New Details Alleged in Scheme to Make Millions Off First Border Wall in Texas

 

The latest lawsuit filing in Hidalgo County talks of kickback deals worked out over drinks and steak dinners.

by Kiah Collier, The Texas Tribune, and T. Christian Miller, ProPublica

This story was co-published with The Texas Tribune.

The kickback scheme was allegedly hashed out over weeknight drinks at a steakhouse in a border county in south Texas. Amid surf and turf and expensive scotch, a Hidalgo County official said he would meet with contractors in the clubby confines of the restaurant in a strip mall in McAllen.

There, Godfrey Garza Jr., director of the county’s drainage district, cajoled company executives to hire a firm owned by his family in exchange for a cut of lucrative construction contracts, according to new documents filed in state district court in Hidalgo County. The target of the plan: a $232 million project funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the county to build a border fence and rehabilitate aging dirt levees along the Rio Grande.

The previously unreported details of Garza’s alleged scheme emerged last week in an ongoing lawsuit in which the county has sued companies owned by Garza, his wife and their two sons for fraud during the construction of the combined levee-fence. The new filings also implicate one of Texas’ most powerful engineering firms, Dannenbaum Engineering, as a participant in the scheme.

“[T]he deeper we look into this case the more troubling facts we discover,” said Michael J. Blanchard, the county’s lawyer. “As evidence develops, it is increasingly clear that the wrongdoing in this case rose beyond the level of simple fraud.”

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Source: ProPublica