part 3
“It turned out there were 30 or 40 boys still around, and probably a hundred over the years,” Buzbee says. “Those boys were going in and out of the Chase Tower in downtown Amarillo, and no one ever questioned, why are these boys going in there? He was hiding right in plain sight.”
Buzbee represented 10 boys, and “I took every penny he owned. Which,” he adds, “I was very proud of. I can’t say what the settlement was, but I know that a lot of them were driving Ferraris around Amarillo.” He laughs. “And you don’t normally see a lot of Ferraris or Lamborghinis in Amarillo.”
‘The kind of business I’m in, you don’t garner a lot of love’
Buzbee lives in one of the biggest mansions on the most exclusive street in Houston. There is a white Rolls-Royce parked in the forecourt, beside his wife Frances’ white Mercedes.
He has lived in the house for the past 11 years, purchased from a man who had sold his oil and gas company and gone into the wine business. He completely rebuilt the house, then sold it following a divorce. Buzbee paid $13 million for it.
Arriving at his home, I ring the doorbell, and a woman’s voice on the intercom instructs me to wait outside until Buzbee is ready to see me.
He appears 10 minutes later, sturdily built and of medium height, with a tan and slicked-back hair; he looks toned and refreshed. He is wearing a light-blue linen suit, hand-tooled alligator-skin boots and a dark-blue shirt. He speaks in a soft Texas twang at odds with his air of palpable self-confidence.
He has been following his daily routine of meditation, exercise and a plunge in an ice bath. He leads the way into the sitting room and sinks into a capacious sofa.
The house is a study in muted opulence. An art deco lamp on a rosewood table, paintings by Léger, Louis Kronberg and Alexander Calder on the walls. A book detailing his art collection – Matisse, Pissaro, Renoir, Cy Twombly, an abstract painted by Frank Sinatra – sits on a coffee table. (In an unfortunate incident in 2017, a female guest who had drunk too much ran amok when Buzbee called for an Uber, overturning furniture and causing $300,000 in damage to artworks including two Andy Warhol paintings.)
Buzbee’s mansion in downtown Houston is a far cry from his modest rural upbringing Credit: Shane Lavalette
Bookshelves line the room: volumes on law, politics and international relations. There is a well-thumbed copy of The Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese existentialist poet and writer Fernando Pessoa – from a time when Buzbee was living in New York’s East Village, he says, “trying to be a poet”. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, CS Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, and a book by the new age spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.
Buzbee is a much more complicated man than his reputation for abrasiveness suggests.
As we talk, a small white dog bounces into the room, and leaps excitedly on his lap, before being shushed away. This reputation, I say, hard-nosed, ruthless, the meanest dog in the yard… how would he describe himself?
“Super nice guy.” He grins. That’s not what I’ve heard. He feigns a wounded look. “Is that right?” The grin broadens. “That’s hurtful. I’m trying to get in touch with my emotions.”
So would he describe himself as loved, respected or feared? “Well, you saw the dog…”
But in the human realm? “I guess respected, probably. The kind of business I’m in, you don’t garner a lot of love.
“I was at a dinner here once in this grand house owned by a billionaire, with a lot of oil and gas people, and I said to my date, I’ve literally sued every single person in this room. So you don’t get a lot of love when you do that.”
‘If I had the case today I probably would have got £500 million’
Nor did Buzbee have a lot of love growing up in the small, rural north Texas town of Atlanta. His father worked as a butcher at a local grocery and his mother worked in the school cafeteria.
A hard-scrabble upbringing. His father, he says, would fight at the drop of a hat – and usually be the one to drop it – and Buzbee would frequently be the object of his temper. “Big and mean,” he says. “Everybody knew him in town. Still do, and he’s 81.”
On days when he wasn’t working, he’d tell Buzbee to “get in the truck, boy”, and they’d drive the dirt roads around town looking for discarded beer cans. “He’d slow down, I’d jump out, pick up a can, throw it in the back and we’d keep going. We’d do that for hours.” After selling the aluminum, his father would retire to his favourite bar to drink and play pool with his buddies, while Buzbee sat in the corner watching. “He wrestled a bear once,’ he says, ‘and fought a dwarf”.
He did what?
