Reached by phone later that evening, Ware denied any such briefings by Benavides. "I'm going to call Ted right now," Ware said.
And so he did. And from that moment on, Benavides never again implicated his boss--never said a word about Ware's alleged involvement to Dan Paul. If anyone else from the media bothered to ask him about what the Observer had already published--and it's not clear that anyone did--Benavides wasn't talking.
Last week, Ware told me that he had, indeed, spoken to Benavides that night. "I'll let Ted tell you what was said," Ware told me.
But Benavides, after scampering down a hallway to avoid me, refused to be interviewed about his conversation with Ware. "It's my choice not to talk to you," he said, clearly rattled.
Paul's audit clears Ware. In his report, Paul states: "I have determined that City Manager John Ware was not aware of the confidential 'ASAP' study nor was he aware of the use of consultants to be paid without notification to or approval by the City Council."
But it's not that simple.
Several employees who Paul interviewed say that the auditor must have cleared Ware because no employee was able to tell Paul about any firsthand conversations with Ware regarding the study. They could only speculate about what Ware knew, about what Keheley and Benavides were telling him.
Benavides has apparently changed his tune--remaining mute (or worse) to Paul, about matters he freely discussed with me on November 21. And Keheley denies his own involvement--let alone that of his boss.
Still, plenty of things don't add up.
For one thing, it's hard to believe that two dozen of Ware's top people were working on an arena study that he knew nothing about--especially since, at the time the "secret" work was going on, Ware was the central participant in the business group's study of the same subject.
Asked if he felt betrayed by his top assistant, Keheley, Ware shrugs "At the time it happened, the staff certainly had the authority to do what they did without my approval."
Ask any senior staff member, though, if Ware is content to be out of the loop on any aspect of any city project, and they will laugh at you. "John wants to know everything that's going on," one department head says. "He doesn't really like surprises."
Which is why it's so hard to believe that Ware simply dropped the question of how the secret work was being funded after his search for Keheley's phantom AA turned up nothing last May. "They couldn't find the AA, I stopped the work, and I just forgot about it until this report showed up in November," Ware says.
Even if you believe that Ware was out of the loop until November--and that's believing a lot--it's utterly implausible that by the time Ware, Keheley and Benavides faced off with the city council on November 16, Ware didn't know the truth about the secret study--the same truth that Keheley and Benavides knew but chose not to share with the council.
"I hadn't looked into it," Ware told me. "Other than the fact that it was done in public works and Louise had authorized payments."
Surely, though, Keheley had briefed his boss on the results of his November 3 and 4 meetings with staff. Right? "I don't remember," Ware says.
But how in the world could Ware be so uninformed--so unprepared to face the council and its questions, with so very much at stake?
"I was in Houston having a treatment somewhere during that time period," Ware told me. He was, of course, referring to the day-long cancer treatments he had been enduring on a regular basis after being diagnosed with the life-threatening disease last summer.
John Ware, who is nothing if not the toughest guy anybody has ever seen when it comes to fighting an impossibly tough disease, is so tough that he never talks about his cancer. He was so concerned last fall lest anyone notice any perceptible change in his work habits that he didn't even tell his own office staff when he was in Houston undergoing chemotherapy.
That Ware would now attribute any misstep to his disease means only one of two things. He's been truly too sick to keep track of the city's business (which no one, not even his top deputies, has previously seen any evidence of). Or, in an unprecedented and desperate move, he's using his illness as an excuse not to reveal the full truth about his own involvement in the secret study and its coverup.
Neither scenario bodes well for the city. And neither scenario is, quite frankly, acceptable for a city this large, with this many pressing needs and problems.
But this city council will never do anything about it. "I don't think any of the council members want to discipline John," Fielding has said repeatedly since November. "'So he lied to us. He kept things from us. But how can we discipline him--he has cancer?' And, of course, we can't discipline anybody else if we don't discipline him."
Don't bet on John Ware firing Cliff Keheley this week. But if Keheley keeps his job, you can bet on the city staff continuing to mislead and withhold and distort and cover up and flat-out lie to the city council.
That's a perversion of the high, squeaky clean ideals of the council-manager form of government. But it's likely what this city's going to get, as long as the members of the council are too gutless to demand anything better--for themselves, or the citizens of Dallas, who they represent.
