(Bloomberg News) Andy Beal's road to becoming a billionaire, doing deals with the likes of Carl Icahn and Donald Trump, runs straight through the slums of Newark, New Jersey.

It was 1981, and Beal, then a 29-year-old vulture investor, was scoping out two 16-story apartment buildings owned by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The bricks were chipped and bulging off the exterior of the buildings. Tenants had pried open the elevator doors and thrown furniture down the shafts.

Beal liked what he saw.

He and a partner bought the towers for $25,000 and a promise, backed by a $2.5 million letter of credit, to fix the bricks. They did the repairs-employing armed guards for protection when visiting the apartments-and never tapped the credit line before selling the buildings two years later to a New York doctor for $3.2 million, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August issue.

In the past three decades, Beal has made a fortune buying distressed assets. He snapped up bonds of power companies during the California blackouts in 2001, debt backed by jetliners following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and billions worth of commercial and real estate loans after global credit markets froze in 2008.

In between, the investor with a restless mind started a company to build rockets and beat a rotating team of pros at Texas Hold 'em in the world's richest poker game.

Beal's focus on beaten-down loans makes him look like a hedge-fund manager. He's not; he's a banker.

His Plano, Texas-based company, Beal Financial Corp., owns three banks. Deposits are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. That means Beal raises money for his investments by promising, these days, to pay depositors just 1 percent a year. A small bank in New Mexico he bought in 2010 offers checking accounts. Otherwise, his 34 branches sell just savings accounts and certificates of deposit, which are less expensive to manage.

"It's an FDIC-insured hedge fund," says Sherrill Shaffer, who worked for the U.S. Federal Reserve for 17 years until 1997 and is now the John A. Guthrie Distinguished Professor of Banking and Financial Services at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

Unlike a hedge-fund manager, Beal doesn't have to divvy up profits with investors. The banks controlled by Beal Financial have shareholder equity of $3.2 billion, according to the FDIC, and he owns the entire company.

A native of the manufacturing city of Lansing, Michigan, Beal has collected an A-list of partners and friends. He's pals with Trump, the loudmouthed developer. He talks history with Gabe Kaplan, creator and star of the 1970s sitcom "Welcome Back, Kotter." He's done business with Icahn, the corporate raider. Former President George W. Bush visited Beal's offices after leaving the White House.

This year, Beal attended the Las Vegas wedding of his friend Steve Wynn, the casino developer. Clint Eastwood was the best man.

Beal, who flies commercial and drives a Ford Excursion sport utility vehicle around Dallas, says he still reviews every deal his company does to make sure he's not spending too much. These days, Beal is hitting the brakes because he sees a bubble inflating.

Stocks and corporate bonds have rallied during the past two years because the U.S. government dumped money into the economy in the form of rock-bottom interest rates and imprudent deficit spending, Beal says.

"Today's markets are being supported by a flood of money," he says. "There are so many lenders in a race to the bottom when things are good. We don't participate in that."

Trump, who borrowed at least $600 million from Beal's banks during multiple bankruptcies by his casinos, says investors should heed the banker's warning. "He has 20/20 vision into what is going to happen in the future," says Trump, 65, who briefly flirted with running for the U.S. presidency this year. "I know lots of smart bankers. Andy is right at the top of the list."

Beal's politics -- he's a self-declared libertarian -- seem an odd fit for a banker who relies on federal guarantees to attract deposits. He loathes big government and gives money to politicians who vow to dismantle it. Until they do, he plans to avail himself of federal programs to make money just like the next guy.

"I hate big government," Beal says in an e-mail between a series of interviews granted, he says, only to ensure that the facts about his banks are correct. "I don't like the government- issued paper currency rules or the laws that require its use. But those are the rules, and I live by them."

In buying loans, Beal takes heftier risks with FDIC-insured money than do many bankers. Delinquent loans accounted for 21 percent of all loans at Las Vegas-based Beal Bank Nevada, the largest of his three banks, compared with an average of 5 percent for all U.S. banks as of March 31.

Taking bigger risks is legal as long as Beal abides by rules that prohibit banks from owning equity in nonfinancial companies or buying most debt rated as junk without dispensation from regulators, Shaffer says.

Beal's banks also must hold extra capital because they make riskier loans, says George Burns, commissioner of the Financial Institutions Division of the Nevada Department of Business and Industry, a regulator.

Beal Bank Nevada is stockpiled for Armageddon. It had $2.2 billion of equity capital at the end of 2010. Equity for a bank is the amount of assets -- its outstanding loans -- minus liabilities, or deposits. Beal Bank Nevada's equity capital accounts for 35 percent of total assets, according to FDIC data. The average U.S. bank had an equity-to-asset ratio of just 11 percent at the end of 2010.

Beal's profitable trades have produced almost off-the-charts results compared with other banks. Beal Bank Nevada had a return on equity of 27.4 percent in 2010 versus an average of 5.9 percent for all U.S. banks, according to the FDIC. Beal says he succeeds because he does his homework and always buys loans that have collateral that he can get if the borrower defaults.

Beal could get richer if he got out of banking with its costly regulations and formed a hedge fund, says Tim Yeager, associate professor at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

"He's paying nothing on deposits and making extremely high returns on assets," Yeager says. "But he could make more money, I promise you, by not being a bank."

Beal actually toyed with the idea, starting an affiliate called CLG Hedge Fund LLC. Beal says he put Hedge Fund in the name because he wanted its employees to think like hedge-fund managers, buying and making higher-yielding loans. He even put them in separate offices in Frisco, 18 miles (29 kilometers) from his bankers in Plano.

CLG never operated as a hedge fund, partly because Beal didn't want to share his returns. "Interfacing with regulators is one thing," Beal says in an e-mail. "Taking calls constantly from various investors is intolerable. Also, why split profits?"