It gets better. White claims that while Price pestered him again and again to sell him the land, he didn't actually want to buy the land directly from White. He wanted him to pass the property through a middleman first: the late Jack Madera, a person who ranks almost up there with Danny Faulkner in the drama department. Madera was a notorious jail concessionaire—the guy who sells cigarettes and candy bars to the prisoners—with contracts in counties all over Texas. He was a flamboyantly generous host and entertainer of sheriffs, a role that cost former Dallas County Sheriff Jim Bowles his re-election when it was revealed that Madera had been hosting and entertaining Bowles a bit too generously.
Do we digress? Just listen for the violin.
Alex Scott
John Wiley Price bought the land for $150,000. Or did he?
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In the end, White says—and the documents confirm—that Price bought the plot directly from White, borrowing $150,000 from the bank to do it. And Fain—well, she gave up her non-existent interest in the land to the commissioner for a measly $10. How generous of her.
Lots of people have offered me theories about why Price might have wanted his administrative assistant to give away interest in land she had no interest in, but they're mostly fantasies based on what we know the feds are looking for: money laundering and that sort of thing. It's not obvious how any laundering would have worked, and there's no evidence in the public record anything like that happened.
The county clerk's office probably wouldn't have noticed if there was. Dallas County Clerk John Warren tells me that, for the most part, his staff just records the documents people bring in.
"The law does not require me to authenticate or police the documents filed with my office," Warren told me in an email. "With the volume of records filed daily that would require me to hire about 10 staffers with legal experience."
If the staff sees something glaringly wrong with a document, he said, they won't file it, and they might even refer it to the district attorney. But I think we're talking Republic of Texas wacko wrong, not Dapheny Fain not-quite-right wrong.
I put the question to Robert Webster, an attorney with Fitzpatrick Hagood Smith. Until 2007, Webster was chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Dallas. I asked what it means if somebody files a quit claim deed giving up an interest they do not possess, but there's no obvious scam attached to it—no tit-for-tat. Is it nothing?
"It may very well be nothing," he said. The tit-for-tat, he said, is the issue.
"If it were an act in the furtherance of another crime, it's conspiracy. But anybody could file a quit claim deed on somebody else's property, and it could be nullity, especially if they're a nut. If I'm not a nut and it's done with some purpose, then it could be criminal."
Got that? I sure don't. I just know that the law is a many-splendored thing, and I want to keep away from it every little chance I get. Commissioner Price, on the other hand, apparently has the opposite reaction.
Take this one little deal, nine acres of undeveloped land in southwest Dallas, multiply it by about a thousand, and you begin to get the scope of what the feds are looking at. Price's annual Kwanzaa Fest alone represents about a million dollars a year in money nobody seems to be able to count. The feds are talking to a number of antiques and art dealers across the city with whom the commissioner does large volumes of cash business. The federal search warrants show that investigators are looking for broad patterns of money-laundering and "structured cash transactions"—deals where you put cash in and out of the bank in just under $10,000 increments to avoid federal reporting requirements.
I really shouldn't wish the feds luck, because that would be un-objective of me as a journalist, Heaven forfend. I do express my sympathy. I know how difficult it can be to sort out the affairs of people who move around real fast. There is even a personal anecdote I would be tempted to share, which I think would be parallel, drawn from an unhappy experience I had once with my wallet on vacation, but I am afraid this story might be offensive to Gypsies, or, as I believe we should call them now, the Roma people. So instead I will say once more, as I said up top:
Lots of luck on this one, boys and girls.
Price wanted him to pass the property through a middleman first: the late Jack Madera, a person who ranks almost up there with Danny Faulkner in the drama department.
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