The Texas attorney general’s office announced yesterday that it has sued the Texas Highway Patrol Museum, a nonprofit telemarketing organization based in San Antonio that raises millions of dollars in the name of helping state troopers.

I had always been curious about the museum, which is housed in a brick building at St. Mary’s and Alamo streets but attracts few visitors. In October, we examined the museum’s tax records and found that only a fraction of the nearly $12 million in revenue raised by the museum’s telemarketers actually went towards the charitable causes it touted. For every dollar raised, less than a penny was spent on Department of Public Safety troopers and their families.

Attorney General Greg Abbott’s lawsuit reveals new details about what, exactly, donors’ money was spent on. State investigators obtained financial information and credit card statements from the museum, and found employees had paid for cigars, liquor, vacations, meals and “exorbitant” vet bills for an “office cat.” The lawsuit describes an organization with few controls over how money was spent, and an absentee board that seldom asked questions.

Here’s an annotated copy of the lawsuit:

In our last story, I interviewed Scott Henson at the criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast, who had received a telemarketing call from the museum in August. Scott wasn’t happy that the caller initially claimed to be with the Texas Highway Patrol — as if the caller were really with the Department of Public Safety. “This group is about as much about helping troopers as buzzards are about helping roadkill,” Scott wrote at the time. He called yesterday’s lawsuit “way past time.”

The museum’s assets have been frozen and it’s been closed since Friday. Its lawyer, Kim Brown, called the lawsuit “heavy handed” and said the expenses were justified.

What about the cigars?

Prizes for telemarketers, he said.

Liquor?

Drinks for office parties.

The office cat?

The vet bills for the cat were unavoidable.

The lawsuit lays out more expenses for trips, meals and cars that the state describes as wasteful spending. But Brown said the museum is hardly a fly-by-night organization that defrauds people. The small museum has operated in San Antonio for years, he said, and while it has high overhead costs, it does spend money on charitable causes.

The attorney general is seeking to dissolve the nonprofit museum and its related entities. The next step is a hearing for a temporary injunction that has yet to be scheduled.

Here’s a searchable library of all primary documents we’ve obtained about the museum. If you’ve had any experiences with the museum or its telemarketers, feel free to contact us.

Watch October 14, 2011 | Texas Highway Patrol Museum: Fundraising Questions on PBS. See more from Texas Week.

Many thanks to Rick Casey, Bruce Kates, and the staff at KLRN’s Texas Week for having me on their show to talk about the Texas Highway Patrol Museum and its little-known purpose as a telemarketing operation.

The Texas Highway Patrol Museum sits on a prime piece of property near downtown San Antonio, across the street from Rosario’s Café y Cantina. Business is booming at Rosario’s, but not so much at the museum. It usually looks empty every time I drive by or hang out in King William. I’ve been kind of curious what their deal is.

After I wrote about delays and conflicts at the Briscoe Western Art Museum last month, Express-News police reporter Michelle Mondo suggested I take a look at the highway patrol museum. It sounded interesting.

A quick Google search showed that others had asked similar questions about the museum over the years and discovered red flags. Amy Davis, a TV reporter who used to work in San Antonio and now works in Houston, investigated the museum in April 2008 and produced this in-depth report. Davis found that the museum was actually a telemarketing operation, and she interviewed a former employee who said the group spent little money on troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety. The KSAT Defenders produced a similar report later that year.

More recently, Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast blogged about a phone call he received from a telemarketer who said he worked for the “Texas Highway Patrol.” Henson asked if he meant DPS — and the caller said yes. It’s a big no-no to falsely claim to be affiliated with a law enforcement agency.

What does DPS, the government agency that employs state troopers, think about the museum? Not much. The agency’s website has a general warning about giving money to telemarketers — but it also has a web page that focuses on the highway patrol museum in San Antonio. DPS criticizes the exhibits, puts “museum” in quotes and warns the public not to give it money.

All this adds up to a good story that people need to know about.

The museum is a nonprofit organization, so its tax records are open to the public. Guidestar offers free access to the three most recent years of tax returns for most nonprofit organizations. The Express-News has an account with Guidestar that gives us access to even more tax returns, which offers a treasure trove of historical information about charities.

Database Editor Kelly Guckian logged into Guidestar and got me copies of everything available for the Texas Highway Patrol Museum and a related entity, the Texas Highway Patrol Association. The two organizations share the same board members, and both were founded by Lane Denton, a former state representative from Waco who was found guilty of stealing money from a different law enforcement charity.

