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…
While we’re on the subject of embarrassing videos, let’s take a peek at the one above, posted by the Dallas Police Department a few days ago. In it, a man breaks into a DPD bait car to steal the GPS device, and the department’s asking if anyone knows who’s responsible…
Courthouse News this morning brings us The Case of the For-Profit Vocational School vs. The Personal-Injury Law Firm. The former is Rhodes Colleges, a California-based chain of campuses that offers courses in everything from criminal justice to HVAC repair (maybe you’ve seen the ads?). Locally, Rhodes has three DFW locations…
After the jump, in its entirety, is a release we just received that offers sketchy details involving 19 people — most of them locals — who were indicted by a federal grand jury this week for their involvement in what the U.S. Attorney’s Office calls a “massive cybercrime conspiracy.” We…
Four years ago we were writing about the race for Dallas County Precinct 5 constable: Mike Dupree v. Jaime Cortes. Ah, the good ol’ days; how things have …. changed? Now, it’s Jaime Cortes v. a handful of comers looking to snatch away his job, which he only got after…
We’ve written quite a bit about the Dallas Police Department’s efforts to treat prostitutes not as criminals, but as victims: In ’06, Jesse Hyde profiled the so-called “whore cop” who works truck stops; two years later, he wrote about the Letot Center, where minors on the run from their pimps…
Admit it. You laughed when the DPD and city officials held a press conference last week urging locals to stop firing guns while bringing in the new year. “No … gunfire … on … New … Year’s … Eve,” Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway said nice and slow in an…
Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle says he’s not interested in committing initially to any of the numerous job offers he’s received since announcing his retirement in November. He’s been approached mostly with consulting and teaching positions, he says, and no one has asked him to become the top cop someplace…
In some parts of town, you can tell when the calendar needs flipping when the guns start firing; apparently, nothing says “Happy New Year!” like shooting a pistol in the air. And while there haven’t been any serious injuries due to the celebratory pop-pop-pop in recent years, according to Dallas…
It’s always a good idea ’round this time of the year to make a list of accomplishments, if only to figure out what you need to get done in the coming year. So happens, of course, that Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins needs to get re-elected in 2010, and,…
While waiting for Macerich officials to return our calls concerning Valley View Center, where I spent some of this afternoon, there’s this story out of Phoenix worth a look-see, if only as a cautionary tale. Because if the movies have taught us anything, it’s that couples stopped by the police…
Sorry, but one last bit of bookkeeping before I hit the nog: We’ve known for a while when Don Hill and the missus, former City Plan Commissioner D’Angelo Lee and two others found guilty in the federal City Hall corruption trial are being sentenced; we’ve had February 26 circled on…
Another front-page story last week in The Dallas Morning News criticizing the Dallas Police Department’s crime-reporting methods had the paper in a self-congratulatory mood, with the editorial board demanding “an independent external audit or a formal FBI review of Dallas’ crime-reporting procedures” and Steve Blow applauding his colleagues for revealing…
Downtown Dallas was on fire last night — at least, its trash cans were. Six or seven of them, to be more exact. That’s what firefighters say. We saw four for sure — the first one around 9. The trash can at the corner of Griffin Street and Ross Avenue…