“I saw it happen.” One day there was a dwarf in the bar who was drunk and who took it into his head to needle Buzbee’s father when he was shooting pool, jogging his arm when he went to make a shot.
“My dad took pool super-serious, and he got annoyed pretty quick. When my dad said ‘hey’, the dwarf kicked him on the shin. My dad has really skinny legs, hardly any fat on them. He saw stars and he just went ‘whack! and knocked the dwarf into the wall.”
And the bear?
There was a man, he says, who would travel the small towns in the area with a muzzled bear, charging people $20 to wrestle with it, just to prove they could. ‘Nobody could beat the bear. My dad wrestled it, and the bear beat him easily.” Buzbee laughs.
Deepwater Horizon
At the age of 17, Buzbee graduated from high school, “and I was out of there. Tried to get as far away as I could.” He attended college on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, and went to serve in the Marines, spending four years in the Middle East, Kenya and Somalia and rising to the rank of lieutenant.
Wondering what to do in the future, on a ship sailing off the coast of India he picked up a friend’s preparatory law school handbook and started answering questions and found he was pretty good at it. “And I said, hey boys, I’m going to go to law school.”
He shakes his head and laughs. “The weird things that happen to you.”
He enrolled at the University of Houston Law Center, and in 1997 graduated summa cum laude, then joined one of Houston’s biggest law firms, but left after a year. “I decided, I don’t want to keep making the managing partners richer so I’m going to try to do it myself.”
He set up with a partner in an office in a suburban strip mall, handling personal injury cases for oil-rig workers; he took to it, he says, like a duck to water. “With my working-class background I could bond with those guys really easily. And if you have access to one guy you have access to 25 others – cousins, brothers, whatever; something happens in their family and they call you.”
His first major case was an anti-trust violation. Reading through “a truckload” of depositions in a case against a drilling company he came upon evidence that nobody else seemed to have noticed, that companies were sharing information on employees’ wages to keep them rigged low. He told his partner they should pursue the case. When his partner hesitated, Buzbee took out two lines of credit to pursue it on his own, and within a year had collected $75 million in settlements from various drilling companies. “If I had the case today I probably would have got £500 million.”
“It turned out there were 30 or 40 boys still around, and probably a hundred over the years,” Buzbee says. “Those boys were going in and out of the Chase Tower in downtown Amarillo, and no one ever questioned, why are these boys going in there? He was hiding right in plain sight.”
Buzbee represented 10 boys, and “I took every penny he owned. Which,” he adds, “I was very proud of. I can’t say what the settlement was, but I know that a lot of them were driving Ferraris around Amarillo.” He laughs. “And you don’t normally see a lot of Ferraris or Lamborghinis in Amarillo.”
‘The kind of business I’m in, you don’t garner a lot of love’
Buzbee lives in one of the biggest mansions on the most exclusive street in Houston. There is a white Rolls-Royce parked in the forecourt, beside his wife Frances’ white Mercedes.
He has lived in the house for the past 11 years, purchased from a man who had sold his oil and gas company and gone into the wine business. He completely rebuilt the house, then sold it following a divorce. Buzbee paid $13 million for it.
Arriving at his home, I ring the doorbell, and a woman’s voice on the intercom instructs me to wait outside until Buzbee is ready to see me.
He appears 10 minutes later, sturdily built and of medium height, with a tan and slicked-back hair; he looks toned and refreshed. He is wearing a light-blue linen suit, hand-tooled alligator-skin boots and a dark-blue shirt. He speaks in a soft Texas twang at odds with his air of palpable self-confidence.
He has been following his daily routine of meditation, exercise and a plunge in an ice bath. He leads the way into the sitting room and sinks into a capacious sofa.
The house is a study in muted opulence. An art deco lamp on a rosewood table, paintings by Léger, Louis Kronberg and Alexander Calder on the walls. A book detailing his art collection – Matisse, Pissaro, Renoir, Cy Twombly, an abstract painted by Frank Sinatra – sits on a coffee table. (In an unfortunate incident in 2017, a female guest who had drunk too much ran amok when Buzbee called for an Uber, overturning furniture and causing $300,000 in damage to artworks including two Andy Warhol paintings.)
