Sinclair, Harry Ford

Harry Ford Sinclair (b. July 6, 1876, Wheeling, W.Va.; d. Nov. 10, 1956, Pasadena, Cal.) established the Sinclair Oil and Refining Corporation and the Sinclair Gulf Corporation (later the Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation) in 1916.

In 1921 Albert Fall, Secretary of the Interior under President Warren Harding, secretly leased the Teapot Dome oil fields in Wyoming to the Mammoth Oil Company, another Sinclair operation. Those oil reserves had been set-aside for the Navy but control had been transferred earlier to the Department of the Interior by President Harding's executive order.

The Wall Street Journal broke the story of Fall's illegal deal on April 14, 1922. President Harding publicly defended the deal, but a Senate investigation, led by Senator Thomas J. Walsh (D-MT), began on October 15, 1923 in the Senate Committee on Public Lands and Surveys.

On January 24, 1924, Edward Doheny-to whose Pan-American Petroleum and Transportation Company Fall had also leased oil fields at Elk Hills, California-admitted that he had lent Fall $100,000. A week later the Senate passed a resolution finding fraud and corruption. Fall had already retired from his post as Secretary of the Interior. He would later be charged with conspiracy and accepting bribes, convicted of the latter, sentenced to a year in prison and fined $100,000.

Sinclair was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, and his trial began October 17, 1927. After forty minutes of deliberation the jury acquitted Sinclair, but the judge declared a mistrial when the government presented evidence that Sinclair had hired a detective agency to shadow the jury.

Sinclair was tried and found guilty for criminal contempt of court and sentenced to six months in prison, which he served in Washington, D.C. in 1929. The Teapot Dome and Elk Hills oil reserves were restored to the U.S. government by the Supreme Court without deciding the issue of fraud. See Mammoth Oil Co. v. United States, 275 U.S. 13 (1927) and Pan American Petroleum & Transport. Co. v. United States, 273 U.S. 456 (1927).

From the guide to the Trial Transcripts, 1926-1928, (Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University)