The museum is the telemarketing arm of the partnership. It employed more than 380 people in 2009, most of whom worked at call centers in El Paso, Austin and Houston. The association provides benefits to state troopers.

A brochure states the group gives the “finest benefits possible” to troopers. But looking at a five-year span of tax returns showed that while benefits were indeed paid to troopers and their families, they were only a fraction of the total revenues raked in by the museum’s telemarketers.

I typed all the financial information into a spreadsheet. Here are the numbers:

Donors gave nearly $12 million to the museum, but the association gave only $65,300 to DPS troopers and their families. That’s half a penny for every dollar raised.

Yet when telemarketers call potential donors, they often refer to recently killed troopers by name, pull heart-strings, and lead people to believe that most of their money is actually going to help the people who need it. That happened to the friend of David Slaton, a trooper who died last year in a car accident. The telemarketing call hit her hard.

My story about the museum ran Sunday and many outraged readers responded that they had received telemarketing calls from this organization and others.

What do people with the museum have to say about all this? The employees I spoke with were friendly, and the director of marketing who oversees the telemarketing operation basically described it as a necessary evil. There’s overhead, he said, but without the telemarketing calls, no money would be coming in at all.

But there are more effective ways to help peace officers. Slaton’s friend told me she was impressed by the 100 Club of Houston, which does not raise money through telemarketers. It relies on membership donations, and according to its tax returns, it gave about $1 million in survivor benefits last year.

Rick Hartley, executive director of the 100 Club, said the group has no plans whatsoever to try telemarketing.

It’s not worth the blow to their credibility.

Trouble at the Alamo: How it fell under state oversight on Dipity.

Reading Scott Huddleston’s latest update about the turmoil at the Alamo, I wondered how many people remember the roots of the problem and why the state of Texas got involved in the first place. I doubt casual readers know Scott deserves some of the credit for the changes — or the blame, depending on how you view the Alamo’s caretakers, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas.

Huddleston

Scott got involved when a tipster told him that some members of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas questioned the group’s leadership, and were forming their own splinter group to raise money for the Alamo.

“I wanted the story to be more than ‘she said, she said,’” Scott told me. He began obtaining copies of contracts, emails, letters — anything that would shed light on what was going on at the Alamo. He found examples of questionable spending and a lack of focus. “Their biggest challenge was an inability to raise money for capital improvements,” Scott said.

“I felt like I needed to be shaking the bushes just to keep up with them,” Scott said.

After his first story about the rift was published, he filed an open records request with the state of Texas to find out how the Daughters were spending funds raised from license plates with Alamo themes. It turned out the Alamo only received a portion of the funds for upkeep.

As more members of the Daughters publicly criticized the group’s leadership, some were expelled for speaking with the media, which led to more follow-up stories.

Scott wrote at least 60 articles in the past two years that mentioned the Alamo and its troubled caretaker. Most stories were about the turmoil within the organization and its track record at the Alamo. For long, seemingly never-ending sagas like this, newspapers really need to devise a way to help readers see the whole picture.

Google’s Living Stories project tried to address this problem. It’s no longer supported but it inspired ProPublica to generate a similar design that gives readers a timeline and easy access to past posts about the topic they’re interested in.

Dipity is also cool — I made this timeline compiling most of Scott’s stories.

It’d be great if newspapers came up with something like Living Stories. Sometimes a story is bigger than a single article. We ought to figure out a way to systematically tell that story in a compelling way.

Retaining wall collapse and landslide in San Antonio on Dipity.

After a towering retaining wall collapsed and threatened scores of homes last year in the San Antonio neighborhood of Rivermist, an obvious question arose: How safe were the untold number of other residential retaining walls in the city?

Under city code, walls in San Antonio over four feet tall were supposed to go through a permitting process. But until Rivermist, that permitting process rarely happened in new subdivisions — despite the widespread use of large walls to sculpt hillsides in the rapidly growing Texas Hill Country.

In other words, no one at the city could vouch for the safety of other retaining walls, many of which are 20 feet high or taller.

After the collapse at Rivermist, the city announced that all tall residential walls built in the last three years had to be verified as safe by an engineer and permitted. So far, most walls have passed muster.

But one subdivision with 14 retaining walls is still having problems.

It’s called the Heights of Crownridge, located on the far North Side by the Crownridge Canyon Natural Area. Jen found out about it after a concerned resident emailed her photos of a long vertical crack in a huge wall in the middle of the subdivision.

