In 2004 Brooks and his newly formed nonprofit group Friends of the Farm took over and quickly brought the farm back to life after its fallow years. Melton, who is also a master naturalist, planted vegetable beds to feed the poor. They improved 7 miles of trails, grew a 10-acre sorghum maze, and installed a new roof in ecofriendly faux slate on Samuell’s old summer home.
Brooks was a city boy from New Orleans. A fourth-grade trip to a farm and fresh cow’s milk put him off dairy products for decades. “And I spent the last two years on a tractor, looking at wildflowers and hummingbirds,” he says.
Brooks was on a messianic mission to save the farm. He worked one or two oil and gas deals a year to support himself and spent the rest of the time writing grants and hiking through fields to guard stands of bluebells. He signed all his bitter exchanges with city officials “God Bless” and claims to have quoted Genesis to exorcise snakes from the bathroom in Samuell’s old farmhouse.
Despite the hard work, though, the center for broken families never came together. An equestrian boarding enterprise meant to be the major revenue stream for the farm also never materialized. Even with free admission, the park as a nature preserve and base for community programs attracted only about 10,000 visitors a year, a tenth of what it drew when it was a working pioneer farm. “They said they were going to raise millions of dollars out there. We said terrific,” says Paul Dyer, the director of the city’s Park and Recreation Department. But it never happened. Restored blackland prairie? Yawn. The people of Dallas wanted their petting zoo.
Meanwhile the Friends of the Farm volunteers continued to butt heads with city officials. They wanted to build a tree farm. The city told them they already had more trees than it could plant. The Friends of the Farm wanted to start a mulching program. The city said it didn’t have a problem with brush clogging the landfill.
Dyer says it was nothing personal when the city eventually asked for more control over Friends of the Farm’s operations. But the group balked at giving the city veto power over its grant proposals and volunteer programs, and Brooks refused to sign a new contract. Last fall, the city told Brooks and the Friends of the Farm to vacate the premises.
They decamped in October, leaving the row of desert willows they had planted along Beltline Road to wither and die in the city’s care.T
the city may have evicted brooks from the farm, but he hasn’t given up. One almost expects him to appear in a straw hat, chewing a long stalk of hay. But, no, he arrives at a suburban Starbucks to state his case against the city attached to his Bluetooth earpiece and BlackBerry, looking like the oil and gas lawyer that he is. Brooks rifles through the stacks of old newspaper clippings and public records he has assembled, saying, “It makes me furious all over again.”
What he found when he looked into the history of the city’s Samuell dealings was a troubling story documented in plain view. Despite the provisions of the will and the 1940 judgment, the city had gone back many times to get court permission to buy land it wasn’t allowed to buy, to sell Samuell land it wasn’t supposed to sell, and to pocket proceeds from transactions instead of giving them to Samuell’s permanent fund.
For instance, in 1954, the InsurOmedic Life Insurance Company bought one of the downtown Samuell lots from the city for a cash payment to the Samuell trust, plus a gift of 200 acres of South Dallas land. Despite the provision against using Samuell money to buy real estate, those court-approved maneuvers permitted the city to acquire most of what is now known as Crawford Memorial Park. Then the city transformed part of the area into a service center for other parks, sucking Samuell maintenance funds into Crawford’s wormhole. “I call that money laundering,” Brooks says.
While the Texas Attorney General’s office was reviewing his findings this spring, Brooks took a drive through an industrial area of northwest Dallas to look at what Dr. Samuell’s money had bought. Just past the city limits, a motel advertising jacuzzi rentals, and a flood warning sign, he turned onto the rutted gravel park entrance road and saw a meadow and tall trees on the banks of the Trinity River. “It’s pretty. But half the time it’s underwater,” he says. There are no buildings, no playground, no bathrooms, but the parking lot was oddly crowded that cold and drizzly day with people huddled in their cars. “This is basically a place to do drugs and hook up,” Brooks says. “They took the proceeds from prime real estate and went out and literally bought swampland. This is your original Trinity boondoggle.”
But the first instance he found of the city siphoning funds from the Samuell fund occurred way back in 1950. Judge Rawlins approved the city’s request to trade a lot on the southeast corner of Commerce and St. Paul streets that the Statler company wanted for a hotel, in exchange for $50,000 to be paid into the Samuell fund and another lot across the street valued at $100,000. Today the lot the city traded away is the site of the shuttered Hilton that the mayor wants rehabbed or razed, and the only sign of a park there is a dusty palm tree in a bare dirt planter under a sign that says “Keep Out.”
Brooks was disturbed enough by the court’s decision to allow the city to keep the extra land for its own purposes, instead of handing all proceeds of the deal to the Samuell fund. But there was something more. The newspaper clippings and court documents refer to the southeast corner lot the hotel company lusted after. But the 1940 judgment said Samuell had owned the southwest lot. Brooks worries the city secretly swapped its original Samuell lot for this other one the hotel people wanted, without asking the courts for permission. His hunch involves a three-way back-room deal between R.L. Thornton and his Mercantile Continental building planners, the hotel chain, and the park department. “I think I know what happened,” Brooks says of the discrepancy in the records. “And it was fraud at the highest levels.”
