Paul Fielding Makes a GOTV Push
It's never too late to rewrite your narrative!
“I just read the 13 page ethic violation found by the inspector general against Schultz. please make sure to read it!” wrote one NextDoor user yesterday, to which another replied “how do I find it?”. The first user directs them to another user’s page where apparently, a google doc with the violations has been posted. This is NextDoor, so my interest was justifiably only fleeting. But then, the same user follows up: “Paul Fielding spoke before the city council and discussed the inspector general’s report”. I think to myself: surely not the Paul Fielding — the same one that made history as the first councilmember in Dallas to get arrested by the FBI for conspiracy and fraud? That Paul Fielding?
And then, this tweet:
“As you may know, I used to represent District 11 and I went to prison for a similar charge as to what is alleged in this” says Fielding with a completely straight face unbecoming of someone just saying a lie. It’s silly season friends, but even Dallas has to draw the line somewhere.
The name Paul Fielding might not mean anything to you — it’s been at least a decade and a half since it’s been a relevant thing to know. For much of the last twenty years, Fielding’s claim to fame was the aforementioned arrest and sentencing in federal court after a spectacular fall from grace. This week, Fielding is the flag that the right wing coalition of District 11 is waving loudly and proudly in a last minute push to get their favored candidate (Candy Evans — thrice the candidate, never the victor) in a seat at the horseshoe. But for the people wondering what the fuck is going on, a somewhat quick history is due. Buckle in, she’s kind of a long one:
Paul Fielding was a two-ish term councilman from North Dallas when the feds came knocking. He had painted himself as the most honest man to ever grace the steps of City Hall since his election in 1991 (his first election was actually in 1983 after ousting a Medrano in District 2, but that’s a story for another day). Unfortunately for Fielding, 1991 was also the year the FBI set up shop in Dallas to start a sting operation known as “Operation Cobra Nest”. The original goal of Operation Cobra was to target corruption in the local defense industry. To do so, they set up a fake shop in North Dallas with the goal to “help small minority owned businesses obtain contracts with big defense companies” by helping them obtain financing to do that sort of thing to begin with. It just so happens that this was the business that Paul Fielding was also in.
Fielding was in the business of factoring: the process of buying invoices or debts of another company, thus allowing said company to access cash flow immediately after issuing an invoice. The factoring company then collects directly from the business’s customers. As Laura Miller describes it in her 1996 article titled “Should Paul Fielding go to Jail” , a factoring company works like this: “it purchases the small company’s receivables in the form of a job invoice. Then, the factor goes out and collects the money owed. For its trouble, the factor pockets three to nine percent of the invoice’s total value”. Are you still with me?
Fielding and his partner, Sam Feldman, created their factoring business, Mason Rich, after failing out of a real estate one (spoiler: these guys are just not good at this). There were enough factoring companies in the DFW area at the time that competition was stiff, but the pair had the idea of particularly serving businesses in the Black community. By the time Fielding got elected to City Council, his name had already come up in conversations that the FBI had wire tapped, and the prospect of bagging a politician felt easier and juicer than the defense contractors they had originally come over to get. Still, when Operation Cobra Nest announced their first round of arrests for their sting operation, Fielding wasn’t one of them. And even afterwards, they’d found a bigger fish to fry: a man named Gail Cooper.
Cooper, according to this D Magazine article by Darrell Preston from 1996, was a sleaze magnet. By the time the article was written, Cooper’s record included multiple bankruptcies, domestic violence charges, and multiple clients who would go on to face prison sentences. “A Gail Cooper Special is said to include a bankruptcy, a divorce, and often some form of complex financial restructuring…leaving creditors unable to collect claims”, writes Preston. This record is probably what piques the FBI’s attention, ultimately leading to an armed raid of his ranch in 1995. That same day, the feds strode through the front door of an office in a high rise on Preston Road and executed a search warrant for the other half of the indictment: Paul Fielding.
Fielding and Cooper had crossed paths through Sam Feldman, Fielding’s aforementioned partner in the factoring business, a meeting that the Mason Rich partners probably didn’t envision would lead to both of their arrests soon enough. The whole thing had stemmed out of an intersection of Fielding’s work as a councilman with a company called EDS Corp and his work at Mason Rich with a company called Raypak Corp. Mason Rich had been factoring for Raypak, a minority owned business that was a distributor of that stretchy packing material that keeps six packs of beer together. Raypak sold this stuff to Miller Brewing Company. It would go like this: Raypak would sell its material to Miller and issue an invoice. As the factoring company, Mason Rich would buy that invoice so that Raypak would get their cash without having to wait for Miller. Then, Mason Rich would collect from Miller what was owed. This was all fine and good until one day, Miller stopped paying. Raypak had been a steady business for Mason Rich so far, so Fielding and Feldman continued to buy invoices, waiting for Miller to do their part. They did this for at least 6 months, buying invoices worth more than $300k before realizing they were getting played. With nearly a quarter of the company’s net worth now in the hole, Mason Rich turns to Gail Cooper. For his part, Cooper cooked up a scheme to make it look on paper like Mason Rich was just fine, nothing to see here. That would be all good and well if it wasn’t for the fact that since Mason Rich had (smart, and wealthy) investors it was liable to, this was fraud and conspiracy.
