There is something almost quaint about watching a young man discover that striking oil six times in a row is not, in fact, the beginning of his fortune but rather the closing of a trap. Cooper Norris, the lanky, gap-toothed son of Billy Bob Thornton’s Tommy in Paramount+’s Landman, has spent the better part of this second season learning a lesson his father has been trying to teach him since the series began: in the oil business, when a deal looks too good to be true, someone is already counting the ways they’re going to destroy you.
The mechanics of Cooper’s predicament require understanding the history between Tommy and the cartel. M-Tex had purchased mineral rights at auction that turned out to belong to a Mexican drug cartel. Tommy negotiated a surface lease with them, but cartels being cartels, they decided to change the terms. When Tommy refused, they dragged him into a basement beneath a bar, beat him savagely, put a gun to his head, doused him in gasoline, and prepared to set him ablaze. The man who stopped it was Danny Gallino—because, as Tommy later explains to Cami Miller, it is his cartel. Gallino did not save Tommy out of mercy. He saved him because he saw a longer play: legitimate entry into the Texas oil business through a man who now owed him his life.
Tommy declined the implicit partnership. So Gallino found another way in: through the son.
Cooper, who dropped out of Texas Tech two months before completing a petroleum engineering degree, decided to strike out on his own by consolidating small leases and drilling wildcat wells. To finance this roughly forty-eight-million-dollar venture, he partnered with an Odessa-based company called Sonrisa. The terms seemed generous to the point of absurdity: a fifty-fifty split until costs were recouped, then Sonrisa would take only eighteen percent of profits thereafter. Cooper signed without having a lawyer review the contract. He was twenty-two years old and believed he had outmaneuvered an industry that has been chewing up dreamers since Spindletop.
What Cooper did not know—what Tommy’s investigator Nate eventually discovered—was that Sonrisa’s funding originated from a Dallas-based financial fund controlled by Gallino, operating under the alias Dan Morrell. The cartel boss had simply waited, then approached Tommy’s son with an offer designed to look like opportunity. Every producing well Cooper brought in increased the leverage Gallino held over Tommy. The contract was structured so that Cooper would never actually see meaningful profits. The debt would pile up, the leases would be foreclosed, and Cooper would be left with nothing but a ruined reputation in the Permian Basin. Meanwhile, Gallino would control wells that Tommy’s own son had developed.
Tommy’s solution is elegant in its brutality. M-Tex will purchase Cooper’s leases outright, cancel the loan with Sonrisa, and absorb the drilling costs. Cooper’s dreams of becoming a wildcatter billionaire evaporate in a single conversation. Instead, his father offers him a job as a landman—nine thousand dollars a month plus bonuses, running his own crew, learning the business properly. It is a rescue disguised as a demotion.
But the maneuver collides with M-Tex’s own financial catastrophe. Four hundred million dollars sits locked in insurance structures, inaccessible when the company desperately needs capital. The only willing lender is Gallino himself. Tommy refuses, explaining to Cami that while the FBI might forgive them for leasing cartel-owned minerals, a four-hundred-million-dollar loan would make M-Tex look like the engine of a money laundering operation. Cami, determined to save her late husband’s company, orders a meeting with Danny anyway.
The trap meant for Cooper now threatens to swallow everything. Gallino plays a long game, and in West Texas, patience is just another kind of drilling.
