07/25/02      Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia ...Dallas?

Dallas being a corporation, it strikes me that this whole mess might well fall under the current corporate fraud model, perhaps even with respect to the legal recourse of us "shareholders," the Dallas citizen/taxpayers. 

Ron Kirk and John Ware constituted a sort of two-headed CEO type creature that sold out the corporation for their personal enrichment:

Kirk's wife was given a half-million dollars in stock options by Tom Hicks.

Ware was given a lucrative job (and a sort of company of his own by Hicks) immediately after he, as City Manager, negotiated the truly awful arena deal, supposedly on behalf of the city/corporation.  In corporate terms, Ware acted as the Chief Operating Officer, or president, and Kirk acted as the Chairman of the Board of Directors.  

It seems to me a good argument could be made that they defrauded the citizen/taxpayers or "shareholders."  As the two-headed CEO creature of the corporation, with the "insider information" in the form of the secret deals they "negotiated" with the arena billionaire bums, it is obvious they willfully, knowingly, and (How could it not be?) criminally defrauded the citizen/taxpayer shareholders.  

City Manager Ware, with an imminent lucrative job from Tom Hicks in the works, hammered out a contract that sold out the corporation for which he had accepted fiduciary responsibility.

Mayor Kirk, with full knowledge of the secret deals and his wife's half-million in hand, flat lied to the citizen/taxpayer shareholders in his efforts to get the deal accepted.  

Kind of parallels things like "cooked numbers" and fraudulently misleading shareholder reports, eh?  

Poor Old Al Lipscomb was convicted for far less (a puny $1000 a month) and sentenced to "prison" for his criminal malfeasance... and he was just a member of the Board of Directors (City Council).  How come Kirk and Ware get a free pass from the current  CEO witch hunt when they, through their arena Bad Deal, epitomize the end result of criminal corporate fraud when perpetrated by corrupt, psychopathic CEOs -- personal enrichment for themselves and their cronies at the expense of a raped and looted corporation (the City of Dallas sure fits that description)?  

It seems to me these two are little different from the other corporate crooks we see reviled every night on the news.  They, too, should face jail time for their criminal malfeasance.