Albert Fall's Road From Frontier Murder Trials to a Black Bag of Cash

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Albert B. Fall was born in Kentucky in 1861 and was working in a cotton factory by age 11, an experience that left him with lifelong respiratory problems. He moved west through Oklahoma and Texas to the New Mexico Territory, taught himself law, and became a landowner in the Tularosa Basin, where he allied with rancher Oliver M. Lee. When attorney Albert Jennings Fountain and his eight-year-old son Henry vanished near White Sands in February 1896, Fall defended Lee and two of his men, William McNew and Jim Gilliland, and won acquittals because the bodies were never found. In 1908 he won another acquittal for Jesse Wayne Brazel, accused of killing lawman Pat Garrett.

Fall became one of New Mexico's first U.S. senators in 1912 through a contested alliance with Thomas B. Catron, and in 1918 he lost his son Jack and daughter Caroline to the Spanish flu within a single week, then won reelection without giving a speech. In March 1921 Warren Harding named him Secretary of the Interior. After Navy Secretary Edwin Denby transferred control of naval oil reserves at Elk Hills, Buena Vista, and Teapot Dome, Fall leased drilling rights without competitive bidding to Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny. Convicted in October 1929, he became the first cabinet official sent to prison for crimes committed in office, and he died in poverty in El Paso in 1944.

• Visiting the bedridden Woodrow Wilson in 1919, Fall said he had been praying for him, and Wilson replied, Which way, Senator?
• He justified skipping bids by claiming nearby private wells were draining the Navy's oil underground.
• Doheny gave him $385,000 in cash, delivered in a little black bag.
• A jury acquitted Doheny of offering the bribe, and Doheny's company later foreclosed on Fall's ranch to collect the money as a loan.
• Sinclair served six months for contempt of Congress and jury tampering after hiring the Burns Detective Agency to shadow his jurors.