Pickens Minding His Own Business : Corporations: Still nursing his wounds from foiled oil company takeover bids in the ‘80s, he’s busy trying to live down raider image and revive natural gas firm he does control.

T. Boone Pickens spent the 1980s in the headlines, aggressively pursuing oil companies, earning millions of dollars from their stock, and angering some business circles.

The Boone Pickens of the ‘90s has a much lower profile. Instead of trying to take over someone else’s company, he’s trying to restore the financial health of his own, Mesa Inc., after a losing gamble on natural gas prices.

He also has some regrets about the last decade.

“Ehh, the ‘80s,” he said in a recent interview. “I go back and look at that period, I wished it never happened. Because, you know, what you thought you were doing--other people didn’t agree with what you thought you were doing.”

Pickens unsuccessfully targeted several oil companies for takeover in the 1980s. The most prominent were his 1984 bid for Gulf Corp., followed by plays for Phillips Petroleum Co. and Unocal Corp.

Critics, particularly oil company executives, called Pickens a corporate raider. Unocal sued Mesa, charging Pickens’ company made an illegal profit from Unocal stock, and won $42.8 million in a settlement with Mesa this year. But Pickens spurns the “raider” label and insists his offers were sincere.

At 66, Pickens still works out, stays busy with his eight children and 16 grandchildren, and is a powerful Republican fund-raiser and sought-after personality. But he says he’s too old for his cherished dream of a run at the Texas governorship.

Dropping his sometimes combative public persona, he admits there are things he would have liked to do differently.

“If I had it to do over again, which you never get that chance, I would never have made an offer for a company after we had become Gulf’s largest stockholder,” Pickens said.

The last of Pickens’ big moves ended in 1991. Pickens’ Boone Co. purchased 26% of Japan’s Koito Manufacturing Co. but was refused a seat on Koito’s board during a two-year battle. Koito maintained Pickens was a front for a Japanese investor trying to shake down the firm, a charge Pickens denied.

These days, Pickens buys shares of Mesa stock, now owning close to 7%.

He’s trying to build demand for natural gas and find premium markets for it, while decrying the nation’s reliance on foreign oil. He served two terms as chairman of the Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition and recently reached a deal with SuperShuttle to use Mesa’s natural gas for its van fleets at Los Angeles International and John Wayne airports.

Pickens also hopes to further ease Mesa’s $1.2-billion debt load. In the summer of 1993, Mesa restructured $600 million in debt, deferring about $150 million in interest payments over two years.

Mesa is expected to lose up to $90 million in 1994, its sixth straight year of losses.

“The debt, there’s no doubt, it is the centerpiece of the problem,” he said.

“We distributed $1.2 billion (to shareholders) over a period in 1986-90, which really gutted our equity, believing that natural gas prices would go up and everything would be fine. Natural gas prices went down and things weren’t fine, is about what happened.”

Mesa hopes to be back in the market next year, or as soon as prices rise and interest grows in natural gas stocks, not with equity but perhaps with convertible debt or selling a royalty trust.

Analysts see little to get excited about at Mesa these days. They say the company has good gas properties and quality reserves, but its long-term viability depends in large part on natural gas prices.

Bryan Dutt, oil and gas analyst at Howard, Weil, Labouisse, Friedrichs in New Orleans, called Mesa a “wait-and-see-type story.”

“There’s not much they can do without restructuring their debt. They’ve got to sit and wait for higher natural gas prices. Talk about a natural gas engine is fine for the year 2000-plus, but it’s not going to help them in the short term,” Dutt said.

Pickens has mellowed in recent years, said Wales Madden, an Amarillo attorney and businessman who has known Pickens for 50 years--since high school--and served on the board of Mesa since its inception.

“He is more able to relax and enjoy the fruits of some of his labor,” Madden said.

“I think that Boone has learned, as we all have as we reach this age, that not everyone’s going to agree with us and not everyone’s going to love us, and we relax and enjoy those things that are important to us, which are family and friends,” he said.

Pickens said he feels fortunate. “The last thing I am is bitter,” he said. “I’ve had a great career as far as just the people and all the things we’ve accomplished.

“If you’ve got to make a lot of decisions, you’re going to make some you’re not going to like when you go back and reflect on them.”

The toughest, Pickens said, was his analysis on natural gas prices. But no one could have predicted in the mid-1980s that prices would drop, he said.

“I did bet the farm. That was the mistake, is the bet was too big,” he said. “I thought that natural gas was it.”