IT WAS a tragic end to a life that epitomised the winner-takes-all spirit of American capitalism. On March 2nd, the day after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of rigging bids for oil-drilling rights, Aubrey McClendon, a founder of Chesapeake Energy and one of the pioneers of America’s natural-gas revolution, died after driving his car at high speed into a wall.

Mr McClendon, 56, was one of the high-rollers of the shale boom—and of its bust. He turned a $50,000 investment in 1989 in Chesapeake, based in Oklahoma City, into what became one of the two biggest natural-gas producers in the United States, with an acreage of leaseholds almost the size of West Virginia. He was also one of the champions of natural gas as a relatively clean fuel compared with coal, and an advocate for freeing America from dependence on Middle Eastern oil. “To hell with OPEC”, he was fond of saying.

Yet his ride was a white-knuckled one even by the standards of America’s oil industry. He quickly seized on the potential of two emerging technologies, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking), to unlock vast new sources of natural gas and change the face of American energy. But it was his zeal in amassing land by borrowing heavily that gave him his edge—and ultimately brought him down.

“To be able to borrow money for ten years and ride out boom-and-bust cycles was almost as important an insight as horizontal drilling,” he was quoted as saying in Rolling Stone magazine, in 2012. That was four years after he had lost most of his personal fortune on margin calls during the global financial crisis. A year later he was ousted from Chesapeake for mixing reckless personal bets with those of his publicly traded company.

Mr McClendon, the great-nephew of a former Oklahoma governor, was not a typical wildcatter. He had preppy, Richard Gere looks. His first career choice was to be an accountant. But with Chesapeake’s other founder, Tom Ward, he was adept at leasing land quickly and quietly to secure the shale resources beneath before others realised their potential, and he was as keen to flip it for a higher price as he was to frack it.

“Geologists and engineers were the important guys—but it dawned on me pretty early that all their fancy ideas aren’t worth very much if we don’t have a lease. If you’ve got the lease and I don’t, you win,” he once said.

He became an Oklahoman hero, particularly after bringing a professional basketball team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, in from Seattle. He had a wife and three children, and regularly treated friends to his collection of fine wines. But his brash business tactics also brought him a number of lawsuits.

His leasing methods eventually attracted the attention of America’s Department of Justice. On March 1st it accused him and an unnamed co-conspirator of lowering the price of leases to drill for oil and gas on land in Oklahoma between December 2007 and March 2012, charges which carry stiff jail penalties if they lead to a conviction. It said “various corporations and individuals” were not charged but were also involved. Chesapeake said it did not expect to face prosecution.

Mr McClendon swiftly described the charge as “wrong and unprecedented”, saying he was the first person in the oil-and-gas industry in 110 years to face antitrust prosecution under the Sherman Act for joint bidding on leaseholds. His lawyers argued that the “business practices” in question were well-known in the Oklahoman and American energy industries. “Starting today, Aubrey gets his day in court,” they said. He died the next morning. As The Economist went to press, police in Oklahoma City were still unable to say whether the crash, in which he was the only victim, and which involved no other vehicle, was intentional or not.