Pulse Of The City

When the owners of a Dallas talent agency disappeared, their littlest clients paid a very high price.

At
age 5, professional model Logan Jenkins is experienced enough to know
when he’s been had. Driving past the building that housed his former
talent agency, the now-defunct Marquee Talent, he tells his mom, “I
hate those people.”

While it’s not nice to hate,
Logan’s sentiment is easily understood. He is one of 113 models and
actors who say Marquee bilked them of thousands of dollars when the
agency suddenly closed its doors last December and its owners, Tommy
and Wendy Gallatin, filed for bankruptcy. On August 8, the Consumer
Protection Division of the State Attorney General’s office secured a
permanent injunction against Marquee, ordering $73,210 in restitution
for its former clients. Now, as the legal process drags on and the
Gallatins continue to shirk their debt, their creditors—82 of them
children—try to understand how they fell victim to one of the largest
cases of talent agency fraud in state history.

Marquee came to the attention of
state regulators last November. That’s when the Texas Department of
Licensing and Regulation began receiving calls from clients and parents
of clients who claimed they weren’t getting paid for jobs. To date, the
TDLR has received 145 such complaints.

“One of the things that
really got our attention was just the sheer number of people who filed
complaints with us regarding nonpayment of services,” says Kevin
Ketchum, a spokesperson for the TDLR, which monitors 20 Texas
industries in the interest of public welfare.

Records show that beginning in
June 2000, the Gallatins routinely stole money from their clients.
Instead of taking their usual commission for, say, a catalog ad and
forwarding the remaining balance, the Gallatins told their clients that
the companies had simply not yet paid. In one case, a mother heard from
a family member that her child had appeared in a television commercial.
But when she called the Gallatins, they denied the commercial had ever
aired.

“Looking back now, we
definitely had blinders on,” says Leslie Wilson, whose children are
owed a combined $3,700. “We ignored a lot of problems because we felt
so strongly about the Gallatins personally. It’s not so much the money.
We felt very emotionally invested with them. That part of it hurt my
kids.”

What little can be learned about
the Gallatins comes mostly from parents who don’t wish to be quoted,
for fear of repercussions from the couple. One thing is a matter of
public record: Tommy served six years probation for a theft offense in
1994, a fact that surprised many parents when it came to light. They
knew the Gallatins as charismatic people who seemingly cared about
their clients. Wendy, a flashy dresser, was always very friendly with
the child models and enjoyed playing with them. The Gallatins
themselves are parents of two boys who have done modeling and acting
work, one of them for the television show Barney and Friends. The boys
still attend Highland Park schools, though tax records indicate that
the Gallatins’ former house in University Park is now owned by a bank.
Their phones have been disconnected, and even a former close friend of
Wendy’s says she can no longer reach her.

Now, 10 months after Marquee
went under, its clients still don’t know whether they’ll get paid.
Aside from a $10,000 surety bond maintained by the TDLR since Marquee’s
founding, no one has been able to identify any assets of the bankrupt
Gallatins that can be applied toward the restitution. And their Chapter
7 bankruptcy case has come to a halt until a judge can actually locate
the Gallatins and order them to appear in court. So far, no criminal
charges have been brought against them.

“There are so many ways
they could have stolen money that we’ll never know about,” says one
mother of three former Marquee clients. Like others who’ve spent close
to a year fighting for a few thousand dollars owed her children, she
says she’s doing it to shed light on the Gallatins and how much money
they actually stole.

Meanwhile, little Logan Jenkins
soldiers on. He has landed at another agency and continues to find
work. “This is still a legitimate business,” says Terri Jenkins, his
mother. “You just have to find people who are honest and who are doing
it for the right reasons.”
—Stephen Markus

A ROAST GONE AWRY

When the Press Club of Dallas put on
a roast of Donald Carty in the Hyatt’s Landmark Ballroom in August,
more than a few in attendance were overheard wishing for a quick,
painless death to end their evenings. Such was the poor timing of the
event and of the roasters themselves. After 9/11, the Press Club might
have reconsidered its roastee. Carty is the chairman and CEO of AMR
Corporation, parent of American Airlines, which lost $1.8 billion in
2001 and another $1.1 billion in the first half of this year. Four days
before the roast, Carty announced his company would cut 7,000 jobs.
None of this would seem to put a man in a laughing mood. The roasters,
with one exception, didn’t help. Below, a recap of the three’s
efforts: 
 
 
ROGER STAUBACH tossed a
toy football to the back of the ballroom, to good effect; fumbled
through a prepared speech; at one point had to say, “That’s a joke”;
did not reveal that he sits on AMR’s board; called Carty a “bona fide
dummy,” then threw it to a video projected on a big screen of Carty
getting pulled out of an audience at Ford’s Theatre and used as a
ventriloquist’s dummy (get it?).
  
