The Great Texas Oil Heist.

• Date: 01 May 2023
• Author: Fitzgerald, Timothy

The Great Texas Oil Heist, by Robert Cargill (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021). 192 pages, ISBN 978-1-62288-402-5.

Crime novels and true crime stories are a bookstore staple. Many long airplane rides, beach vacations, and cold winter nights have passed amiably with the self-indulgent pleasure of a potboiler. Rarely, if ever, does that genre intersect with energy economics. This account of unauthorized directional drilling under the East Texas field ("The Black Giant") in the late 1940s and 1950s is likely the only plausible true crime account that has a direct bearing on issues of energy economics.

Robert Cargill is a retired academic chemist who clearly took on this project as a personal passion, having lived through it as a close but uninvolved observer. He delivers a gripping account of the events leading up the discovery of the scheme to drill under adjoining leases and produce oil illicitly. The historical events might seem to have no bearing today, given that they concluded nearly 60 years ago and all of the key actors...