A couple days ago the DFW entity who goes by the name, sometimes, of Elsie Hotpepper, sent me an email, part of which you see screen capped above.
The subject line says "A trip down memory lane". There was no further explanatory text. Just six attached PDF files. It took me awhile, and a phone call from the aforementioned Hotpepper, before I understood that the point of these PDFs is they are sort of appalling evidence of how long Fort Worth's Trinity River Vision and the town's other instances of corruption have been Boondoggling along.
We will go through these PDFs one by one, gleaning what we can, starting with the one on the left in the top row...
The first one is from way back in 1995, an article in D Magazine titled "Who Runs Fort Worth?" Okay, basically the article makes the case that the Bass Family to a large degree runs Fort Worth, treating the town like it's their own little fiefdom, remaking parts of the town to suit their whims, well, mostly the whims of Ed Bass.
The next PDF shows us the payroll of the Tarrant Regional Water District from 2013. From that we learn that way back then J.D. Granger was being paid 74.80 an hour. The employee with whom J.D. had an extramarital affair, and later married, Shanna Cate, was making 38.23 an hour. The ostensible boss of J.D. and Shanna, Jim Oliver, was making a whopping 146.63 an hour.
The next PDF goes back five years to 2008 with another TRWD payroll, but this time we learn the yearly salary. In 2008 J.D. made 140,000 a year. Girlfriend, Shanna, made 64,200, while their boss, Jim Oliver, made 275,000 a year.
Moving on, the next PDF is an article titled The Uppity Dumpties written by Richard Connor that was in the Fort Worth Business Press way back on November 27, 2006. This article details the cronyism of the group of Fort Worth insiders, like Kay Granger and her son, J.D. and Bryan Eppstein, who benefitted from multiple contracts of the no-bid sort with the water district, including managing the water board campaigns of Jim Lane and Marty Leonard.
The next PDF is an article in The Texas Observer from October 20, 2000 by P.A. Humphrey titled Bringing Home the Bacon. This article details what seems to amount to a form of insider trading by Kay Granger helping finagle pseudo public works projects which would benefit property owned by Granger.
The source of the info in the final PDF we are a bit unsure about. It's an article written by Matt Pulle on September 11, 2005, titled Einstein? No, Eppstein: Fort Worth Republican plays both sides of the fence. At the end of the article we see "Photo of Bryan Eppstein on this page courtesy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram."
So, we can say for certain the photo is from the Star-Telegram. But the article? The Star-Telegram is not known for articles like this which details the tangled web of Eppstein's dealing with the Fort Worth political machine.
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So, there you go. The main thing I got out of these six PDFs is how amazingly long this stuff has been going on. How does one bring about a RICO investigation? RICO, as in Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
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