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The Scheme to Hook Up a King With the Wasp Woman and Other Wild Plans

Khalid Elhassan August 31, 2020 34 min

Susan Cabot - Hussein of Jordan — Susan Cabot and King Hussein. Veja

26. The Silver Scheme

The East Texas Oil Field is one of the world’s biggest oil deposits, and it made H. L. Hunt (1889 – 1974), who controlled much of it, one of the world’s wealthiest men. His sons Nelson, William, and Lamar – the last a founder of the American Football League and Major League Soccer – were also super-rich. Especially Nelson, who made a killing drilling for oil in Libya.

Nelson Hunt was a paranoid crackpot, however, who feared that the US government was conspiring to steal his wealth. In order to protect his fortune, he concocted a scheme to buy a whole lot of silver, and hoard it in Switzerland. Then he decided to buy all the silver, and persuaded his brothers to join him in a bid to corner the world’s silver market. By 1979, the Hunt brothers owned about half the world’s transportable supply of silver. Then their scheme backfired in spectacular fashion.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.