Posts Tagged ‘Willis Johnson’

Just How Far Does The John Wiley Price Corruption Story Reach?

Monday, June 4th, 2012

Sometimes you know there’s a big, juicy story swimming just under the threshold of public consciousness, but don’t have the tools, sources or knowledge to bring it to the surface. Such is the case with the FBI’s ongoing investigation of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, a powerful, long-serving fixture in the Dallas black political power structure. Right now the story involves current Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and money that may have improperly made it’s way from Rawlings’ campaign chest to Price’s pocket via political consultant Kathy Nealy. The FBI raided Price’s office last year.

The lefty Dallas Observer is more blunt in what the FBI is alleging: “The affidavit claims a pay-for-play scheme existed in which businesses would pay handsome consulting fees to Nealy’s company at about the time they were seeking to win a contract with Dallas County. A portion of that money would be funneled to Price, who would steer the favored contractor through the Commissioner’s Court.”

Not living in Dallas, the first time I ran across John Wiley Price’s name was in connection to the previous mayor of Dallas, then-aspiring Senate candidate Tom Leppert. Leppert and Price seem to have cooperated in killing Richard Allen’s Inland Port project, Leppert allegedly because it competed with a similar project by backer Ross Perot, Price allegedly because Allen wouldn’t pay Price and his cronies $1 million in shakedown money. I should hasten to add that Price, who has been a fixture on the Dallas political scene long before Leppert even moved there, is to the best of my knowledge not one of Leppert’s cronies, or even particularly close to him. However, Willis Johnson, who was allegedly part of the shakedown effort, is one of Leppert’s cronies, and was (along with the late Lynn Flint Shaw) one of Leppert’s conduits into the Dallas black community.

Price has an, ahem, interesting history. He was arrested for felony assault charges, of which he was acquitted just after the Rodney King riots. And his protege Aaron McCarthy is a member of the New Black Panther Party.

But if Price committed the crimes alleged in the FBI affidavit, the question is: How deep does the corruption go? How many other Dallas political players were paying off Price, and in exchange for what? Price has been in office a long, long time. It’s quite possible he has enough skeletons in his closet to make it an ossuary.

I don’t have the answers, and I don’t even have the knowledge or connections to properly dig for those answers. But I suspect we’re going to find out in the near future anyway…

Tom Leppert Critic Jim Schutze on Problems During Leppert’s Term as Mayor

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Before I interviewed Tom Leppert, I wanted to research several controversies that came up during his term as Mayor of Dallas. Unfortunately, because of The Dallas Morning News paywall (and, as you can read below, possible DMN involvement in some of those controversies), information about them was hard to come by.

Lacking a good Dallas political connection to pump for information, I ended up reaching out to Jim Schutze, one of the writers for the Dallas Observer‘s Unfair Park section on local Dallas politics. Schutze had foolishly generously offered to dish the dirt on Leppert’s term as mayor, and when I called him up I was evidently the first person who had taken him up on the offer. I ended up talking to Schutze on the phone for over an hour.

I’ve edited the notes from that phone call into the semi-coherent form found below, and the material in block-quotes represents the gist of what I was able to transcribe from Schutze’s description (I can only type so fast, so word-by-word transcription of a one-hour phone call in real time is quite beyond me). I’ve also included some links to columns where he covers some of the issues we discussed.

I should point out that neither The Observer (which is the Dallas equivalent of The Austin Chronicle, but not as sad) nor Schutze could be considered conservative (though Schutze says that a quarter-century of observing local politics firsthand has “beaten the bleeding liberal” out of him). As such, everything said below should be taken with a grain (or several grains) of salt, and adjusted as needed for bias. However, while Schutze’s version of events should not be treated as gospel, all of the below seem to be real controversies that occurred during Leppert’s term as mayor, and I believe all should be looked at and investigated more thoroughly than they have been heretofore.

I conducted the interview with Leppert on September 19, and I really meant to have all this up considerably earlier, ideally just a week or two after that interview, but events intervened. I’ve been both busy (including a new job) and lazy, and this material needed considerable editing, which meant it got put on the back-burner while I grappled with the endless press of current events.

Trinity Toll Road Controversy

Angela Hunt (East Dallas progressive City Council member) put up a referendum on wonk infrastructure issues. Leppert mischaracterized it as an attempt to kill the toll road, but it was really a debate over where to put it: outside the flood plain or (as Leppert wanted) inside the flood plain. The 1998 election to authorize the bonds for the original project didn’t say “highway,” it said “park road” on top of the levee, not a highway. When it became a freeway, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said you couldn’t build one on the levees, because it was unstable and too big a risk. Plan B was to build the highway between the levees. None of the numbers for this road work, because the road is way too expensive for the amount of traffic to be carried.