Buzbee’s mansion in downtown Houston is a far cry from his modest rural upbringing Credit: Shane Lavalette
Bookshelves line the room: volumes on law, politics and international relations. There is a well-thumbed copy of The Book of Disquiet, by the Portuguese existentialist poet and writer Fernando Pessoa – from a time when Buzbee was living in New York’s East Village, he says, “trying to be a poet”. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, CS Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, and a book by the new age spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.
Buzbee is a much more complicated man than his reputation for abrasiveness suggests.
As we talk, a small white dog bounces into the room, and leaps excitedly on his lap, before being shushed away. This reputation, I say, hard-nosed, ruthless, the meanest dog in the yard… how would he describe himself?
“Super nice guy.” He grins. That’s not what I’ve heard. He feigns a wounded look. “Is that right?” The grin broadens. “That’s hurtful. I’m trying to get in touch with my emotions.”
So would he describe himself as loved, respected or feared? “Well, you saw the dog…”
But in the human realm? “I guess respected, probably. The kind of business I’m in, you don’t garner a lot of love.
“I was at a dinner here once in this grand house owned by a billionaire, with a lot of oil and gas people, and I said to my date, I’ve literally sued every single person in this room. So you don’t get a lot of love when you do that.”
‘If I had the case today I probably would have got £500 million’
Nor did Buzbee have a lot of love growing up in the small, rural north Texas town of Atlanta. His father worked as a butcher at a local grocery and his mother worked in the school cafeteria.
A hard-scrabble upbringing. His father, he says, would fight at the drop of a hat – and usually be the one to drop it – and Buzbee would frequently be the object of his temper. “Big and mean,” he says. “Everybody knew him in town. Still do, and he’s 81.”
On days when he wasn’t working, he’d tell Buzbee to “get in the truck, boy”, and they’d drive the dirt roads around town looking for discarded beer cans. “He’d slow down, I’d jump out, pick up a can, throw it in the back and we’d keep going. We’d do that for hours.” After selling the aluminum, his father would retire to his favourite bar to drink and play pool with his buddies, while Buzbee sat in the corner watching. “He wrestled a bear once,’ he says, ‘and fought a dwarf”.
He did what?
“I saw it happen.” One day there was a dwarf in the bar who was drunk and who took it into his head to needle Buzbee’s father when he was shooting pool, jogging his arm when he went to make a shot.
“My dad took pool super-serious, and he got annoyed pretty quick. When my dad said ‘hey’, the dwarf kicked him on the shin. My dad has really skinny legs, hardly any fat on them. He saw stars and he just went ‘whack! and knocked the dwarf into the wall.”
And the bear?
There was a man, he says, who would travel the small towns in the area with a muzzled bear, charging people $20 to wrestle with it, just to prove they could. ‘Nobody could beat the bear. My dad wrestled it, and the bear beat him easily.” Buzbee laughs.
Deepwater Horizon
At the age of 17, Buzbee graduated from high school, “and I was out of there. Tried to get as far away as I could.” He attended college on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, and went to serve in the Marines, spending four years in the Middle East, Kenya and Somalia and rising to the rank of lieutenant.
Wondering what to do in the future, on a ship sailing off the coast of India he picked up a friend’s preparatory law school handbook and started answering questions and found he was pretty good at it. “And I said, hey boys, I’m going to go to law school.”
He shakes his head and laughs. “The weird things that happen to you.”
He enrolled at the University of Houston Law Center, and in 1997 graduated summa cum laude, then joined one of Houston’s biggest law firms, but left after a year. “I decided, I don’t want to keep making the managing partners richer so I’m going to try to do it myself.”
He set up with a partner in an office in a suburban strip mall, handling personal injury cases for oil-rig workers; he took to it, he says, like a duck to water. “With my working-class background I could bond with those guys really easily. And if you have access to one guy you have access to 25 others – cousins, brothers, whatever; something happens in their family and they call you.”
His first major case was an anti-trust violation. Reading through “a truckload” of depositions in a case against a drilling company he came upon evidence that nobody else seemed to have noticed, that companies were sharing information on employees’ wages to keep them rigged low. He told his partner they should pursue the case. When his partner hesitated, Buzbee took out two lines of credit to pursue it on his own, and within a year had collected $75 million in settlements from various drilling companies. “If I had the case today I probably would have got £500 million.”
