After Their Murder-Suicide, Questions About Rufus and Lynn Flint Shaw's Shady Dealings Haunt Dallas

Leppert's response to any and all inquiries about these e-mails, the existence of an Inner Circle or the role of Willis Johnson has been sarcastic and dismissive. When Dallas Observer reporter Sam Merten asked him at a public event last week if Johnson had a special role as gatekeeper for minorities seeking contact with him, Leppert said, "If you look at my schedule, and you look at what I did, and anybody does, they would laugh in your face."

The Inner Circle is not a mere figure of speech. It is a fairly formalized organization with a semi-monthly schedule of meetings. One of the e-mails, providing the schedule for the full year, starts out, "Subject: Inner Circle group schedule. Mayor Leppert has asked me to invite you to a meeting on Friday, August 17th at 7:30 a.m. and the location will be the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce...He would like to meet with the entire group every other week."

I asked Leppert's chief of staff, Chris Heinbaugh, if Leppert had attended meetings at the Black Chamber on any of those dates. He e-mailed me back: "The calendar indicates 8/17 and 10/26."

I am taking that as a yes.

Let's talk about the Shaws. Not in news stories but in columns and editorials The Dallas Morning News has portrayed the Shaws as brave martyrs. The day they were found dead, the News published an editorial on its Web page calling Rufus Shaw "a gruff political analyst and stinging critic of Dallas' power structures."

No, he wasn't. He was a grifter with no visible means of support. His wife was smart, charming and a hard worker, but she, too, could be ruthless, cutting others dead in order to save her own skin. I spoke with one woman who was so wounded and humiliated by a scam Lynn Flint Shaw pulled on her that she had to leave the state for several years.

One story the News broke about the Shaws a day after their deaths was that police found evidence in their home indicating they had been paying their mortgage out of her city council campaign funds, which would be illegal.

I had been reporting for months about her misuse of campaign funds. I recently asked Heinbaugh, Leppert's chief of staff, why the mayor had never addressed her misuse of campaign funds, in spite of his very public call for higher ethical standards in the matter of campaign finance reports.

Heinbaugh answered me: "They are allegations, and the Mayor prefers not to respond to allegations. As you probably know, allegations of campaign finance disclosure violations are not handled at City Hall or under the City Ethics Code, but usually by the Texas Ethics Commission or in some cases, a District Attorney. Those would probably be the correct venues to have your allegations addressed."

Well, in fact, Section 12A-10 of the city's code of ethics is devoted entirely to campaign finances, and, as far as I have been able to determine, the proper party to go to the district attorney and make a complaint about violations would in fact be the city or a high city official. Like the mayor. But Leppert's response, through Heinbaugh, is a total blow-off.

Nelson of the Morning News editorial page asked "why not wait a week" before publishing the e-mails and raising questions about the Shaws. My answer is this. The questions aren't about the Shaws. The questions are all about Tom Leppert. About City Hall and DART. About that damn hotel the Morning News is pimping for so hard.

How many more crucially important public policy votes are going to tilt one way or the other because somebody in The Inner Circle got a contract?

In the last week I have received calls and communications from a number of people who have been involved in the development of DART, the Dallas Center for Performing Arts and various City Hall initiatives. I mean people who were involved at the top.

One person said to me: "Dallas should be taking the Shaw story the same way it took the Kennedy assassination," as an urgent call for a profound and searing self-examination.

Nothing in the lives of the Shaws merited their deaths. None of it was worth depriving their son of his parents. In that, there is no proportion. Instead, I see a sense in which they were victims, too, of a system that uses people cynically for its own narrow gain. I refer specifically to the Morning News editorial page.

But who are the ultimate victims? You're right. You. And me. We are. That's why we're the ones who have to clean up this cesspool. And I'm not just talking about South Dallas. The place to start is with Leppert and the Citizens Council.