Angela Hunt referendum said the road would flood, and the plan would diminish the carrying capacity of the floodway and increase flood risk. Five rightaways were under consideration, only one in the flood plain. A levee collapse would be worse than Katrina.

In 2007, Leppert was anointed by the business leadership to defeat the Hunt referendum as Job One. Leppert could sell any board of directors on anything. He was a developer in Hawaii. He was the one who moved to Dallas, Turner Construction didn’t. He wasn’t CEO for long, and I [Schutze] don’t know why he left.

Carol Reed (of a consulting company now called The Reeds) lead the campaign to defeat the referendum. Leppert said the Corps of Engineers had signed off. But the Corps said: “We haven’t signed off on anything.” The North Texas Toll Road Authority told reporter Michael Lindberger they hadn’t signed off on the money. The Dallas Morning News sat on the story; the owners are landholding families in favor of the road.

The referendum was narrowly defeated, meaning the road stayed between the levees.

The estimated $400 million turned out to be $1.4 billion (2007), $1 billion over budget, now over $2 billion. (Leppert’s dodge: “I am very comfortable with their [the Corps’] position.”)

Leppert said there were fewer issues with a toll road than there actually were, and promised numerous recreational facilities would be built as well. Angela Hunt said that “Leppert’s not a liar, he’s a salesman, and he believes his pitch.”

After Katrina, the Corps of Engineers reexamined levees and said they were useless even in a hundred year flood.

Police Statistics

Urban Crime statistics have been dropping nationally. When Leppert came into office in 2007, Dallas had the highest crime overall per capita for cities of over a million people. Leppert vowed to change that. Leppert called in Police Chief David Kunkle (a tough, respected chief) and said he wanted the crime numbers down. DPD changed the way it reported crime statistics to the FBI for the Uniform Crime Statistics. Dallas Morning News did a terrific series of investigative news on the process. For burglary, an incident would no longer be counted unless something was stolen. Most other cities disagreed with the Dallas redefinition and called it a “Lawyering of the language.” As soon as they put in the new guidelines, crime rates dropped, and Dallas was no longer number one.

SAFE Teams

Another Leppert crime controversy was the creation of SAFE (Support Abatement Forfeiture and Enforcement) teams: A team of cops, code inspectors, health department inspectors, etc. would “wallpaper” cheap apartment complexes with code violations in order to seize properties. The Property Owners Association got involved, since property rights were being trampled, and in some cases apartment buildings were turned over to connected city council friends.

The City-Funded Hotel

Built by the city, owned by the city, funded by bonds, unless there’s enough revenue. Trammel Crow was against it and said the Dallas hotel market was flooded. Leppert pushed it forward anyway.

Lynn Flint Shaw and Willis Johnson

What role did Lynn Flint Shaw and Willis Johnson play in Leppert’s campaign and administration? And what role did they have in steering/approving minority business contracts with City Hall and/or DART?

Shaw was a black woman who was well liked by sophisticated white arts people, a liaison between rich white Republicans and poor blacks. That vote has been important in pushing big Business Establishment initiatives (sports stadiums, etc.). Shaw was chair of Leppert’s fundraising committee.

As soon as he was elected, she sent an email to all business contacts to go through Willis Johnson (then a radio DJ). The email said that all requests for minority contracts with the city should go through Shaw, Johnson and a small cabal of black leaders who called themselves the “Inner Circle.” Willis Johnson is at the center of an FBI investigation as a major minority contractor and lobbyist. He had a regular weekly meeting with Leppert when he was mayor.

Shaw had no official roll in City Hall, and an unpaid role at DART.

Rufus and Lynn Flint Shaw’s Murder/Suicide

Lynn Flint Shaw and her husband, columnist Rufus Shaw, were found dead of an apparent murder/suicide on March 8, 2008.

Shaw was about to be indicted on a fraud charge that had nothing to do with politics, on a debt/signature forging issue. Circumstances of her death are mysterious. She had started to run for the council, then lived on the campaign funds, and made up phony expenses. Police determined there was nothing there to investigate. She was still Leppert’s campaign chair at the time of her death.