 
 
LAURA MILLER
also read from a prepared speech; roasted the other roasters more than
she did Carty; said, “It’s good to be up here with boys who are good at
games. One is good at football. The other is good at the blame game”;
reminded everyone, “This is a roast”; told an overly long joke about
airline food; inexplicably invited her husband, state representative
Steve Wolens, onstage to perform a really, really overly long magic
trick that involved tearing up tissue paper, stuffing it into his fist,
then pulling out a pair of tissue paper underwear for Carty.  
 
 
RON KIRK
spoke extemporaneously; appeared in shirtsleeves, apparently
comfortable with his newly acquired avoirdupois; called the Press
Club’s Survivor theme for the evening “stupid,” to good effect; said he
would not bring his wife Matrice up onstage to do a magic trick; made a
Fokker joke; involved the audience in a mock lie-detector test of
more-or-less humorous statements about Carty. 
  
 

Woman on Top 
Dallas
darling SAMANTHA TANNEHILL is your typical stunningly beautiful yet
down-to-earth model who has conquered international catwalks and
survived harrowing equestrian adventures on her parents’ South Texas
ranch. It’s almost too much. The 21-year-old signed with the Campbell
Agency and recently won a national search for the new face of Chanel.
She will walk for the famed French fashion house’s spring 2003 show in
Paris this month. As for the horseplay: “When my parents moved to
Seguin, they bought me a horse,” Tannehill says. “She was ornery, and
she would try to get me off her by going into low-hanging branches so
she could go flirt with boys. And she did brush me off a couple of
times.” Hard to imagine such a woman getting brushed off.

—Kristie Ramirez

Holy Water
A small mom-and-pop company is on a (refreshing) mission from God.

Sitting in her tiny shop in an
obscure office complex in Garland, bottled-water magnate Cindy Bender
hesitates to reveal the final step in her production process. The
result, Rain Fresh, has become the best-selling bottled water at six
area Whole Foods stores and is delivered to the homes of 2,500
customers. Bender smiles sheepishly and then covers that smile with her
hand as she shares her secret.

“I pray over the water,” she says. “People are going to think we’re running some kind of cult out here, but it’s true.”

Bender further reveals that she
used to play Bible-on-tape recordings to the water through a
transducer—until the transducer broke. Her husband Joseph walks in,
figures out what his wife has been talking about, and says, “You didn’t
tell him that, did you?”

The Benders themselves know it
sounds a bit strange. But they are, by all appearances, just average
folk with a fantastic story about how they got into the bottled-water
business. In the early ’80s, when Joseph was diagnosed with the
Epstein-Barr virus, his doctor told him to drink purified water. Joseph
sent test samples to a lab from off-the-shelf brands to find the
purest, but he was not encouraged by the results. So Joseph, who is
also dyslexic and whose formal education ended after a couple years at
Tyler Junior College, taught himself how to purify his own water. It
was pure but nothing special. Then something happened.

In 1985, according to the
company’s literature, Joseph’s truck broke down in an East Texas
thunderstorm, and a tornado dropped from the clouds. He took refuge in
the only spot he could find, a hollowed-out tree. The tornado’s vortex
passed within several feet of him, and Joseph says he “tasted a sweet,
soft water in the air.” He decided to reproduce that water as best he
could, and Rain Fresh was born. Before long, orders were pouring in.

Now Rain Fresh’s production
process entails 24 steps (officially) that make it unique in the
industry. Besides being carbon-filtered, ozonated, and reverse-osmosed,
Rain Fresh goes through a magnetic field that removes “negative
memories” of pollutants. In step number 20, it is enriched with oxygen
in a vortex that mimics the conditions inside a tornado. Then, of
course, there is the final step, after bottling.

“I just believe that doing
business with God in mind is the only way to do it,” Cindy says. “I
feel like I gave my business to God and I just run it for him as a
servant. Does that sound weird?”
—Tim Rogers

Double Trouble
With the opening of Hotel ZaZa, it seems this town has gone a little cuckoo. Here’s how the repeaters stack up.