The Scoundrel
2025
No scoundrel can be of the highest order. He is doomed to the lowest order, stuck in shadows and stench, the sweet dark sludge of dirty money, forever lodged in a foul and unforgiving hell.
This is where Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall lived and died, his blood poisoned with corruption, his mind in the grip of greed, his duty to serve our country tossed on a bonfire of disregard.
Fall had no time for expanding our National Parks. Au contraire, he supported a bill to take away farm land from New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians.
His starring role in the Teapot Dome Scandal stained America’s front pages throughout the 1920s. Fall took $400,000 in bribes from oil companies to secretly lease them oil reserves in Wyoming and California.
No open bids and nothing transparent. Nothing left from these oil reserves for the Navy, which in the 1920s was making the change from coal to oil powered ships.
I’ve got the money, got the four hundred grand
I could care less about protecting the land
I’ll sell it all off one piece at a time.
Teapot Dome and Signal Hill,
Anything in between that lets me pay off bills.
Another new suit, another mink for my wife
Another day to wallow in this Washington life
A fine time to pillage and to make a quick buck.
I’m slick Albert Fall and I’m here to explain
No lawyer can touch me from California to Maine.
But the law did catch up with Albert Fall.
In 1931-2 he spent nine months in the New Mexico State Penitentiary, caught red handed taking a $100,000 bribe from California oil man Edward L. Doheny.
Newspapers of the day called him “The Fall Guy.”
Fall’s legacy… the first U.S. cabinet member convicted of a crime committed in office. He died in poverty and poor health in El Paso 1944.
