My Uncle’s Mercedes and the Church of Creative Accounting

“The Rich Kids at Church”

I grew up around people who prayed hard, hustled harder, and occasionally crossed lines the federal government cared about. This episode looks at how that shaped me, how BMX and rock music kept me sane, and why I eventually had to make sense of the contradictions.

Transcript

George TenEyck: 0:00

Picture this. I'm nine years old in Detroit. A BMX kid. MTV kid. Thrasher magazine under the mattress, Rolling Stone on the coffee table. I know what rich people are supposed to look like because I watch Silver Spoons, Richie Rich and Dallas. J.R. Ewing in a cowboy hat scheming over oil. Ferris Bueller sneaking out the window, Marty McFly shredding a guitar and accidentally inventing rock and roll. And then my dad leaves General Motors. We pack up everything we own into a U-Haul, and suddenly I'm a fourth grader in Texas. Where kids have Mercedes, jet skis, quad runners, private planes, and arcade games in their basements. I wasn't ready for that level of wealth. Hell, I'd never even seen a Mercedes up close until that moment. But my Uncle Mike, he had two, his and hers. And I was rich adjacent. I loved the perks, the toys, the private flights. But even then something felt off. The extreme Jesus stuff, the righteous, pious, blessed, and highly favored energy. It smelled fake even to a nine-year-old. Like someone spraying glade over a crime scene. If you weren't alive during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, imagine the 80s. But with more cocaine, more deregulation, and fewer ethics. SNLs were supposed to be boring local lenders. But after deregulation, guys like my uncle Mike learned that they could flip land, inflate values, move money through shell companies, and borrow against imaginary profits. Mike wasn't working alone. He was tied in with names you've probably heard of if you're from Northwest Tarrant County. Let's just put it that way. Names like Eagle Development, Harvey and Associates, U.S. liquids, some legit, some less so, some creatively flexible. They played the game everyone was playing at the time. Buy land, overvalue it, borrow against it, move the debt into another entity, rinse, repeat. Until eventually the whole Jenga Tower of bullshit collapsed. And in the late 1980s, Mike saw what was coming. He suddenly packed up the family and moved to Beverly. That's right. Beverly Hills, California. That was 1989. No warning, just poof. As if he felt the federal government breathing down the back of his neck. By 1990s, the feds were after him. And in 1997, they finally caught up. As a kid, I didn't care that something smelled criminal. I was too busy riding jet skis and sitting in leather seats on on a private plane, pretending I was Ferris Bueller being escorted into a Cubs game. I didn't know about indictments. I didn't know about land flip schemes or federal subpoenas. I just knew my uncle lived big, talked smooth, prayed loud, and somehow made money appear out of thin air. But underneath all of that shiny eighties luxury was this weird tension. He was family. He was also a criminal. And I think some part of me always knew that. When Mike finally pled guilty, he rolled on his associates. Yep. He flipped. He confessed to his role in the fraud, cooperated with investigators, and served a short but sweet federal prison sentence at a, you know, club fed. You know, the white-collar quote unquote prison they they send financial criminals to. Yeah, you know it. While he was in prison, everything fell apart. I mean, think about what that could do to your family if you're suddenly sent away to federal prison for crimes you committed ten years earlier. My cousins, kids themselves, were left mostly unsupervised. They ran up the gas cards buying booze. They drifted, they acted out. I mean, what kid wouldn't in that situation? My cousin Brad. Well, he OD'd in 98. That's the part where they say the story stops being fun or nostalgic or even dramatic. This wasn't an HBO crime saga. It was real. And a kid died because the adults around him were living like rules didn't apply. After he got out, Mike claimed he lived as a non-person, quote unquote. He didn't own property in his own name, didn't put assets where the government could see them. He worked through proxies. He stayed in the shadows, still hustlin, still slippery. He worked behind the scenes of businesses in ways that skirted, if not outright violated the conditions of his sentence. Even the real estate stuff, which he should have been barred from touching, was handled through buffers and trust structures. Meanwhile, my dad's life had been wrecked by being tied to Mike's orbit. His property management business at Eagle Development collapsed. My parents went bankrupt in the early 90s. All because my uncle wanted to play Texas Gordon Gecko. And years later, after my grandfather died, Mike slow walked the estate distribution. My mom had to yell at him and threaten legal action just to get what was owed. God knows how much 80's money was buried long before that. Now, I want to be fair. Not everybody in this story was crooked. My cousin He escaped the gravity pretty well. He saw the chaos coming, he joined the army, got disciplined, built a life. Got out of the family's destructive orbit before it swallowed him like it did Brad. I'm not here to throw him under the bus. If anything, he's proof that you can claw your way out of an inherited mess. This isn't a story about money or crime or eighties excess. It's a story about what happens when adults let greed and ego steer the ship. And kids get tossed around like luggage. It's about how my uncle's choices shaped my own view of hypocrisy, religion, authority, and wealth. How it sharpened my humor, influenced my voice, made me a little darker, a little funnier, a little more skeptical of people who quote Bible verses while hiding cash in drywall. And it's a story about being a Gen X kid who just wanted to ride BMX, watch MTV, and figure out the world. While grown-ups around me were running savings and loan grifts and playing make believe with federal law. Who knew? So yeah. That's how a Detroit kid raised on rap, rock, skate culture, and pop culture rebels ended up in the splash zone of a Texas-sized real estate scandal. It wasn't the childhood I expected, but it's the one that made me. And it