How Neil Bush Got Into Trouble

DENVER - What's in a name? Fate, perhaps, if the name is Neil Mallon Bush.

Many of those who have followed the savings and loan scandal believe Neil Bush's last name opened doors in the Denver business community, eventually landing him a seat on the board of directors of the doomed Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan.

His family believes his name drew the attention, unfairly, of federal regulators, who accused him of conflicts of interest after Silverado collapsed.

``It's darn unfair that they're only doing it to hurt George Bush . . . and they have succeeded,'' First Lady Barbara Bush told reporters recently.

The tale of Neil Bush's troubles has been aired at length, and will be again this week when the president's 35-year-old son appears at a public hearing in Denver to answer the charges lodged against him. But there is another part of the younger Bush's name that has been overlooked.

It, too, tells a story. It's a reminder of George Bush's path to success, a road paved with connections and influential friends, the same course Neil Bush tried to follow, with different results.

Neil Bush, who has lowered his profile in recent weeks and declined interview requests for this story, initially did not set out along the same road traveled by his famous father. Hampered by learning disabilities, he had to struggle to graduate from a private Washington high school.

At Tulane University in New Orleans, where he received undergraduate and graduate degrees during the 1970s, he lived off campus and did little to attract attention. He may have, humorously, tried to avoid it; the Tulane yearbook for his sophomore year, 1975, carries a picture of a long-haired, mustached Neil Bush under the fictitious name ``Whitney X. Branglebush.''

Yet, by age 25, Neil began to fall into the family pattern. He moved to Denver and, like his father before him, went to work for an energy company as a way of learning the business before going off on his own. Neil joined Amoco Production Co., the region's biggest oil company, and was put to work assembling drilling deals as a landman.

At the time, the fast-buck atmosphere in the Rocky Mountain capital, fueled by high petroleum prices, must have seemed like an updated version of Midland, Texas, the boom town that lured his father three decades earlier.

``Denver was a go-go town. It was booming. The economy was going to go on forever. Oil was going to go to $100 (a barrel). Things were really flying,'' recalled Mike Asher, a 38-year-old oilman who came to town about that time. Neil and his wife, Sharon, joined the boards of civic organizations, including the Boys Club, the opera and the Children's Museum, in much the same way that George and Barbara Bush had dedicated themselves to the YMCA, local theater and other good works in Midland.

In 1983, Neil left Amoco and started his own oil company, JNB Exploration. At the time, the boom had started to go bust and money was no longer so easy to find, recalled former partner Evans Nash Jr.

``We were selling deals when a lot of people didn't get anything sold,'' he said in an interview. ``Because Neil was who he was, he had inroads into companies, in part because he was the son of the vice president.'' Like his father, Neil raised money from out-of-state investors, in Texas, New York and Florida, Nash recalled.

Neil Bush, then 26, invested only $100 in his own company, but others put up much more. Among them were two prominent local developers: Bill L. Walters, whom Neil met in Republican circles, according to Nash, put up $150,000 and received an ownership share of JNB; and Kenneth M. Good put up $10,000 and arranged for JNB to get a $1.7 million line of credit at a bank he controlled.

It was Good who made a $100,000 investment in 1984 for Neil that the president's son did not have to repay. Bush, who delayed reporting the loan to the Internal Revenue Service until 1990, has conceded that this ``incredibly sweet deal'' looks ``a little fishy'' but insists that there was nothing improper about it.

Meantime, in 1985, Neil Bush was invited to join the board of directors of Silverado Banking by its smooth-talking chairman, Michael Wise, who met him at a dinner party a few months before. Despite his lack of knowledge of the banking business, the 30-year-old Bush agreed; he has said that he considered the $9,000-a-year director's job ``an honor'' and a form of service to the community.

For serving as a rubber-stamp for Silverado's management, as one officer of the thrift has described the outside directors, Neil Bush now stands accused of ``the worst kind of conflict of interest'' by federal regulators investigating the institution's 1988 collapse, rated one of the most expensive failures of the entire S&L crisis.

One count claims that Bush ``engaged in unsafe business practice'' by failing to disclose his business connection with Walters while voting to approve $103.4 million in Silverado loans for his partner. The second count and third counts claim that Bush failed to disclose his relationship with Good when he asked the board to approve a $900,000 line of credit for the developer and when Silverado was considering Good's request to forgive $11.5 million in loans.

Bush vigorously denies any wrongdoing. Denver oilman Mike Asher, who describes himself as a close friend, says Bush simply ``was in the wrong place at the wrong time.''

His Republican defenders describe Neil as naive. Despite his problems, Neil Bush says he would like to continue in his father's steps and run for political office someday. That may not be possible, though, unless he manages to persuade an administrative law judge at this week's hearing that the case against him is without merit.

Even if he beats the conflict-of-interest charges, he still faces a threatened $200 million lawsuit against Silverado directors by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., as well as the fallout from other state and federal investigations.

``If this boy was trying to be like his father,'' concludes Fitzhugh Green, a boyhood friend of Barbara Bush and a biographer of President Bush, ``it sort of backfired and blew up in his face.''