Hunt has 'no regrets' 29 years after silver collapse

Once world's richest man, Bunker Hunt has 'no regrets' 29 years after silver collapse

By DOUG J. SWANSON / The Dallas Morning News

The cookies have been served on a silver tray. That would be no big deal anywhere else, but this is Bunker Hunt's house.

Hunt once was considered the world's richest private individual. The son of legendary oilman H.L. Hunt, he reigned as an embodiment of the Texas tycoon stereotype: ample girth, a gambler's disposition, far-right politics and a certain swashbuckling approach to capitalism.

That peaked with a famous effort by him and his brothers to buy up much of the world's silver – an attempt, many alleged, to corner the market.

The scheme collapsed 29 years ago this week on what has come to be known as Silver Thursday. Its aftermath destroyed a large part of Hunt's estate and left him in a tangle of lawsuits, bankruptcy and tax problems.

"It was unfortunate, let's put it that way," he said with a wave of his hand. "They were gunning for us pretty hard."

Now 83, with the suits behind him and the taxes paid, Hunt lives in relative modesty in a North Dallas house with his wife of 57 years.

On a recent afternoon, he hobbled across his living room on shiny running shoes and a cane before settling into a wing chair. He talked amiably but haltingly and complained that his memory is poor.

"No regrets," he said in response to a question. "I guess if I thought about it hard enough, I'd probably come up with some."

Silver collapse

As for his role in the silver collapse – smallish fare by current Wall Street standards but probably the biggest financial scandal of its era – Hunt maintains that he did nothing wrong.

"I don't think anybody can corner the market," he said. "But I guess if you buy up a lot of items ... the price can go up."

Such self-evident declarations are a staple of someone who once said that if a man can tell you how much money he has, then he doesn't have much money.

Hunt offered this advice for anyone pursuing his current business interests of oil exploration and thoroughbred racing: "The oil business is good if you can find the oil," he said. And: "If a person is going to have racehorses, I would advise him to get good ones."

The fifth child of H.L. Hunt's first marriage, Nelson Bunker Hunt followed his father into the oil business after Navy service in World War II.

"Although he sometimes came off as a fat, squinty-eyed bumbler, he was sharp and crafty and gifted with the same mathematical mind his father had," wrote Harry Hurt III in his biography of the Hunt family dynasty, Texas Rich. "He also had extraordinary bursts of creative vision."

And there was no one like him, Hurt said recently: "They threw away the mold when they made Bunker Hunt."

Hunt's big oil strike came in Libya. The Sarir field had reserves three times the size of the great East Texas field where his father had made the original Hunt millions. By the late 1960s, Bunker Hunt, with a fortune variously estimated at $8 billion to $16 billion, was christened, in newspapers and magazines, as the world's richest man.

"Maybe for a day or two," he said.

In 1973, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi nationalized Hunt's operations there. It was a major blow to Hunt's business but not the hardest one. That came in the silver market.

Hunt and two brothers, Herbert and Lamar, began buying silver as early as 1970, when the price was around $1.50 an ounce.

"Bunker and Herbert really did think we were going to have an inflationary depression," said Hunt's wife, Caroline, "and that silver was a reasonable thing to buy."

By January 1980, the price hit a record high of $50 an ounce, and the brothers held nearly $4.5 billion in silver, much of it stored in Swiss bank vaults.

"They were blaming us for the price going up," Hunt said. "But there were probably a couple hundred thousand people that were buying silver."

Alarmed at the size of the Hunts' holdings, federal commodities regulators set trading limits. "They changed all the rules," Hunt said.

Prices began to drop, and the Hunts could not meet the margin calls on their futures contracts. A sell-off followed, and on Thursday, March 27, 1980, silver plummeted to less than $11 an ounce.

"We were forced to sell, and we did," Hunt said. Their losses exceeded $2 billion.

Vilification

The Hunts were vilified as greedy speculators who had attempted to manipulate the market. "I think everybody was looking for a whipping boy," Mrs. Hunt said, "and unfortunately Bunker was it."

Biographer Hurt, in an interview, said most of those attacking the Hunts had it all wrong. "They weren't trying to corner the market," he said. "They were doing something much crazier than that."

Bunker Hunt believed, Hurt said, that apocalyptic days were approaching, and they would render paper money worthless. "They [critics] misunderstood him," Hurt said. "The guy was a fanatic. He really believed that stuff."

The apocalypse didn't come, but lawsuits did. In one major case, a New York civil jury found in 1988 that the brothers used fraud and conspiracy to monopolize the world silver market.

Hunt filed for bankruptcy that year and was forever banned from American commodity trading the next. Mrs. Hunt said she and her husband took it in stride. Even at his wealthiest, Hunt was known to wear cheap suits, drive himself in aging Cadillacs and fly coach.

"We didn't have to give up any yachts, because we didn't have any," she said. "We didn't have to give up a butler because we didn't have one."

He did, however, have a worldwide empire that included Yemeni oilfields, Australian cattle ranches, horse farms, antiquities collections, pizza parlors and at least one bowling alley, the Bronco Bowl in Dallas.

Liquidating all that fell to Hunt's bankruptcy trustee, R. Carter Pate. "The complexities were simply enormous," Pate said. "Start to finish, it [liquidation] took a total of seven years."

Pate said Hunt remained cooperative throughout the dismantling of his global domain.

"I guess the biggest surprise was how gracious, how professional Bunker was," said Pate, now a managing partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "He had accepted what had happened."

Though he lost his position on the list of the world's richest people, Hunt never descended to pauperdom. The bankruptcy did not touch the trust left to him by his father. Its value has been estimated at $200 million.

Life these days

These days, Hunt still goes regularly to his office at Thanksgiving Tower in downtown Dallas. "I'm working on some overseas oil exploration," he said, "in Africa and the Middle East."

He started buying racehorses again and has won the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Breeder three times. "I've still got a few horses, yeah," he said, referring to his 100 or so thoroughbreds.

The years seem to have taken some of the edge off the right-wing political views that once put Hunt in the national leadership of the John Birch Society. Of President Barack Obama, he said: "He's obviously a fellow that's got a great personality. I think his ideas on business are not too bad."

Hunt didn't have much else to say about the current economic situation, except that he owns few stocks. However, one recent item in the financial pages caught his attention: the price of silver.

"It was close to 13 bucks an ounce," he said. "That was considered a pretty good price 15 or 20 years ago, and it's still a pretty good price."