Jennifer and I had written a bunch of stories about the problems with retaining walls in San Antonio. After Jen got the tip, we drove to Crownridge over the weekend with baby Sophie sleeping in the car. The subdivision was unfinished — streets were completed but only a handful of homes had been built. There were no lawns. Just sun-baked dirt and rock.

And there are a lot of tall retaining walls. The one the tipster alerted Jen to is huge:

And sure enough, there was a long, very noticeable crack on the northern section. This is part of the crack:

Jen sent an open records request to the city for more information about what was going on at the Heights of Crownridge. A couple weeks ago we sat down in an office of the city’s Planning and Development Services Department to read a stack of letters and engineering plans related to all the retaining walls in the unfinished subdivision.

No engineering plans had yet been received for the big wall we checked out. (I later interviewed Scott Rozier, the owner of Rosch Co., which built the wall with the crack. He stood by his work.)

But there were problems with other walls. Going through the documents, Jen and I had a case of deja vu. It turned out some of the same people involved with the wall at Rivermist also designed and built a wall that later cracked at the Heights of Crownridge.

Engineer Russell Leavens designed the Rivermist wall, and it was built by Gravity Walls Ltd. They also designed and built a different wall at Crownridge that suffered from a large crack and was deemed unsafe. This wall was on the southeast corner of the subdivision, which we hadn’t known about. Engineer Tim Theis determined that the wall had not been built according to plans.

At Rivermist, city officials had also claimed that Gravity Walls Ltd. did not build the wall according to engineering plans.

Theis mentioned problems with the particular type of retaining wall used in both subdivisions. Gravity walls rely on their sheer mass to remain stable. But once they’re built, it’s difficult for inspectors to make sure the walls were constructed right. That problem was noted at Rivermist and also at Crownridge.

As we reviewed the documents, a city engineer who was handling the case came by the office. It turned out construction had been on hold at some lots for months as the concerns about the retaining walls were being sorted out.

The pile of documents included maps showing the location of each retaining wall and who built it. Coupled with the info we learned from other documents and interviews, the maps helped me build this interactive feature that showed readers what was going on in the subdivision:

View Retaining wall problems at the Heights of Crownridge in a larger map

We could have cranked this story out faster if Jen hadn’t made the open records request. But the documents gave us details that we might not have otherwise known, such as the connection to Gravity Walls Ltd. Plus, we can post the paper trail online for readers to check out for themselves.

It simply pays to dig up pertinent records … even if it slows you down.

Local weather watchers have been dutifully documenting San Antonio’s temperature, precipitation, and other climate data for 140 years. If you’re curious how this year’s drought compares to past dry spells, meteorologist Robert Blaha with the National Weather Service has done you a huge favor.

Blaha helped dig up old climate records and published monthly rainfall totals for San Antonio going back to 1871. I stumbled across this interesting piece of the city’s weather history while helping out with a story about the drought, and I made this interactive chart based on the data. (There are a few gaps in the rainfall totals in the 1800s, so the chart starts at a nice round number — the year 1900.)

“We were able to find the records,” Blaha told me. “In the 1800s, they hand wrote (the climate data) in ink. It was in a paperback book. When I came here in 1975, they were in notebook format. In 2050, they’ll be in the format of that day.”

Blaha said the rainfall gauge in San Antonio has changed locations over the years. In the early days it was at a co-op station and then moved to Fort Sam Houston. In 1891 it moved to a downtown office building. Somewhere along the line it was at Stinson Field. In the 1940s it moved to the San Antonio International Airport and stayed there ever since.

All that work helps us compare this year’s drought to past dry spells. This year, we’ve received 5.6 inches of rain so far in San Antonio. That’s about half the total precipitation for the lowest year on record since 1900, when it rained 10 inches in 1917.

In 2010 it looks like we got quite a bit of rain –37.4 inches. But click on the monthly figures for 2010 and 2011. The data show that September 2010 was our last significant taste of rain.

In the nine months since then, we’ve barely gotten anything.

We’ve been checking how stimulus funds are being spent in Bexar County, and one of the interesting things we’ve learned is how money for some projects still hasn’t been spent, more than a year after the Recovery Act became law.

Last month I met Peter Zanoni, assistant city manager for the city of San Antonio who’s in charge of the city’s stimulus projects. He and his staff said the stimulus is great for San Antonio but they were also open about some of the difficulties they faced. At one point, Zanoni showed me a chart detailing how the city had been awarded $118 million in stimulus money. But as of April, the city had only spent about a tenth of that — $12 million.

“So you’re probably saying, ‘Jeez, what are you guys doing? That’s pretty weak,’” Zanoni quipped.

