oil was in the tanks. Then they would lay in wait until the Koch Oil man arrived and drained the tank. The Koch Oil employee would leave a document behind, called a run ticket, that stated how much oil Koch had carted off. If the firm was really taking as much oil as it appeared to be, the run tickets should show a smaller amount of oil than Elroy and his team had measured. That’s how Elroy ended up surrounded by cattle, secretly photographing the Koch Oil gaugers.
But there were two big obstacles to making this plan work. The first was the fact that the oil tanks were all located on private property—property owned by oil drillers like Exxon and Mobil. Elroy couldn’t just trespass on the land to take oil measurements. The second obstacle was figuring out when Koch Oil was due to arrive and drain the tanks. It would be cost prohibitive to have Elroy stake out the company around the clock for weeks at a time.
Ballen turned to the oil majors for help. While none were willing to attack Koch publicly for taking oil from them, they were more than happy to help Ballen behind the scenes. Their assistance was never publicly disclosed, even as videotape of the surveillance was shown publicly during a later Senate hearing. The companies gave Elroy permission to enter their property and to measure their oil. They also told Ballen’s team when the Koch Oil truck was scheduled to arrive, so that Elroy could be there to observe it.
With the secret help of the oil majors, Ballen and Elroy were ready to build the case against Koch. They had copius amounts of documentation and photographic evidence. They had the testimony of Koch’s own oil gaugers, whom Elroy had interviewed.
But Ballen knew that they needed more. So the Senate issued subpoenas to senior Koch Industries executives in Wichita—subpoenas that would compel the men to answer questions under oath. Then Ballen bought a plane ticket to Wichita. There he would question one of the men he had just subpoenaed. It was the man who had ultimate control over this enterprise: the chief executive, Charles Koch.
* * *
It is almost awe-inspiring to fly into the Wichita airport. During the daytime hours, airplane passengers can look out the window and see the Kansas prairie stretching away toward the horizon like an impossibly long tabletop covered in green. Wichita itself seems minuscule and stranded within this wide expanse, a small jewel of white buildings surrounded by residential neighborhoods and factories. Outside the city limits, the emptiness looked like the far edge of America.
Ken Ballen arrived in Wichita with his assistant attorney, Wick Sollers, in late April of 1989. They had a grueling schedule ahead of them.
On April 24, the two Washington attorneys drove to Koch Industries headquarters. They were scheduled to depose, or interview under oath, eleven of the company’s senior executives and employees. As they drove to the headquarters, Ballen and Sollers might have thought they’d been given wrong directions. One of the largest and most profitable companies in Wichita wasn’t located in a skyscraper downtown. Instead, Ballen and Sollers kept heading west on Thirty-Seventh Street, away from the city center, until they reached the far northeastern corner of Wichita’s city limits. On the north side of Thirty-Seventh, the city ended and gave way to a limitless horizon of tall prairie grass. On the south side of the street was their destination: a squat office building of steel and glass with darkened windows.
They arrived early in the morning. Their first deposition would take place just after nine o’clock, and it was arguably their most important: they would start the day by interviewing Charles Koch.
Lower-level investigators like Jim Elroy became convinced that Charles Koch must have been aware that his firm was taking far more oil than it paid for from oil wells throughout the Midwest. It seemed that the behavior was so widespread that it must have been directed from the top. It was almost inconceivable that Koch would not be aware of it. Now Ballen would have the chance to question Charles Koch directly.
But first, they had to get into the building. This turned out to be no easy task. Ballen and Sollers were stopped at a security checkpoint, where security guards asked them to show their identification. They passed through a metal detector. Then they walked down a hallway into the center of the building and came to yet another security checkpoint. They showed