William Herbert Hunt

William Herbert Hunt (March 6, 1929 to April 9, 2024) was the third son of H.L. Hunt and Lyda Bunker Hunt and the business partner of his older brother Nelson Bunker Hunt. He was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, and ran Placid Oil and Penrod Drilling, the companies held in the trusts their father created for the first family.¹²

The Wiretaps

In the autumn of 1969 Herbert and Bunker Hunt engaged a Houston private investigation agency to place electronic surveillance on houses in Dallas, telling its president that they had been the victims of extensive embezzlement. The targets were four Hunt Oil executives, among them their father's security chief, the former FBI agent Paul Rothermel. The agency's men recorded the telephones from rented cars, edited the tapes, and delivered them to the brothers, who paid an itemized bill. A policeman in Richardson stopped one of the men, Jon Joseph Kelly, on January 16, 1970, and found a recorder in his car. Within three weeks the brothers had told Senator James Eastland that they were trying to have their father declared incompetent. Kelly and Patrick McCann were convicted, and named the brothers afterward. Both were indicted in 1973. The Fifth Circuit reinstated the suppressed tape evidence against them on December 23, 1974. In July 1975 they were indicted again, with the lawyer Percy Foreman, for obstructing justice by paying for the detectives' silence, and were acquitted.³⁴⁵⁶

Soybeans and Silver

On April 28, 1977, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Herbert and Bunker Hunt, five of their children, and a family corporation for exceeding the three-million-bushel limit on soybean futures through accounts in relatives' names, and the Seventh Circuit ruled for the commission in 1979. That July the brothers formed the International Metals Investment Company in Bermuda with two Saudi partners. The group held about 200 million ounces of silver when the Commodity Exchange restricted trading to liquidation on January 21, 1980. On March 27 the brothers could not meet their margin calls. A federal jury found in August 1988 that Herbert, Bunker, and Lamar Hunt, the Saudi diplomat Mahmoud Fustok, and the Bermuda company had manipulated the market, and that all but Lamar had engaged in racketeering. Judgment for the Peruvian company Minpeco exceeded 132 million dollars.¹⁷⁸

Bankruptcy

Placid Oil filed for bankruptcy in 1986 and Herbert Hunt personally in 1988. The brothers paid about 160 million dollars in 1994, most of it to the Internal Revenue Service. The 1936 trust in his name was beyond the reach of the creditors and held Petro-Hunt, which he ran with his three sons. "After the January 1, 1990, settlement, I walked away with an IRS overhang for ten years," he said in 2001. Of his brother he said: "Bunker and I split up. It seemed like every time one of us got sued, the other got sued too, and we had to hire twice as many lawyers."¹