It's June 6, 1972, on Mustang Island, a barrier right across the ocean from Corpus Christi, Texas.

A local fisherman is standing in the surf, checking the tide, when he spots something out of place.

Driftwood? Parts of a sunken ship? The objects move closer, then the fisherman realizes. It's a man, dead,

wrapped in chains with his hands tied behind his back and a block of cement around his neck.

Cops quickly identify the corpse as Randy Farenthold, a 32-year-old millionaire and playboy from

Corpus Christi that the magazine Texas Monthly

euphemistically describes as a quote sportsman a gangland slain clear as a south Texas morning

Farenhold had been scheduled to testify at a federal trial against four men accused of swindling him

out of a hundred thousand dollars not a small amount of cash in the early 70s.

The scheme had involved the purchase of treasury notes that the men claimed were owned by the

mafia. Randy, a keen gambler, went for it, agreeing to buy the mafia skin money at a knockdown

price. His transaction with the

four men was set to take place in the Houston motel room, but just as it began, the group was

held up and robbed by a man brandishing a shotgun. Randy had decided the man was a plan

that he'd been set up, and he ratted to the cops. Big no-no. In the early hours of June 4th,

somebody beat and strangled poor Randy to death, wrapped him up and tossed him in the corpus

Christie Bay. Without his testimony, the case against the four men falls apart. Two of the guys who were

indicted though are involved in scams against

other wealthy locals, themselves part of a high-stakes pigeon shooting and gambling ring alongside

a man named William Bill Asher Richardson Jr., a decorated former Marine and oilman who'd been

gunned down on his doorstep almost a year previous.

Suspects had gotten off that killing at trial, controversially,

...