gave me one hell of a story to tell. The savings and loan crisis wasn't just banks failing. It was the playground for anyone who could figure out how to bend the system. Mike's crimes, specific, audacious, and textbook savings and loan era white-collar genius. Inflated land appraisals for properties he wanted to flip, straw buyers, people whose names went on loans while Mike and his associates pocketed the gains, land flipping schemes through companies like Harvey and Associates in Fort Worth and later through trusts. Business partnerships with the likes of Tom Blanton and ventures like U.S. Liquids. He and his partners siphoned money through these deals, sometimes working closely with other high-risk operators in oil, real estate, and development. Hell, Neil Bush even crossed paths with them, at least according to my dad's stories. He drove them and pick up picked him up from Meacham Field a couple times in the 80s. To be a fly on the wall than that car. Geez, Dad. Billions of dollars went through these networks, and while the savings and loan crash toppled banks, people like Mike had already perfected the art of hiding, delaying, and laundering assets into trusts and proxies. Essentially, the law caught him, but only barely, and only after he'd built layers of invisibility. I mean, when my uncle was on the come-up, they called him, I mean, he was a CPA, right? A brilliant accountant, and they called him the financial wonder kind of Fort Worth. Little did they know. He wasn't smart enough not to get caught. But I digress. Here's the thing, though. As a kid, I didn't hate being rich adjacent. I loved flying on their private Cessnas and riding jet skis and quad runners and gawking at the his and hers Mercedes in the driveway. I mean, my aunt had the exact same Mercedes convertible, you know, the red one like I saw in Beverly Hills Cop. I mean, she drove us to school in that thing and talked on the car phone. I mean, I was nine. It was awesome. But something always felt off. The extreme Jesus shtick, the constant reminders of how pious my uncle was. It was theatrical, fakery, hypocrisy. You could smell it from a mile away. I was a nine-year-old skeptic. And that was confusing. He was family. He was fun to be around. My cousins were cool kids. And he was also clearly running schemes that, from my childlike perspective, didn't feel entirely legal. But what did I know? That tension, thrill, and suspicion, love, and a little side eye is a motif you'll see repeating in my life. Learning to enjoy what's in front of you while noticing the cracks underneath. So Mike's activity starts in the mid-1980s with Harvey and Associates in Fort Worth. He helped engineer land flips, overinflated appraisals, and straw buyer schemes, the bread and butter of the savings and loan crisis. You don't have to take my word for it. I mean, this is research directly from the court docket and the FDIC criminal divisions press releases about my uncle. He was also tied to a company called U.S. Liquids, which was run by Tom Blanton, another local businessman who was super Jesus y and he lived in our neighborhood. And I was friends with his kids, and they they all seemed nice enough, but I mean I didn't know anything about what our dads were doing and what my uncle was doing. Well, U.S. Liquids, Mike became a silent partner after he went to prison. My thought was, and I don't know this for sure, but it seems like Mike took one for the team, and Tom was there to throw him a bone after he served his prison sentence. I mean, total speculation, but who knows? There were trusts, proxy companies, and accounts tied to family members, including my grandfather's estate. But Mike doesn't vanish. He continues business invisibly, using his trusts as proxies, hiding his assets, and becoming what he called a non person. A proxy landman in mineral and oil leases, controlling trusts and keeping his wealth off the books. Meanwhile, the collateral damage to family? Devastating. Parents eventually bankrupt, cousin overdoses in '98. Dad's business falters, and all the while Mike is this charming, outwardly Jesus y figure, and untouchable in the public eye. Mike's criminal genius is textbook white collar. Asset concealment via trusts and proxies. Strategic use of family and associates as buffers. Watching it unfold as a kid, and then later reflecting as an adult, I realized this isn't about evil. It's about intelligence unmoored from ethics. Patterns, manipulation, and charm were tools. Collateral damage, just a side effect. And the moral tension was personal. He was family. He was fun. He was brilliant. And he was criminally shady. That duality, it shaped how I view people, ethics, and risk to this day. The story of my uncle isn't just about the savings and loan crisis or white collar fraud. It's a lens on human behavior, ethics, and the cost of brilliance without conscience. For me, the lessons were brutal and subtle. Watch patterns. Protect your family and your ethics. Enjoy the perks while you can, but never ignore the cracks. Mike's story shaped my world, whether I liked it or not. And now I can tell it with side-eye sarcasm and a little dark humor. Because sometimes that's the only way to survive the absurdity of your family history. After prison, Mike continued to engage in business ventures, including opportunities in the Barnett Shale fracking boom of the early 2000s. His son became involved as part of these ventures. I'm not sure how much of the operations were Mike directing behind the scenes. But my cousin wasn't inherently shady. In fact, he was navigating a complex situation trying to find his footing. My cousin's trajectory was shaped in part by family chaos. Had he not joined the army and gotten his life together, he could have gone down a path similar to Brad's. He ended up breaking the cycle, and that's worth acknowledging. Mike's criminal genius is textbook white collar. Asset concealment via trusts and proxies, dual public private persona, pious and respectable, but secretly opportunistic, strategic use of family associates. The savings and loan crisis was this weird mix of deregulation, greed, and financial engineering run wild. Banks collapsed, billions were lost, and the government had to bail out entire institutions. Headlines made it sound like bad management, but underneath there were people who treated it like a game.