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Or how a gas station attendant from Massachusetts turned himself into a Texas wildcatter and junk bond king, built three fortunes over three decades and squandered them all before triggering the largest corporate default in a decade. By Riva Adas
Still think there are no second acts in American lives? You may not have heard of Jack Stanley.
Stanley's stage is oil and gas; his star turn, unfortunately, has been bankruptcy and default. In April his TransAmerican Energy Corp. and its subsidiaries, TransTexas Gas Corp. and TransAmerican Refining Corp., filed for Chapter 11, wiping out on paper the last of an $800 million fortune for Stanley and decimating the $1.9 billion poured into his junk bonds by supposedly savvy investors over the past three years. It marked Stanley's third trip to bankruptcy court in three decades and represented the largest corporate default since Texaco's landmark filing in 1987, according to Moody's Investors Service.
Perhaps you were too busy day-trading, or reading the funny papers, to have noticed the latest installment of this long-running drama. With Internet millionaires sprouting like summer weeds, failures like Stanley's seem almost un-American. How do you blow a fortune, after all, in the midst of the greatest boom in recent history?
In fact, Stanley's is one of those only-in-America stories: Horatio Alger meets H. L. Hunt. Born in Massachusetts, Stanley developed a hankering for the energy business while pumping gasoline as a teenager. Soon he owned a chain of gas stations in the Northeast; he was a self-made millionaire by 30. Before long he purchased a refinery in Louisiana and began drilling exploratory wells throughout Texas and in the Gulf of Mexico.
Irrepressible, litigious, bold, even brilliant, Stanley was a man possessed by an implacable business logic: If I'm pumping gas, why not own the gas station? If I own one, why not many? If I need gasoline, why not make it? If I'm refining it, why not find the oil? On such logic John D. Rockefeller created Standard Oil Co.
Stanley, whose empire encompassed the refinery as well as a gas exploration and production outfit, amassed and lost successively larger fortunes and triggered successively bigger bankruptcies. To be sure, the oil "bidness" ain't what it was in John D.'s...