He and his late brother, Charles, watched a fortune built on arts-and-crafts chain Michael’s and other companies disappear after one of the largest tax-evasion cases in history.
am Wyly is something of a celebrity at his Dallas retirement home. The former billionaire is often stopped while walking the long, air-conditioned hallways or reading in the dining hall at Edgemere, which houses 300 of the city’s well-heeled seniors. “A lot of people will thank me for making their late husbands rich or somebody in their family rich. Or thank me because somebody had a good job working for one of my companies,” says Wyly, 85. “They’re nice folks.
Charles Wyly, who worked alongside his brother Sam for decades, was also targeted for tax evasion. He died in a car accident in 2011. However, the government still went after his estate in what was dubbed"zombie litigation."“I’m an old guy. I don’t need much,” Wyly says during a phone interview from his apartment in the retirement home, where he pays a modest $7,500 a month, according to court filings.
Emboldened by his success, he embarked on his next corporate adventure, which would pit him directly against AT&T. Wyly wanted to build a nationwide digital network that would give computers a way to transmit data outside of phone lines. But AT&T, which wanted to keep that data business for itself, stood in his way. Wyly’s company, Datran, spent some $100 million waging a technical and regulatory battle—and lost. But then Wyly challenged AT&T’s monopoly in court.
Wyly hasn’t retired completely from politics, or at least from addressing hot-button political issues. He has spoken outfor his anti-immigrant rhetoric and is working on his second book about immigration, which tells the stories of successful immigrants like PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, Google’s Sergey Brin and Tesla’s Elon Musk. “It was inspired by all the public talk that seems dumb. There’s a lot of anti-immigration talk and we are a nation of immigrants.
“I set up what was essentially a big 401,” says Wyly. “The basic tradeoff for what I did, like with all these private plans done by big insurance companies, is you get to defer transactions and capital gains taxes.”
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