On October 30, 2006, Mike pleaded guilty to three counts of securities fraud in federal court in New York City. The frauds were part of a pump-and-dump scheme to inflate the prices of three over-the-counter stocks by sending out more than a million faxes that appeared to contain a confidential tip from a stockbroker to a client. “In fact, as I know, there was no broker, no client, and no tip,” Mike admitted to U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Preska. She accepted his guilty plea and sent him back to rehab, pending a sentencing hearing scheduled for this spring.

“Self-Feeders Are Good”

T. Boone Pickens is one of the most complex characters in modern-day capitalism, an unlikely combination of King Lear, Lazarus, Robin Hood, and Amarillo Slim. He has made billions for himself and average investors by shaking up the moribund management of major corporations and by taking huge gambles in the energy industry. He has risen from his apparent financial deathbed at least twice. And he has donated hundreds of millions to various philanthropies. But like so many self-made monarchs, Pickens now finds his empire roiled by internecine strife. Some, if not all, of the turmoil is also self-made. As he has publicly admitted several times, his unrelenting quest for financial success has taken precedence over his family life for the better part of the past 50 years. And if his achievements in business were often hard earned, his pride in them has just as often been narcissistic.

Monuments to Boone Pickens abound across Texas and Oklahoma like the obelisks of an Ozymandias, king of kings. The old Mesa Petroleum building in Amarillo featured a bronze statue of Pickens playing racquetball. The football stadium at his alma mater, Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, is named in his honor. His office and ranch are virtual shrines, adorned with his photographs on magazine covers and in the company of American presidents and business potentates.

But even though Pickens has donated seven-, eight-, and nine-digit sums to his alma mater and such causes as hurricane relief, he has refused to pass on a significant share of his vast fortune to his five children. He claims he doesn’t want to spoil them, much less attempt to build a dynasty as the Rockefellers have. “Self-feeders are good” is the way he puts it.

And therein lies the rub: Pickens has shown he can get a whole football stadium full of college students to cheer for him. But can he get his own children to love him as he loves himself?

The Luckiest Guy in the World

Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. began his life by very nearly killing his mother. On an otherwise auspicious day in the spring of 1928, Thomas Pickens Sr. learned that his wife, Grace, was experiencing serious complications with her pregnancy. The doctors at Keystone Hospital, in the rural hamlet of Holdenville, Oklahoma, presented Pickens Sr. with a horrific dilemma: They could save the mother or the child but not both.

Pickens Sr., a local oil-and-gas land man, insisted on trying to save both. He persuaded a surgeon, who was not an obstetrician, to attempt the first cesarean section in the hospital’s history. All the surgeon had to go by was one page in a medical textbook. “My dad said, ‘We’re gonna pray, and you’re gonna do it,’ ” Pickens recalled. “I don’t know how long it took, but when that surgeon came out of the operating room, he told my father, ‘You’ve got a little boy.’ ” That little boy’s rise to riches has long since become part of American financial lore—with numerous embellishments. Pickens has often boasted that when he was only 28 he founded his first oil company, Petroleum Exploration Inc., with a geology degree and $2,500 in cash. In fact, the crucial seed money came from his first wife’s uncle, rancher John O’Brien, and Eugene McCartt, a local supermarket scion. Along with putting up an equal amount of cash, they cosigned for a $100,000 line of credit, which was big bucks in those days.

In the spring of 1964, Pickens transformed P.E.I. into a public company called Mesa Petroleum. He reckoned he could increase Mesa’s energy reserves much faster and more surely by acquiring the producing properties of other companies rather than simply drilling for oil and gas. That same basic insight inspired his attempts to “drill for oil on Wall Street” by trying to take over allegedly undervalued and mismanaged major oil companies during the halcyon days of the 1980s.