Unwanted Donor

He's off Carter's guest list

Pudgy Supersalesman Edgar Gregory set out in 1971 to make a fortune. Flush with cash from the sale of his used-car agencies in Warrensburg and Joplin, Mo., the high school dropout bought a propane-gas dealership in Pensacola, Fla. Three years later he sold out for a net profit of over $1 million. He then bought five small banks in Alabama, and by 1975 was operating ten motels in that state and in Florida and Mississippi. By the end of last year, Gregory, 40, was boasting about a personal fortune of $11 million and corporate assets of close to $75 million.

He and Wife Vonna Jo bought a $300,000 home in the Pensacola suburb of Gulf Breeze, with a miniature merry-go-round for their six-year-old daughter. They cruised aboard a 45-ft. yacht, owned two Cadillacs and a Stutz Black Hawk, and threw splendiferous parties.

Gregory gave $228,000 to charities, including the First Baptist Church in Pensacola and the Shriner's Hospital for Crippled Children in Galveston, Texas, between 1974 and 1977. His First Bank of Macon County (Ala.) gave an unsecured $31,200 loan to the Atlanta-based Institutional Development Corp., which aids disadvantaged youths and has the strong backing of First Lady Rosalynn Carter. The same bank lent $32,400 to Robert Stapleton--husband of Jimmy Carter's sister Ruth--for the purchase of an evangelistic retreat in Denton, Texas.

Gregory had another passion: politics. By his own account, he and his wife gave a total of $108,522.08 to political campaigns between 1974 and 1977. Among recipients: Governors George Wallace of Alabama and Reubin Askew of Florida. Gregory claimed that he and Vonna Jo gave some $40,000 since 1974 to Jimmy Carter's campaign fund and to the Democratic Party, and he also credited himself with raising some $250,000 elsewhere for the Democrats. Because of this feat he was made a member of the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee's finance council.

All that political effort paid off for Gregory in numerous small attentions. Gregory drew Vice President Fritz Mondale to a $500-a-plate fund raiser in Pensacola in September. Gregory boasts of hobnobbing with the Carters on ten occasions since the President's Inauguration, a count partly substantiated by records in Washington. He twice attended soirees at the White House: one in March 1977 to honor British Prime Minister James Callaghan, and another in September to mark Carter's signing the Panama Canal treaties. Last June 23 he flew from Washington to a fund raiser in New York aboard Air Force One as a "personal friend to the President." Gregory made his twin-engined Beechcraft available to ferry Carter's mother, Miss Lillian, to a wedding in Fayetteville, N.C., in December. Trinkets from such encounters line Gregory's walls.

But last spring the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation issued cease and desist orders against Gregory's five banks, charging unsound practices. State bank examiners said the loan to Robert Stapleton was "substandard"; they initially wrote off the loan to Institutional Development Corp. as a "loss," but it was later repaid. Gregory's bank in Macon County closed in January. Another bank, in Wilcox County, Ala., closed in March. On Good Friday, Gregory and Vonna Jo were indicted on Alabama felony charges that they accepted deposits at a bank that was about to be closed.

Last week the whiff of shaky bank dealings--an uncomfortable reminder of the Bert Lanceaffair--caused dismay at the White House. Said Press Secretary Jody Powell: "What contacts Gregory had with the President have been in the relationship of a financial contributor." An aide to the First Lady made clear that she "does not consider Gregory a close friend." John White, Jimmy Carter's nominee as the Democratic National Committee chairman, declared that he "never heard of Gregory until TIME started asking about him." Immediately after, White phoned Gregory and took back an invitation to a D.N.C. finance council lunch that took place the next day in the White House State Dining Room.

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