Bart B. Chamberlain Jr. died recently in the Bahamas at the age of 93, an expatriate to the end. The Mobile oilman and attorney had spent the last three decades of his life outside the country he was born in, first in the Swiss Alps and then at Spanish Wells, outliving most of his friends, his associates, his enemies and finally the civil judgment that drove him out.
United States authorities never collected the $19.4 million judgment entered against him, which arose from violations of the pricing rules Washington imposed to counter the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s. Justice Department lawyers gave up in 2002, having seized almost $13.5 million, and a federal judge declared the case closed.
What Chamberlain left behind, for anyone who cared to read it, was a remarkable document: a letter of some seven and a half pages, written on Douglas Oil Purchasing Company letterhead on Dec. 22, 1989, and addressed to all of his employees.
“A spirit of considerable sadness”
“It is in a spirit of considerable sadness instead of the kind of spirit we like to enjoy at this time of year that I write this letter,” it opened.
By the end, Chamberlain had told his employees he had deliberately absented himself from the United States and planned never to return. His father’s family, he noted, had lived in Mobile since before Alabama was a state. His mother’s father had left the Spanish Army in Cuba in the 1870s and built a business and a reputation in the city. Leaving was not a joyous event, he wrote, but his resentment at his treatment by a government he believed had been corrupted was so intense that he had concluded expatriation was best for all concerned. He expected, in time, to renounce his American citizenship, and would do so “with apology to no one.”
The transaction at the center of it
In Chamberlain’s telling, neither he nor his companies had been charged with wrongdoing so much as with having made a mistake, and the mistake was trusting the written word of the federal government.
In December 1973 he asked the Department of Commerce for export licenses to sell crude oil to BORCO in the Bahamas. Commerce, with Energy Department approval, issued them. Nearly five years later, he wrote, the government sued him personally and his companies for making the very sales the licenses authorized.
The government’s theory was that his operations had evaded domestic oil price controls by shipping crude out of the country and bringing it back as foreign oil. The sales, in roughly equal proportions, were made by Citronelle-Mobile Gathering Inc. and Citmoco Services, drawing on the Citronelle field in north Mobile County. Chamberlain put the pre-tax profits at about $6.6 million, roughly $3.5 million after taxes, and said his own personal share came to $55,000 or $60,000 after taxes. Others in the industry, he claimed, took similar payments and were never sued.
The litigation, he wrote, cost $4 million and “trashed the two companies we spent 30 years building and operating.” He complained that the Energy Department litigated before its own special appellate court, which he said had never once ruled against it.
The enemy he named
Chamberlain’s letter did not stop at the government. He laid the entire affair at the door of oil magnate Leon Hess, in a string of allegations he never proved in any court.
By Chamberlain’s account, Hess bought the old Gulf terminal in Mobile around 1960 and immediately eyed the Citronelle field and pipeline as a bargain acquisition. He alleged that Hess planted a disparaging article about the quality of Citronelle crude in a trade journal, tried to buy his production at a sacrifice price, attempted a fire-sale purchase of the whole operation, and, when rebuffed, quietly siphoned Citronelle crude out of his tanks and replaced it with lower-grade Mississippi oil. He said his companies recovered $440,000 for the thefts. He further alleged that Hess had a criminal prosecution fixed, that he was behind hostile press coverage, and that he pushed a Cochrane Bridge route that would disrupt Chamberlain’s Mobile River terminal.
These were one man’s charges, set down in a letter to his own staff, and they should be read as such. Chamberlain himself had been accused of political maneuvering in obtaining the export licenses in the first place.
A settlement that evaporated
In a long postscript, Chamberlain wrote that a settlement of his personal liability had been worked out, and that John Bolton, then head of the Justice Department’s civil division, had assured him of its acceptance, only to reverse himself with the observation that he had no idea Chamberlain had so many enemies at the department.
Chamberlain told his employees to think about their own futures and not to count on a long affiliation with the company or whatever succeeded it. He offered each of them a letter of recommendation if they wanted one. He said he intended to write a book about the case; whether he ever did is unknown, as he suffered a stroke some years later and was much debilitated afterward.
He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea off Spanish Wells.