About an hour ago, Dallas County Judge Jim Foster summoned a few members of the media, including Sam, to the commissioners court in order to discuss Danny Defenbaugh’s investigation into the alleged misdeeds of Constable Jaime Cortes. Sam will be along shortly with his notes from his interview with Foster,…
Didn’t see this coming: Jibreel Rashad’s guilty! Rashad, of course, was among the myriad defendants named in the feds’ indictment in the Dallas City Hall corruption case, and, like those who came before him — those who pleaded guilty or those who were convicted — he’s looking at a stay…
As he prepared to board an airplane bound for Austin at approximately 6 p.m. on Wednesday night, Dallas County Judge Jim Foster received a flurry of phone calls related to the now-infamous meeting that Dallas County Constable Jaime Cortes had with approximately 30 of his deputies. With Dallas County Sheriff…
Reaction to Terri Hodge’s plea deal with the feds continues to trickle in, with Angela Hunt telling us this afternoon that she has withdrawn her support of Hodge “for obvious reasons” and now supports Eric Johnson in the March 2 Democratic primary. (Update: Hunt, Craig Watkins, Royce West, Rafael Anchia…
Democratic precinct chair and former City Plan Commissioner Neil Emmons was certainly not alone in his support of Terri Hodge in her bid for an eighth term in Texas House District 100, as Hodge’s endorsements included several of the city’s most notable politicos. But even after Hodge pleaded guilty in…
Back in December, Business Resources Corp. filed suit against Dallas County claiming officials hired Virginia-based GTSI to preserve county docs (birth records, death certificates, etc.) at a cost of $17.5 million over seven years — even though the county didn’t take bids on the contract and GTSI doesn’t do the…
The in-box is filling up with NBA All-Star Weekend party announcements — no actual invites, though, which is just as well, as that’s the weekend I’m planning a spiritual retreat or a lost weekend of drinking, either/or. The most recent: a three-day “epic extravaganza” spread out at the Ghostbar and…
Perhaps you recall the recent tale of Inequa Rushing and Waylon McDonald, who, late last month, robbed a bank at East R.L. Thornton Freeway and Grand Avenue — and left a baby in the backseat, not to mention ID in the parking lot. It merited a brief mention in the…
The indictment against Terri Hodge has always looked much more damning than the evidence facing the rest of the gang involved in the City Hall corruption case, and it turns out that, well, it’s all true. Hodge admitted as much in her factual résumé, which she signed Monday as part…
The story’s circulating this morning that Terri Hodge is this close to pleading guilty in her involvement in the Dallas City Hall federal corruption case and is stepping down from the Texas House of Representatives. Unfair Park has been unable to reach anyone in the U.S. Attorney’s Office handling the…
Attorneys for former Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill and Ray Jackson, who represented Hill during last year’s City Hall corruption trial, argued in court Thursday afternoon that any violations of U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn’s gag order issued shortly before Hill’s trial began were not willful, and therefore not criminal…
Never heard of a store called Movies and CDs on Bruton Road till this morning. Then again, having someone burn me a bootleg of 27 Dresses for five bucks while I wait isn’t exactly on my to-do list. The FBI, however, took a decided interest in the joint, and in…
Public meetings often take on the tone of the most disgruntled citizen present, and last night was no exception. However, City Manager Mary Suhm tried to pretend she was genuinely interested in hearing from the 25 folks who showed up at Dallas City Hall last night to participate in the…
From April 1985 till May of ’08, Barbara Nestel was a secretary for the Boy Scouts of America. Among her duties: reconciling financial accounts and processing payments for the National Catholic Committee on Scouting for merchandise and expenses. Which is how she could defraud the Boy Scouts out of $350,000,…
Speaking of courthouse filings, our sister paper in Houston and KTRK-TV, the ABC affiliate down thataways, bring news of a lawsuit filed here by a 25-year-old Chevron petroleum engineer who claims he was assaulted on New Year’s Eve at the Magnolia Hotel downtown.According to the suit, Ivan Pinney of The…
Seriously — the city wants to know. Needs to know. Right now. So it claims, anyhow, which is why the city’s official Web site-bulletin board now features a heads-up for three “community meetings” during which city officials will hear from you (and maybe you, but not you) about what you’re…
As mentioned Monday, the city had one of its attorneys — in this case, Charles Estee, joined by one of the state’s lawyers — down in Austin yesterday presenting oral arguments before the Supreme Court of Texas in a long-running case involving towed cars that were seized by the Dallas…
While we await the Supreme Court of Texas’s ruling in the city’s so-called billion-dollar case later this year, let’s consider another city of Dallas case going before the court at 9 a.m. sharp tomorrow: City of Dallas. v. VSC, LLC. The court will hear oral arguments in the years-old suit…
Turns out, reports of Michael Faulkner’s death were highly exaggerated. Special Agent Mark White, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Dallas spokesman, tells Unfair Park today that the Southlake resident — who was among the 19 indicted by a federal grand jury last week for a “massive cybercrime conspiracy” — was…
More than two years ago, Kevin Colquitt filed a lawsuit in Dallas federal court in which he alleges “the makers of stents approved to treat digestive tract cancers had illegally marketed them for years to treat blocked blood vessels in other parts of the body,” as The New York Times…
When the shooting occurred in June, it merited but a few paragraphs in a crime brief headlined, “19-year-old fires on gang officers, Dallas police say.” Today, though, the U.S. Attorney sends word that a federal jury found Rene Salazar, a member of the East Side Homeboys, guilty of two counts…
Back in August of ’08, Sam wrote about the case of the Dallas Police Department’s Roosevelt Holiday, who claimed at the time that he’d been pushed out of his job as a crime scene detective by higher-ups who didn’t like the color of his skin. Holiday, who’s black, initially filed…