The Inland Port

Richard Allen in California buys up 5,000 acres, says he’ll create an “inland port,” a transshipping hub in south Dallas that will create 65,000 jobs. This would compete with a Ross Perot initiative in Ft. Worth. (Perot was a big Leppert backer; Leppert had his mayoral victory party at Ross Perot, Jr.’s pad). Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, longest tenured and most powerful among Dallas’ black politicians, stopped the project. He said there needed to be more planning, and Leppert backed him up. Allen had been planning for six years. Price sent cronies (the SALT group), including Willis Johnson, demanding $1 million to be paid to them, and 15% cut of profits. It was a classic shakedown. Allen refused, they blocked the project, and now Allen is in bankruptcy. (Note: The FBI raided the offices of John Wiley Price on June 27, 2011.)

Despite all the foregoing, Schutze wasn’t universally negative on Leppert. He said Leppert’s friends thought he was a good guy, more of a chamber of commerce guy than a politician, and would would probably be naturally somewhat shy and retiring if he weren’t in politics.

As soon as this goes up, I’ll send a query to the Leppert campaign to let them respond, and I’ll post their reply (if any) unedited here.

Interview With Texas Senate Candidate Tom Leppert

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

After my interview with Ted Cruz, I was contacted by the Tom Leppert campaign in late August and asked if I wanted to do an interview with Leppert. And they did this despite my very public doubts over several aspects of Leppert’s record. Leppert’s comments on the campaign trail have always been very solidly conservative; my doubts have been over how much Leppert’s actions match his rhetoric. So I agreed to do an interview, after which is was just a matter of finding a date and time when he would be in Austin, which turned out to be Monday, September 19.

From shortly after each of them jumped into the campaign, Cruz and Leppert have been neck and neck in who has the most effective campaign organization, with both seeming very polished and professional. (David Dewhurst’s start was late enough that I haven’t yet collected enough data to make a determination. So far I’m more than little skeptical that the “Ivory Tower” strategy of avoiding the candidate forums is the right choice.) Early on, I sought to get interviews with all of the major Republican Senate candidates, starting in the order they joined the race. I heard absolutely nothing back from the campaigns of Roger Williams, Michael Williams, or Elizabeth Ames Jones, not even the polite “our candidate is really busy but we’ll see if we can work something in” blogger brushoff. By contrast it’s been very easy and hassle free to get information out of the Cruz and Leppert campaigns.

As I mention in the interview itself, this was designed so be a mixture of general and specific questions, as well as mixture of softball and hardball questions.

A few observations:

  • This was conducted in the atrium of the Renaissance Hotel in the Arboretum, which I thought was the easiest north Austin location to sit down in undisturbed. I think it worked OK, but the acoustics (including some soft background music from hotel sound system) were not necessarily ideal.
  • Unlike the Cruz interview, which was filmed and edited by their campaign A/V guy, I shot this myself on a Mino Flip camera and did a light edit in iMovie. I think it came out OK, but not spectacularly. Sorry for the tilt and the busy background. Maybe in the long run I need to set up a mini-studio in my guest room for filming interviews and such.
  • After I finished editing it, I found out that YouTube had imposed a new limit of 15 minutes per video…and removed the button to request lifting the length limit for the videos you post. After I spent an hour uploading it. Thanks a lot, YouTube! That’s why I had to split it into two parts. Plus one part is over 10 minutes, which means you can’t upload it directly from iMovie to YouTube, which is why the aspect ratios of the two may seem slightly different.
  • I really need to do something about my Jabba the Hutt-like countenance. (I have recently stepped up both diet and exercise efforts, so we shall see.)
  • Despite my reservations about Leppert, I tried to make this a fair, balanced interview, with some tough questions, but not a piece of “ambush journalism.”
  • In person, Leppert comes across as a smart, affable politician. He seems more effective in one-on-one retail politics than he’s been at some of the candidate forums. He talks significantly faster than Ted Cruz did.
  • I had the opposite problem I had with Cruz, when we ran out of time for all the questions I had. Knowing that I only had 25-30 minutes for the interview before Leppert had to go off to his next appointment, I only had 11 questions written down. In fact, he answered the questions fast enough that I got through all my questions and still had several minutes left, so I ended up winging it for the rest of the interview.
  • Knowing the interview was going to be this short, I couldn’t really follow up on portions of questions, such as those on the Trinity Toll Road Project, and the roles of Lynn Flint Shaw and Willis Johnson.
  • As Cruz did, Leppert side-stepped some questions, and brought back others to many of his standard talking points. Indeed, “I don’t talk in seven second sound-bites” seems to be Leppert’s favorite seven second sound-bite. As in the Cruz interview, “nothing personnel.” This is what politicians do (indeed have to do) based on the demands made on them by the campaign. Those caveats aside, I think it was pretty successful and interesting interview.
  • I expect to have more information on Leppert (both positive and negative) in the next week or so.