Lots of speculation going on around town about whether the next shoe to fall in Dallas's ongoing City Hall corruption woes may be a Gucci to the head of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. Today, matter of fact, Kevin Krause has posted a tidbit on The News's City hall blog dealing with Price, Dallas County Judge Jim Foster and our coverage in the paper version of Unfair Park dealing with the Inland Port project.
The Inland Port is a gigantic shipping center under development in Southern Dallas. One of the big principals in it, Richard Allen of The Allen Group, has complained that after he refused to hire a group of expensive "consultants" in South Dallas, Price and the North Texas Council of Governments sabotaged his efforts to get a bridge built. Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, speaking about it to the Observer, described Price as always "shaking people down" in Southern Dallas.
Krause's item reveals that Price's lawyers now have deposed Foster a second time concerning his remarks to me that Price was "all about a shakedown." Foster has been maintaining in depositions that he told me that other people thought Price was involved in shakedowns. He has also been saying under oath that he has been talking a lot to the FBI about Price. For complicated reasons of confidentiality, I will have to let the reader be Sherlock Holmes on that one.
The amusing element here for me is The News.
Their basic coverage of this whole saga so far has been typical Morning News
shoot-down stuff, saying I just exaggerated everything and Richard
Allen was at least as much at fault as Price because Richard Allen
complained. As we all know, the most important thing is never to
involve the public. The News always reminds me of the cop telling the crowd, "Show's over, folks, just return to your homes."
Is there smoke here about Price and the FBI? Who knows. It depends on
what Eddie Bernice has told them about Price and what he told her when
he met with her to discuss Allen and the consultants.
Who the hell knows?
O.K. That's it. Return to your homes.
