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It's fairly common in history to talk about famous people, great heroes, but there are also little heroes.

And Edwin Gray, who played a role in the savings and loan crisis, was just one of those little heroes and a member of a much maligned profession.

Edwin Gray was a bureaucrat. You ever wonder why flamingos are pink, or how much taller the Eiffel Tower gets when the iron swells in the summer heat.

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March 1984, Ed Gray is the new chair of the F-H-LBB, a small, previously unknown agency that regulates savings and loans banks, and he receives a videotape

in the mail.

From the Federal Home Loan Bank, FHLB in Dallas, he and two other board members insert the tape into a VCR.

A camera scans mile after mile of empty, unfurnished condominiums that had been built and were now left to rot.

They were separated by stretches of arid flatland, and many were half-finished shells.

A Dallas appraiser is narrating this video.

It's homemade.

Most of them have been financed by a savings and loan company called Empire Savings Bank.

Regulators appalled, and he sends investigators to Texas to see this firsthand, and they confirm, and in fact, they're shocked by actually seeing it in person.

A regulator says, I went down there, and his text and showed me this piece of land and told me how this guy had sold it to that guy, and that guy had sold it again, and it had been sold about six times, each one generating a transaction and a loan.

The regulator said, oh my God, that's terrible.

And the man said, only if you're sixth.

It was usually Empire or some other high-flang thrift.

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