Late last Friday afternoon, Jim Schutze published a run down of the witnesses both the prosecution and defense would like to call to testify at the John Wiley Price corruption trial, which is set to begin next month. In case you need a reminder, Price has been accused of taking bribes in the form of gifts and cash paid to his longtime political consultant Kathy Nealy in exchange for political favors. Central to the case against Price is the accusation that Ross Perot Jr. paid Nealy in order to sway Price to put up road blocks to a proposed southern Dallas “inland port” project so that the Perot family could eliminate competition for their own inland port, AllianceTexas, which is thriving north of Fort Worth.
The salaciousness of that accusation cannot be undersold. If substantiated it would mean that Price, perhaps the most prominent and certainly the most vocal champion of southern Dallas and economic opportunity for Dallas’ African-American population, was paid by the princes of the Dallas’ wealthy white establishment to kill a project that would have brought tens of thousands of solid jobs to southern Dallas. Schutze has called it, in no uncertain terms, a “betrayal.”
Given the backdrop, what the Dallas Observer columnist expects will unfold during the trial is a thorough examination not only of Price’s conduct, but of the entire “Dallas Way” of doing things. The list of witnesses appears to support the argument:
The defense will have no problem establishing Price’s history as a flamboyant champion of the southern Dallas black community, because those chapters are already written in history. Nor will it have a hard time demonstrating that Price has always claimed a particular interest in the economic development of southern Dallas.
But the government clearly intends to argue that it’s that personal history and that claim to be the main champion of southern Dallas economic development that make the crimes of which he is accused all the more heinous. That twist is what will raise the inland port question into sharp focus.
Price, Nealy and Price’s administrative assistant Dapheny Fain are accused of conspiring to shakedown several companies seeking business with the county, most of them in the information technology area, but the inland port matter rises above the others as an accusation of direct betrayal.
The developers of the inland port claimed it would produce over 30,000 new well-paid jobs in southern Dallas in the port itself and an equal number of new jobs in ancillary and support businesses. The public record and his own statements confirm that Price delayed key infrastructure projects and stalled certain important permits. Eventually the developer wound up in personal and business bankruptcy, and the project now is a shadow of what was originally envisaged.
But the city’s only daily newspaper, the mayor at the time and influential members of the business community sided with Price, not the developer, who was an out-of-towner whose project the Perot family had called a “direct threat” to their own holdings in Fort Worth. At the same time, Price derided the promise of jobs by saying that manual labor was identified with slavery and that “during slavery, everybody had a job.”
Read the whole thing here with this curious fact in mind: Price owns the rights to Schutze’s landmark study of Dallas racial history, The Accommodation.