The problem is that officials want to spend the money quickly, but they also want to make sure it’s spent appropriately. There’s a ton of federal oversight — audits, reviews, paperwork — that the city must deal with.

I ended up focusing on an example of a project that was mired in red tape. The city had plans for two fire stations that were “shovel ready” and had received $7.3 million in stimulus grants. The money came from FEMA — the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I got a tip that the project was taking forever and the contractor on the job, Bartlett Cocke, even had to lay off a few employees.

Not quite what the stimulus program was supposed to be accomplishing.

The tip turned out to be true — I interviewed Kirk Kistner at Bartlett Cocke who confirmed it. I also asked for any e-mails from the city that discussed the delays with the fire stations and other stimulus projects. It’s important in these kinds of stories to track down pertinent documents. Tad Wille, budget program analysis manager for the city who somehow keeps track of all the paperwork tied to stimulus projects, was very helpful in compiling a pile of e-mails discussing the delays.

In one message, a deputy fire chief updated his bosses about the federal regulations that were slowing down the project: “FEMA stated to me that ‘shovel ready’ was not a term in their lexicon,” the chief wrote. The e-mails helped lay out the timeline of events and revealed concerns expressed privately by city officials.

One thing I wanted to know is whether other fire departments were experiencing similar delays with these fire station grants. Federal data allowed us to answer that question.

Recipients of stimulus dollars file spending reports, and that data is posted online at Recovery.gov, the official website of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. In the data, each type of grant is identified by a specific code. So you can filter the data by that code to find who has received similar grants.

That’s what I did for the fire station grants. It allowed me to write the following graphs in my story about the fire stations:

According to the most recent spending reports posted online by the Recovery Board, 118 fire departments in the United States had been awarded nearly $200 million in grant money to build new stations. But four of five recipients reported the projects have yet to start, and few jobs have been created.

The reasons for the delays aren’t always FEMA’s fault. In the town of Edgewater, Fla., the station still is being designed, so a detailed environmental assessment required by FEMA didn’t interfere with construction, Fire Captain Jill Danigel said.

“That process did take us many, many months,” Danigel said. “If we were shovel ready, that would have held us up.”

In Valley Hill, N.C., Fire Chief Tim Garren said he’s in the “same boat” as the San Antonio Fire Department.

“We’re as shovel ready as can be,” said Garren, whose department received a $640,000 grant in September 2009 to build a new station. Garren still is waiting for the environmental assessment at the site to be approved.

“I don’t want to fuss because it’s going to be free money, and it’s greatly needed,” Garren said. “But it’s still frustrating.”

We plan to run more stories about local stimulus projects and their impact in Bexar County. I’ve been bookmarking interesting websites about the stimulus and sharing them online through Diigo, feel free to check them out and offer recommendations or tips.

Express-News Reporter Guillermo Contreras is covering a federal trial involving the Mexican Mafia, and he wrote about a fascinating court exhibit: The constitution of the Mexican Mafia in Texas.

This document was posted on mySA.com today, and it’s all about setting a strong social structure for the gang:

There are few words that actually describe the criminal activities of the Mexican Mafia. Here they are:

“We shall deal in drugs, contract killings, prostitution, large scale robbery, gambling, weapons, and in everything imaginable.”

The tip sparked a frantic series of phone calls that afternoon as Josh and I tried to figure out what was going on. Authorities said they couldn’t discuss many details — there was still an active investigation, and De León hadn’t been charged with a crime. It was an understandable response, but we had to tell readers what was happening at a city department funded by their tax dollars and permit fees.

Trying to find answers in a story like this is like working on a jigsaw puzzle, only you have to go out and interview people and dig up records to find the missing pieces. And even then, you’re only going to see part of the picture. But after a lot of work, here’s the gist of what we know today:

There’s certainly far more to this story, but it’s a start. If you’re digging into a murky topic like this for a blog or news organization, here are a few tips that can help you find the missing pieces of the puzzle:

(Photo credit: liza31337)

When City Hall reporter Josh Baugh and I worked on this story about fired city official Fernando De León, Josh found a nice online tool to help us connect the dots.

LucidChart lets you create flow charts and organizational trees that you can share with your colleagues and publish when you’re done. Here’s the chart we made for our most recent story.

It’s a quick and easy tool featured on Lifehacker. Our chart helped me explain to graphic artist Mike Fisher what our story was about visually, which resulted in a simplified version that ran in the paper.

Thankfully, our chart wasn’t as complicated as this bad boy.