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Schmooze Cruise: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that string. And on the Willis Johnson story, no one’s got it.
Last week Channel 8’s Brett Shipp reported on contracts between the county and Johnson, a southern Dallas political consultant and businessman. And over the weekend The Dallas Morning News published several stories about Johnson’s contracts with other public entities.
They were all good stories, but they’re missing the same thing Buzz has been missing: the smoking gun.
Johnson is a close associate of embattled Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. Almost all of the contracts Johnson’s company has landed have come because of the city’s minority-participation rules. But all we have proved so far is that Johnson is a political animal, and a business-savvy one. A smart contractor with his or her ear to the ground knows which minority subcontracting consultant to hire. That consultant invariably tells the contractor to bring in Willis Johnson.
Why does Willis Johnson get to pluck all the plums? He helps get establishment mayors elected. He worked for former mayor Tom Leppert. He worked for the current mayor, Mike Rawlings. You help get a mayor elected, the mayor looks out for you.
But if the only thing the FBI comes up with is that Johnson has one sweet deal in Dallas — even a whole lot of sweet deals in Dallas — then it will have junk, because it’s not against the law to have a sweet deal. In fact, Billy Ravkind, Price’s lawyer, says he hopes he’ll have some rich businessmen on the jury if Price ends up in a trial, because jury studies show that business people don’t look on schmoozing as a bad thing. They look on it as the way of the world.
Johnson has some things going for him. He has a reputation as a guy who does the work. Carol Reed, one of the city’s top Republican political consultants, told me she prefers to work with Johnson because he always does what he says he’s going to do, and he brings back invoices when she asks for them. She told me about another well-known political consultant in southern Dallas too. Whenever Reed asks that person for an invoice, the person calls her a racist.
If that paperwork helps the FBI come up with evidence of a money trail, a string leading directly from Johnson to Price, then maybe that gun will smoke. But for now, all we know about Johnson is that he is one successful son of a gun. And that ain’t against the law.
