinking was propelling him into more-curious behavior. He often carried a handgun and spent long nights at the Quorum Club, owned by his old friend Nick Kralj, a sometime political operative and lobbyist. In a drunken snit one night, he pulled his gun on a young waiter who had displeased him. He put the barrel against the young man’s head, cocked the hammer, and blew hot breath in his face.

Breaking free, the waiter ran out of the restaurant and never returned. Kralj called him to apologize. “Come on back, at least to get your money,” Kralj said.

“I wouldn’t come down there if you had a thousand dollars for me,” the young man said.

Considered an excellent marksman by his friends—some claimed Bullcok could put a rifle round through a wild turkey’s head at three hundred yards—he was admired on a hunt, but he racked nerves in more-domestic environs.

At a stag barbecue at Kralj’s house, which backed up to Camp Mabry, the National Guard compound in Austin, some of the guests were target shooting with machine guns. Bullock sat at a picnic table behind them. Suddenly, he jumped up, pulled out a pistol, and began firing past his pals at the targets beyond them. On another occasion, Kralj accompanied him to San Antonio, where he was to speak to a group of corporate executives at an elegant museum. As they entered the large reception area, Bullock’s pistol fell out of his pocket and went skittering and clattering across the tile floor. Kralj calmly stepped forward, picked it up, and put it in his pocket, as though it belonged to him. Bullock quietly thanked him and proceeded to mingle with the distinguished audience he had come to address.

Another story went that Kralj, no stranger to the byways of the wild side, once got drunk with Bullock, and the two of them took out their pistols and spent some time shooting at roaches in the Quorum Club. But Kralj said that that never happened. “The walls were all stone,” he said. “We would have been killed by the ricochets.” He said Molly Ivins had written that story two or three times—perhaps told to her by Bullock—and it had become an urban legend.

One story that did happen, however, was a night when Kralj had to leave the club to look in on his ailing mother. He left Bullock and George Garland, the head of the comptroller’s bingo division, in charge. He gave them the combination to the safe, which contained not only cash but also guns.

“It wasn’t two hours before George was in jail,” Kralj said. Bullock and his aide, abandoning their custodial obligation to the Quorum Club, had left the establishment and been stopped a few blocks away by a patrolman, who’d seen Garland pointing a pistol at the driver of another car. He was cuffed and jailed until Bullock showed up with Roy Minton and bailed him out.

More than two decades later, Bullock would tell his chief of staff, Bruce Gibson, that back in his drinking days, he once was having a few cocktails with several people in an Austin motel. It kept getting later and later, and eventually the husband of a woman Bullock had been hustling came in the front door. Bullock ducked into the bathroom but then realized that he was trapped. The husband would be waiting for him when he came out. He saw a window in the bathroom and crawled up and dropped through it, toward the ground.

What he hadn’t realized was that the motel backed up to a drainage ditch. “I just kept falling and falling and falling,” Bullock recalled. He found that the banks were so steep he couldn’t get out. He lost his sharkskin loafers in the mud and had to walk four blocks in his socks before he could escape from the ditch. “I kept seeing the headline ‘Comptroller Dies in Creek,’” Bullock told Gibson.

Reprinted from Bob Bullock: God Bless Texas, by Dave McNeely and Jim Henderson. Copyright © 2008. Courtesy of the authors and the University of Texas Press.

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