Chaparrals, frankly, were not viewed as the city’s number one attraction.. Interest lagged. Attendance was poor and, on some nights, virtually non-existent even though the Chaparrals finished second and reached the 1968 Western Division finals before losing to the New Orleans Bucs. The club ran out of money four times, and four times Williams managed to scrape together just enough cash, pledges, or IOUs to keep the franchise from falling apart. He served as general manager and even coached for a season. He endured four hard, grueling, and disappointing years.
The bleeding had not stopped, and the Chaparrals were bled dry. In desperation, the owners sold the franchise to a group in New Jersey, but the league refused to approve the deal. The money was right. But, alas, the potential new owners, according to rumors, had ties to the Mafia. Good for New Jersey, maybe. Bad for the ABA. Terry Stembridge was even told, in a quiet and private conversation, “When you pack up your microphone and head to New Jersey, you’d be a lot better off carrying a machine gun than a suitcase.” As a last resort, owners leased the Chaparrals to San Antonio for a dollar as long as San Antonio guaranteed operating expenses. The team’s name was changed to the Spurs, and they became the hottest draw in town. Terry Stembridge packed up his microphone and became the only member of the front office to move south with the team. The tamales sounded a lot more enticing than a New Jersey machine gun, and he broadcast Spurs games for the next six years.
Four years at the helm of the Chaparrals had been taxing for Max Williams, and he began toying with the idea of branching out into the petroleum business. His wife’s uncle, Glenn Cooper, owned a small oil company in the West Texas town of Seymour, and Williams already had experience working in the oil patch during his summers with Humble. Bob Folsom thought otherwise. “This isn’t the right time,” he told Williams. “Companies are only allowed to produce thirteen or fourteen days a month. The price is low, and a few dry holes will drive you out of the oil patch. There’s just not a whole lot you can do with oil these days. If you want to go where the money is these days, go into real estate with a good broker like Claude McClennahan.”
Williams recognized sound advice when he heard it. If nothing else, Bob Folsom knew real estate. He had made several fortunes developing raw land. Max Williams went knocking on Claude McClennahan’s door and again, entered a high-powered, pressure-cooker world of business. His job, on the surface, was simple enough. Max Williams tracked down pieces and parcels of raw land and negotiated deals for real estate developers who were building shopping centers, office buildings, industrial parks, warehouses, retail stores and homes, creating a new suburbia on empty farmlands, primarily north of Dallas. Property selling for ten thousand dollars an acre was suddenly worth as much as eighty thousand dollars an acre.
Money was flowing like fine wine, and the intensity behind a man’s assignment to find new land and new deals was suffocating. At the time, Williams began working with Randy Stewart, fresh out of law school and working as a commercial real estate closer. For several years, Williams would handle the intricacies of placing a buyer together with the seller, the right land with its user. He took responsibility for financing the real estate packages, then stepped aside and turned the deals over to Stewart to hammer out the fine print and handle the legal work of each transaction. Williams liked satisfied clients and big commission checks. Stewart made sure that the deals were tightly tied together and would go through the legal process without a hitch. Max Williams admired the young man’s grit and energy. Stewart was smart, and he had no problems with working long hours on short notice. Wherever he went and regardless of what he might do to earn a living, Williams knew, there would always be a place for Randy Stewart.
It was during the halcyon days of the early 1970s, and Dallas was known as Big D for a reason. The city possessed a great deal of money, and Dallas had a lot of daring, high-rolling men and women who possessed a great deal of money. Dallas, the myth and the reality, was being nailed together with a handful of promises and an armload of good, honest, make-you or break-you entrepreneurial greed.
The right real estate wizard with the right vision on the right side of town could make greed both fashionable and socially acceptable. For many, deals were consummated in saloons, in taverns, in coffee shops, in back rooms, in board rooms, in hotels – illicit, illegal, immoral, or otherwise – on golf courses, at cocktail parties, over dinner, over phones, overnight, and with a handshake. Max Williams had become part of a business where a man’s money kept score of his wins and losses
Within a year, Claude McClennahan’s company had sold more commercial real estate than any other business in Dallas County. Max Williams did not have a magician’s touch, nor did he ever intimate that he did. He made his fortune the old fashion way, which reflected his West Texas upbringing. He worked hard. He worked long hours. He had no idea what the word quit meant. Max Williams tracked down the land, and money had an uncanny way of finding him. No razzle. No dazzle. No wild speculative ventures. His was a sound, reasonable voice in an easy-come, easy-go, run-away world of real estate.
Chapter 5
His company was known as I. C. Deal Investments, but everyone throughout the burgeoning Dallas real estate industry knew and respected him simply as Irv Deal. He was, he said, nothing more than a good businessman who had long ago manufactured the foundation for his success while still in college – going from door to door and selling pots and pans for Alcoa. He sold so many of them that the company finally decided to let him go. Goodbye. Good luck. Irv Deal was, officials feared, making more money on commission fees than the president earned by running the company.
Deal ran a tight ship. He had a reputation for hiring the right people and making the right decisions. He kept a hard, unflinching eye on the devil that was in the details, as well as on the money coming in and going out, making sure the bottom line never varied or wavered from the financial game plan he had established for each of his projects.
He was never known as a tyrant, but Irv Deal did maintain dictatorial control over every aspect, large or small, of his investment firm. He depended on his own ability as a real estate developer and never bothered himself with any sudden swings or shifts in an unpredictable economic climate. Thus far, the economic winds had always blown in a favorable direction.
It was all about to change.
As far as Irv Deal was concerned, raw land was simply an over-priced commodity necessary for building apartment buildings. Dallas was his base of operation, and he built as many as ten thousand units throughout the sprawling Metroplex. But his influence and his holdings, during the mid-1960s, ranged from coast to coast, with apartments rising up alongside the streets of America’s most prominent cities from San Francisco to Tampa by way of Lake Tahoe. His I. C. Deal Investments had become universally recognized as the second or third largest apartment builder in the United States, depending on whichever report happened to be the latest to hit his desk.
For years, Irv Deal remained firmly entrenched as a major player who had found his niche and parlayed it into a small, or large, fortune, depending on whether he was talking to his tax man or his banker. Irv Deal preferred working from behind a desk and on the telephone. He was smooth. He was eloquent. He possessed a boyish charm and the reassuring style of a businessman who had figured all of the angles and knew how to turn pennies into dollars, great amounts of them.
He liked to make deals, and he was good at it. In one shrewd market-changing venture, he sold sixty-five hundred apartment units to the Great Southwest Corporation for twenty million dollars. For Irv Deal, it was indeed the best of times. The worst of times, however, was swiftly approaching, and it would catch him long before he realized that sudden and unexpected economic erosion was on the way.
Those prolific, fruitful years in real estate were just about as tempting and as seductive as a fashionable, beautiful woman on
