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The New York Times News Service – Nelson Bunker Hunt, the down-home Texas oil tycoon who owned a thousand race horses, drove an old Cadillac and once tried to corner the world’s silver market only to lose most of his fortune when the price collapsed, died Tuesday. He was 88.
Hunt died after a long battle with cancer and dementia, according to The Dallas Morning News.
“A billion dollars ain’t what it used to be,” he said in 1980 after silver stakes he amassed with two brothers, Herbert and Lamar, fell to $10.80 from $50.35 an ounce. In barely two months, their holdings and contracts for purchases – corralling a third to half the world’s deliverable silver – had plunged from a $7-billion value in January to a $1.7-billion loss in March.
With the Hunts unable to cover enormous margin calls, the debacle endangered financial markets and brokerage houses, forcing federal regulators and the nation’s banks to step in with a $1-billion line of credit, a bailout that saved the system from a stampede and the Hunts from an immediate meltdown.
But for Bunker Hunt, who used his middle name, and his brothers – scions of one of the world’s richest clans – the boom and bust led to years of lawsuits, civil charges, fines, damage claims and bankruptcy proceedings that gobbled up vast holdings in real estate, oil, gas, cattle, coal, thoroughbred stables and other assets. Still, they managed to salvage millions and were not subjected to criminal charges.
Countless others were affected – speculators who bought bullion and futures contracts and could not get out in time to avoid heavy losses and ordinary people who sold silverware, jewelry and candlesticks to cash in on soaring silver prices. New rules limiting trades had been imposed, and the glut of silver on the open market intensified the panic that led to the price collapse.
Bunker Hunt was a jovial 275-pound eccentric who looked a bit like actor Burl Ives. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was one of the world’s richest men, worth up to $16-billion by some estimates. With his five siblings, heirs of oil billionaire H.L. Hunt, who sired 15 children by three women and died in 1974, he controlled a staggering family fortune whose value was not publicly reported.
In his heyday, Bunker Hunt owned five million acres of grazing land in Australia, 1,000 thoroughbreds on farms from Ireland to New Zealand, eight million acres of oil fields in Libya, offshore wells in the Philippines and Mexico and an empire of skyscrapers, cattle ranches, mining interests and other holdings. Home was a French provincial mansion in a Dallas suburb and his 2,000-acre Circle T Ranch 30 miles out of town.
Often likened to Jett Rink, the antihero of Edna Ferber’s Giant, or the scheming J.R. Ewing of the long-running CBS television drama “Dallas,” he was a nonsmoking teetotaler who cultivated a devil-may-care Texas mystique by inhabiting cheap suits, a battered seven-year-old Cadillac, economy-class airline seats, burger and chili joints, and dusty barnyards in the raucous company of ranch hands.
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Published Wednesday, Oct. 22 2014