Their personalities are equally distinct. An attorney who has represented both Grahams suggests that combining Pat and Mike in one body would create one hell of a salesman.
"Pat is, in a classic sense, more of a seller," the attorney says. "He's softer, more engaging and more pleasant. Mike's personality is the closer. Mike's more heavy-handed, more abrupt, more in your face."
And more demanding of center stage. Apparently, Pat was not exempt from his brother's frequent displays of egomania. There was nothing equal about the relationship, and though Pat tried on at least one occasion, he never really made much of an effort to escape Mike's dominance. Instead, he would cede control of their joint business affairs to his brother.
It's now impossible to say whether Pat, if he had exercised more independence, would have saved himself some grief later on. From those who've been burned by the Grahams, Mike elicits a rancor that is strong and immediate. The take on Pat is sometimes softened by a subtle empathy.
"My pattern with them," says the former associate from The Woodlands, "is that Mike was always the guy with the ideas, and he was always telling Pat that Pat was too stupid to do anything on his own."
After the forklift business folded in 1983, the Graham brothers went their separate ways. What direction Pat took is hard to chart, although just before he and Mike formed Bankers Capital Management, an investment banking firm, in 1986, he was working for a prefabricated building company in Victoria.
By 1985, Mike was selling luxury condominiums and limited partnerships for two subsidiaries of Century Development, the Kenneth Schnitzer company that built Greenway Plaza and other landmarks of the Houston real estate boom. By all accounts, Mike thrived, becoming one of the company's top movers of investments that provided tidy tax write-offs for the well-to-do.
To that end, Century exposed Mike Graham to a class of people he hadn't had much experience with. They were known within the company as Regulation D investors, people with wealth and, sometimes, power -- attributes that Mike Graham would never deny he coveted. Among the contacts he made was Billy Clayton, who, upon his retirement from the Legislature in 1983, had been the longest-reigning Speaker of the House in Texas history. As a private citizen, Clayton was a lobbyist for corporate clients, and while lobbying for Century, took a cut of at least one commission earned by Mike Graham.
Later, Clayton became a lobbyist for N-Group Securities. He would be instrumental in persuading officials in six Texas counties that private prisons were the wave of the future and that Mike Graham and his brother Pat were the guys to build them.
West Texas oil and gas magnate Clayton Williams was also favorably impressed by Mike Graham. After buying a Century condo in Austin, Williams gave Graham some money and the use of his corporate name to start a securities business. Graham managed to incorporate Claydesta Securities, but nothing more came of the association. According to Midland consultant Stan Beard, who says he handled Williams' end of the deal, "It was just real obvious after a short period of time that Mike wasn't going to be able to do what we thought we needed done."
Graham took the setback in stride. He might even have taken it as a sign to start a business of his own again. He had learned much at Century, not the least of which was that wealthy people, often as not, might be a coin or two short of a full roll when it came to other areas.
"Oh, he was slick," says a former secretary at Century. "He could sit and talk to people and just talk in circles. The words would form to make sentences, but they didn't make sense. People would ask, 'What do you mean by this?' And he would be like a politician and talk completely around it. After a while, people got to thinking, 'Well, maybe it's me, maybe I'm just not catching it.' I think it was a psychological trick."
Another onetime business associate who has witnessed Mike Graham perform says there is something almost predatory in how he closes a sale -- something about his ability to read a room and then hone in on a mark. Graham had exhibited flashes of that quality in the past. But at Century, he perfected it, and his success convinced him he'd never have to sell forklifts or men's clothes again.
"You can go through life hustling a hundred dollars here and a hundred dollars there," says the former associate. "Or you can just put a few more zeros on the end, talk a little nicer and enjoy it more."
Continued...
