Boone Pickens arched his left eyebrow into a silvery horseshoe and waited to hear exactly how much personal income he had earned the previous year. It was two days after Christmas in 2006, and he was dressed down in khaki slacks, a gray sweater, and a pair of loafers, which he had propped up on the desk in his Dallas office.

Pickens turned to check the computer screen behind his desk. Except for his thinning gray hair and the flesh-color hearing aids in his ears, he looked as lean and mean as he had in the 1980s, when his exploits as a corporate raider shook Wall Street and catapulted him onto the covers of Time and Fortune.

Since then, Pickens has endured a two-decade roller-coaster ride. In 1996, slumping natural-gas prices led to his ouster from Mesa Petroleum, once the nation’s largest independent oil company. The following year, he founded the energy hedge fund BP Capital. But even as he launched his financial recovery, his personal life had been shattered by two divorces and a continuing series of crises involving his two sons.

Jay Rosser, Pickens’ veteran public-relations aide, returned from an adjacent office with the 2005 personal-income figure his boss had requested. “You made $1.504 billion last year,” he reported. “That’s adjusted gross income?” Pickens asked.

Rosser nodded and went on to add, “You paid the I.R.S. $279 million in taxes.”

In that single year, Pickens had made more money—and paid more taxes—than he ever had in any previous year. And he did it at an age when most of his peers were either retired to their country clubs or six feet under the ground. Pickens’ fourth wife, Madeleine Pickens, entered the office. A statuesque blond with saucer-shaped brown eyes, she was dressed in tan pants, matching snow boots, and a sheepskin jacket.

“We just lengthened the runway up at the ranch to 6,000 feet,” Pickens said. He added that he was fixing to trade in his Gulfstream G450 jet for a new G550 model. Madeleine mentioned that Pickens had landed the plane the other day. Skeptical that the 78-year-old mogul could land a jet by himself, I asked if he really had been at the controls the whole time. “Boone’s always at the controls,” she replied.

Caught With His Flies Down

On June 11, 2006, Pickens’ elder son, Michael O’Brien Pickens, then 52, allegedly crept around to the back of the Housatonic Meadows Fly Shop in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut. It was late on a sultry evening. Trout were running in the evergreen-shrouded river in the state park directly across the highway. But the fly shop, a converted service station filled with Orvis and other top-brand fishing equipment, was closed.

The shop manager, Devin Booth, gave police the following account: Mike jimmied open a back window and climbed inside. He stuffed reels and other gear worth an estimated $3,000 into a cooler. Then he passed out underneath a desk. A short time later, Booth returned for a routine errand. Booth later told the Associated Press he recognized Mike because he had visited the shop earlier that day, portraying himself as a “big-shot stockbroker” who was “related” to Boone Pickens. When Booth roused him, he jumped up “like a jack-in-the- box” and staggered around groggily.

“You said I could use the phone anytime,” Mike told Booth over and over.

“Dude, even if I did,” Booth said, “you don’t break in and steal stuff and fall asleep under my desk.”

State police arrested Mike on burglary charges. This was hardly his first run-in with the law, but it proved to be a particularly fateful one. The arrest alerted authorities that Mike had violated bail terms after having been arrested on federal securities fraud charges. He remained in a local jail for three days in lieu of posting $15,000 bond. Then he was sent to a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in Pennsylvania.