Then, there’s EDS. A Plano based business, EDS was in the process of getting the Dallas City Council to approve a zoning change in Fielding’s district. The FBI says that in this process, Fielding extorted EDS by leaning on them to hire a company that he was working with in his role at Mason Rich. Allegedly, in August 1992, Fielding asks EDS to hire Handy Andy janitorial services, then after they got the contract, asks EDS for a price increase. The FBI also says that once EDS got the contract, Fielding pressured them into buying products from another company he was factoring called Greenchem. As if that wasn’t enough, one the two owners of Greenchem was Paul Fielding himself. Fielding categorically denies this version of events, chief among his defense being that it would be impossible for him to extort a company as big and powerful as EDS. As far as Handy Andy goes, “Fielding says it was a natural suggestion — not a squeeze”. For their part, Fielding notes that “if [EDS] were feeling extorted, I sure couldn’t tell it”. Once the deal went through, EDS threw a party for Fielding and awarded him with a crystal paperweight from Tiffany + Co. Three months later, EDS’ CEO, VP, and General Counsel all wrote checks to Fielding’s campaign. In Laura Miller’s article, she mentions one EDS official who tells her “Paul Fielding couldn’t coerce us into doing anything…I don’t think you’ll see us disagreeing with anything Paul Fielding has to say on this”. Funny enough, it would be the testimony of “top EDS officials” that would lead to Fielding’s sentencing.
In 1997, a federal judge gave Fielding 41 months in prison for extortion and fraud. But for a bit, it looked like it wouldn’t really go that way. The DMN notes “at first, Judge Brown said he saw no evidence to support the [EDS] allegation”. But after the FBI introduced transcripts of EDS officials saying they “believed Mr. Fielding had made implicit threats to torpedo efforts at rezoning the company’s…campus”, he ruled that extortion did in fact take place. Gail Cooper pled guilty to three felony counts, and two more of Cooper’s clients and Fielding’s partner, Sam Feldman, got seven months in prison. Fielding, once known as a fiscal conservative and watchdog around the horseshoe, resigned from the council and has been largely silent since.
So, I hope you can imagine my surprise when on a random day in April, Paul Fielding walks up to the microphone at a City Council meeting, introduces himself as a resident of District 11 and starts talking about a report from the Inspector General. “I have tried diligently to find out what the outcome of this investigation has been” he says. Since the city’s website is down, I couldn’t find a copy of this investigation outside of what was in the comments section on this twitter post. Fellow D11 loser and user of the hashtag #DEImustDIE (I mean, LOL) Barry Wernick jumps in to let us know that Fielding is claiming he went to prison for the “same thing Shultz did according to the conclusion reached by the IG report”. A user with the handle MomsLoveFreedom chimes in with screenshots of said report (note: who even knows if this report is real — every time someone asks for it, they say DM me and I’ll send it to you???) . From what I can gather, here’s what allegedly happened:
There’s a congregation named Congregation Alteres Israel, registered as a c3 non profit, who owns a single family residence in District 11. The owner hosts “weekly services and large community meals”, events that are advertised through Facebook. These events have been driving complaints to the city’s 311 system due to “loud music at late night hours, bounce houses that obstruct roadways, and vehicles lining both sides of the street”. So, code compliance shows up to investigate and basically says the owner needs to get a permit to operate the synagogue. This visit is followed up a couple times to no resolution. At some point, this resident of District 11 contacts his council member, Schultz, who then intervenes and says code compliance was mistaken since these are private gatherings and Code should supply them with information on regulations on those types of events. Then on May 27, the inspector closed the case file, noting that the owner had met with Schultz to plead his case.
The “Conclusion” section of the report then states that “there is no reasonable basis for the decision by Schultz to overrule the judgement of Code Compliance staff” and “by exceeding her authority and exerting improper influence to subvert this investigation, Schultz allows [the congregation] to operate outside the law”.
Okay, so: there’s a report that currently only exists in screenshot format that is being passed around like a Jim Schutze banned book, a group of dedicated Evans supporters utilizing it like a GOTV strategy from the campaign school of “just see if it sticks”, and a former indicted council member emerging from the ashes to liken his federal extortion and fraud case to…this?
I guess come to your own conclusions but here is mine: maybe fourth time’s the charm.