As I have noted recently, since Joplin's master developer Wallace-Bajjali fled in the dead of night, the idea being pushed is that a con artist came to the city and fleeced us and we had no way of knowing what was happening.
Today's JRBJ story is based on the recent expose on Wallace-Bajjali by the Houston Chronicle, and includes this passage:
The Chronicle published the story on March 14, painting Wallace as a charming, confident huckster with a flair for convincing investors to give him money even when the world was falling down around him.
It all eventually fell apart.
“All the years of smooth sales pitches and economic development lectures, all the promising partnerships and ambitious projects that sounded so good when he first described them – everything that brought David Gordon Wallace to this moment – faded into the shadows,” the story reads. “His business was failing.”
To act like the leaders in Joplin were totally unaware of Wallace-Bajjali's problems is misleading at best. They were totally unaware if they relied on the vetting of Mark Rohr and Mike Woolston. They knew nothing if their sources of information were the Joplin Globe, or for that matter, the Joplin Regional Business Journal.
On the other hand, if city leaders had not ignored the warning issued by one of the city's most prominent businessmen, who did his due diligence and researched Wallace-Bajjali and recommended the city stay as far away from the Texas company. (I will have more information in my upcoming book, Silver Linings in a Funnel Cloud.)
Other city residents researched Wallace-Bajjali and came to the same conclusion.
The Turner Report, in a March 2012 post first noted Wallace-Bajjali's SEC fines and requirement to repay $1.2 million to investors. The Joplin Globe was satisfied with Mark Rohr's explanation that Wallace was taken in by some unsavory characters.
For the next three years I have written about one bankruptcy after another, one unfinished project after another, other cities that have been abandoned and how Wallace-Bajjali was offering excuse after excuse about why it could not repay the investors they cheated.
It was all in public documents, accessible to city officials and accessible to the media organizations who are supposed to protect us from disasters in the making like Wallace-Bajjali.
If we allow this spin of the Wallace-Bajjali debacle to continue, we increase the chance that sometime in the future some other charismatic con artist is going to take the city's leaders and well meaning, but know-it-all, groups like CART for a ride.
11 comments:
The Lorraine Report was clear about W-B. The Joplin City Council ignored the Lorraine recommendations; the Joplin Globe deflected the report by turning the focus on the report's cost instead of its conclusions. Whitewash and ignorance.
anybody with a middle school diploma new it was a ripoff except are fearless leaders at city hall. How much did Woolston& 4 state homes make hmmmmmmmm
Someone is probably already working on the story about how the crying man never got a chance, and that his brilliance was never understood.
The con artists are already here. Look to high st and the Joplin Blasters. Already allowed to move first payment forward 2 months and the Globe is silent. City Council is mum...
Heh. Someone said with the school district vote you'd have nothing more to write about. I pointed out that was silly for the school district, as we continue to see (and my mother mentioned this morning that she heard on the radio that Huff had surgery yesterday), and that the city of Joplin would continue to provide a lot of news going forward.
What's the status of the state auditor's report? Isn't it supposed to be released fairly soon?
1:15 - You are woefully behind the times. The audit was released over a month ago....
*knew and *our. You never got your middle school diploma
He has reportedly been seen on his balcony playing a stringed instrument and lamentmg "what an artist the world has lost in me,.."
Calm down historians; events were mixed for effect (-:
Any dealings with Ray Braswell is a red flag. Birds of a feather.........
Woolston, Cage, Rohr, Huff, and so may others have been responsible for suffocating our recovery.
Are you serious? You want to direct negativity at the one and only development project that is actually happening? Are we just so accustomed to disappointment and frustration with the recovery effort that we can't celebrate and support something good? This is why we can't have nice things, Joplin. The Blasters are building something. And creating jobs. Just last Saturday they held a job fair in order to fill dozens of positions. There are plenty of negative things to speak out about. This isn't one of them. I'm excited about the Blasters. Not only for the job creation and economic impact, but because this is something we can choose to get behind. This is something we can be proud of.
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