Banned from City Hall, banished from the Civic Plaza

Whistleblowers 'excluded from civic process'

San Antonio – He burns for justice, doubts the veracity of any official, elected or appointed, and demands action through alternative means to the white hats and heros of Texas mythology.

John Foddrill/photo-SA Current

John Foddrill says any investigation by police and Texas Rangers into the violent campus police shooting death of a university student over a traffic stop is doomed before it starts.

Why?

Because “any 'investigation' by the DPS/Texas Rangers is tainted due to the fact that DPS Director McCraw, DPS Major Alvin Alexis and others are helping to conceal the aggravated perjury, oppression, obstruction, falsification of documents, etc. of former Texas Ranger Chief Hank Whitman and others who assisted in the ongoing criminal conspiracy to conceal massive long-term public/police corruption inside the City/County.”

Like Socrates, he is in the peculiar position of a man who has been accused of no particular wrongdoing, other than voicing his “shrill” opinions.

Those opinions are backed by graphic evidence in the form of documents that prove elected and appointed officials in San Antonio and Bexar County have totally ignored the fact that hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds budgeted for telephone communications are routinely misapplied for such items as office remodeling and junkets to hotels.

That's not all. He has a series of e-mails that show how a department head directed a vendor to falsify pay records to show employees were compensated for hours worked, then the funds were used to pay for other projects at the direction of staff members who report to elected officials.

For nearly four years, Foddrill was an enraged lion, bearded in his den, firing information requests and e-mails off at a brisk pace that left his correspondents overwhelmed, bewildered at his vehemence.

Media outlets and reporters admit they long ago gave up on him during the course of a 45-month “ban” on any visits to City Hall or the Civic Plaza, City Council meetings, or city offices that City Attorney Michael Bernard and San Antonio Police Chief William McManus unilaterally and extra judicially placed upon he and former Fire Department contract compliance officer Michael Cuellar.

Michael Cuellar/photo-NPR

Or else what?

They would both be arrested for the misdemeanor crime of criminal trespassing – on public property. John Foddrill says it's an ordeal that resembles more a reign of terror than a civil process of settling a dispute.

They have something in common, Foddrill and Cuellar. Both of them allege in federal lawsuits that they were deprived of their civil rights by an active conspiracy by police and other officials when one day a couple of police officers showed up on their front doorsteps with a letter informing them of their new status as banished and banned personas non gratas in the civic arena. There was no explanation, no recourse to appeal, no other due process of law explained, offered, or denied. Sphinx-like, the City of San Antonio answered no questions, made no replies to repeated inquiries until ordered by a federal Court.

It's a story straight out of the hell of the darkest days of the apartheid government of South Africa, but it didn't happen in some third world toilet. It happened in downtown San Antonio, cradle of liberty in the Lone Star State.

Here's how Foddrill describes his transgression. He says he merely exposed, through a constant barrage of public information act requests and e-mails to officials and media that “Bexar County DA Susan Reed and her Office are not to be trusted to find justice for Cameron (Robert Cameron Redus) as they have assisted with the ongoing criminal conspiracy by City/ County officials and employees to conceal three decades of grant fraud, bond fraud, theft, accounting fraud, 45 months of open meeting abuses, official oppression by Chief McManus, 'fraud upon the court,' retaliation, etc.”

One day, said Foddrill, the federal judge who is hearing a case filed on his behalf by Texas Civil Rights Project attorney Jim Harrington asked him confidentially why he didn't just go on back to City Hall and see what would happen. Harrington took on the City of Austin in federal court and got a reversal of a similar ban on the Occupy Austin movement from being able to visit City Hall in that community. 

The judge later lifted the ban on Foddrill and Cuellar's visits to San Antonio City Hall.

Foddrill's reply, couched in the words of an e-mail: “People still ask me and the federal judge asked me why I never defied the illegal ban and just went down to City Hall or a Council meeting in defiance of the law. I told the Judge and tell everyone that I feared for my life and still do. I didn't want to give McManus and SAPD any excuse to handcuff, Taser or arrest me as too many innocent people have died while in jail or under arrest by our corrupt cops. I feared being Tasered to death, being found hung in my cell , getting shot in the back in a failed escape attempt, etc. It happens all the time. I still will not attend public meetings and will not go to City Hall out of fear. I want McManus and the others prosecuted and jailed so that citizens like me don't have to live in fear any more. This thing has drug on for years BUT I am still alive and still am here for my family.”

His lawyers have told him not to make waves, to keep his mouth shut while federal litigation drags on and on through the system. But his anxieties speak more loudly.

“Recently, when a University of the Incarnate Word cop shot 23 year-old student Cameron Redus five times killing him at a traffic stop , when an off duty sheriff deputy murdered an unarmed commuter because their cars accidently bumped , when a Castle Hills police officer left his jurisdiction when he drove across town to shoot a mentally ill citizen and when SAPD officer Jackie Neal handcuffed and raped a pregnant 19 year old teenager on the trunk of his patrol car I said...enough is enough. I can't stand by and wait for our corrupt legal system to fix things...a pipe dream at best.”

He's not alone. Cuellar got a new city job after his bad experience with the Fire Department, in which he, too, uncovered similar fiscal abuses and also lost his job over rumors of workplace violence and a testy working relationship with other staff members – complaints that, as in Foddrill's case, never resulted in a criminal investigation or complaint.

Cuellar told an interviewer he didn't report for work on the new job, fearing an arrest for trespassing that could have resulted in complications too frightening to contemplate.

But the evidence remains, and though there was a trial in a state court, it resulted in a take nothing judgment, and Foddrill has never had an opportunity to bring out the documents, the audio recordings that prove his allegations. He is burning to expose them to the public.

Here is a small sample: A smoking gun e-mail Foddrill obtained details how City IT manager Jose Medina committed wire/mail fraud with Isabel Gonzaba, an official of IG Communications/Globalscope, a city vendor, to steal $200,000 from a HUD grant by falsifying pay records.

Foddrill wrote that the records represent “fraudulent payments were processed via the city's internal telephone 'variable' billing account that was used for decades to secretly gain access to tens of millions of dollars with no competitive bidding, public review, city ordinance, council vote...in violation of the city charter, state law and OMB/federal regulations/statutes."

Watch these columns for more evidence as it becomes available, as promised.