MEXICO: Meet Mr. Jenkins

Though it grows increasingly conservative with the years, Mexico’s one-party government still calls itself revolutionary and acts the part by occasional nationalization of foreign private enterprise. Last week President Adolfo López Mateos was onstage in full revolutionary uniform as a $26 million plan to buy out 365 of Mexico’s leading cinemas went into effect. The intention: to clip the wings of the theater owner, U.S. Citizen William O. Jenkins, 82, a mysterious buccaneer-businessman who has built the biggest personal fortune in Mexico, a money pile estimated anywhere from $200 million to $300 million.

Good Bad Luck. Over the years Jenkins has cloaked his operations in such secrecy that an intriguing mixture of fact and legend has grown up around his empire building. Born May 18, 1878 in Shelbyville, Tenn., Jenkins showed up in Aguascalientes, Mexico in 1901, dead broke. He took a job as a railway mechanic for 50¢ a day. In 1906, a U.S. missionary group staked him to enough capital to launch an itinerant haberdashery business.

His wanderings carried him to Puebla, where he went into small businesses (grain brokerage, real estate) and became the U.S. consular agent in the chaotic days following the 1910 revolution. His financial talents were frustrated by a shortage of funds until he had a fortunate stroke of bad luck. In 1920 Jenkins was kidnaped by General Manuel Peláez, one of the bandit enemies of then-President Venustiano Carranza, and held for $25,000 ransom. Rather than offend the intervention-prone U.S., Carranza paid off— and through an unlikely stroke of generosity on General Pelÿez’ part, Jenkins is said to have received half of the booty.

Gift of Foresight. Just when Prohibition gripped the U.S., Jenkins plunged into the sugar and alcohol business. Sometimes he bought in his own name, other times in cooperation with such men as Maximino Avila Camacho, the brother of onetime (1940-46) President Manuel Avila Camacho. When the great expropriator, President Lázaro Cárdenas, began casting covetous eyes at some of Jenkins’ sugar land in the late 1930s, Jenkins shrewdly gave the land to Cÿrdenas as a gift. Later Jenkins told a friend, “I came out on top. I still get my sugar from the same land because I finance the peasants’ crops.”

By the mid-1940s Jenkins was in a position to swallow an entire $5,000,000 issue of bonds by the Mexican government’s holding corporation, Nacíonal Financiera, without apparent strain. When a projected four-lane highway from Mexico City to Querétaro lagged for lack of funds, Jenkins lent the contractors $25.6 million to finish the job, while at the same time offering the government $80 million to help finance a new superhighway from Puebla to Mexico City. Among his reported holdings today: the Bank of Commerce, textile mills, cement plants, an automobile assembly plant, finance companies and a soap factory.

Park Bench Leisure. Despite vast success and fortune, Jenkins still clings to simple ways. He owns a rococo mansion overlooking Acapulco Bay but spends most of his time in the seclusion of his relatively modest and middle-class home in Puebla. In his shabby office in Puebla, Jenkins types out his own letters on a 20-year-old portable typewriter perched on a much-scuffed wooden desk. He wears well-seasoned dark suits and broad, sometimes soiled neckties. For relaxation he likes to lounge on Puebla’s park benches or play a few rubbers of bridge.

None of Jenkins’ vast holdings brought him more notoriety among movie-mad Mexicans than his string of cinemas. Starting with one movie house in Puebla in 1939, Jenkins ran his competitors out of business. But some 20 years ago the government clamped a mass-pleasing ceiling of 4 pesos on admission prices in the Federal District. As inflation and devaluation later whittled the peso’s value from 20¢ to 8¢, knowing businessmen think that he sold out the cinema equipment two years ago to his former partners. He kept most of the theater buildings, and now the government will have to pay him rent, since its $26 million was only enough to buy the seats, the projection equipment and the long-term leases.