Edward L. Doheny

Edward L. Doheny was an American oil tycoon whose 1892 discovery of oil in Los Angeles, drilled with his partner Charles A. Canfield using a modified mining tool, touched off the Los Angeles City oil field and the broader Southern California oil boom of the 1890s. He went on to develop major oil fields in Mexico through his Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company, becoming one of the wealthiest men in the United States. Doheny's later career was defined by the Teapot Dome scandal, in which he was tried for having paid a bribe to Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall in exchange for a lease on the Elk Hills naval petroleum reserve in California; Doheny was acquitted of the bribery charge in 1930, though Fall was convicted of accepting it.