What he found instead was a bizarre saga about a bankrupt company accused of fraud and its hidden ties to Texas state Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio.

Danner’s tenacious digging offers a shining example of why traditional, shoe-leather reporting still matters in an age of Facebook feeds and Twitter handles. Thanks to the story, Express-News readers now know that the FBI is investigating the case, Uresti says he’s been interviewed as a witness, and the senator revised his state-mandated financial disclosure report.

Related: Why is state Sen. Carlos Uresti facing charges? This news story had the answers months ago

These are the kinds of details that can’t be found in a Google search — unless you Google Danner’s blockbuster article.

I sat down with Danner to talk about how he got the story and the challenges he faced in reporting it.

Q: I thought I’d first ask you to describe your beat, since that explains how you found the story.

A: Sure. I cover civil courts, interesting civil litigation. Bankruptcy court, which is where I came across this. And banking. And that’s pretty much it.

Is that a goldmine for stories? I mean, it seems like you find some pretty interesting things that get litigated.

Yeah, I’m just attracted to conflict. And so I’m always going through cases just to see if there’s something there to chew on. In this particular instance, it was a bankruptcy filing that caught my eye. Because I was hearing about, you know, with the decline in oil prices, that there would be a lot of bankruptcy filings from companies operating in the Eagle Ford Shale. So I was keeping an eye out for those.

Then, within the span of a week or so, it seemed like there were four (bankruptcies) that were filed. They weren’t big names. But I thought I could use that as a spring board to do a story on the wave of bankruptcies in the Eagle Ford.

It actually didn’t really pan out that way. A lot of them were filed in other cities. Houston for instance. So we haven’t really had a big uptick in bankruptcy filings. But in this particular instance, I reached out to the attorney for FourWinds Logistics, which is a frac sand company that would buy and sell frac sand, and the attorney referenced a claim that FourWinds had against Halliburton, which was buying sand from FourWinds, reneging on a $7.5 million contract. For such a small company, that’s a pretty big contract. And from there I just started following the case.

So at this point you don’t even know of Uresti’s involvement. How did you find out about it?

I found out about Uresti’s involvement when I went to a creditors hearing in FourWinds’ bankruptcy.

Can you quickly describe what that is?

Sure. A creditors hearing is conducted by a bankruptcy trustee. The trustee asks the debtor certain questions. Tax returns, things like that. It’s fairly mundane stuff. But the interesting part of the creditors meeting is the creditors have an opportunity to ask questions. So there were attorneys there for different parties. And there was also an attorney on the phone who represented a woman who was suing FourWinds. And I knew nothing about this lawsuit. It was filed down in Cameron County. And apparently she was suing for fraud and I didn’t know any of this. But during the hearing, the attorney asked Stan Bates, the CEO of FourWinds, about his response to the lawsuit, which designated Carlos Uresti as a responsible third party. I had no idea what that meant, whether it was the state senator himself.

It definitely perked your interest, though.

Yeah, yeah, it got me certainly curious. So from there, the next thing I did was try to get a hold of that lawsuit down in Cameron County. I had to look up, what does that mean, a responsible third party? In essence, what it means is that Stan Bates was blaming the problems that FourWinds had on conflicts of interest that he alleged Uresti had.

So what’d you do after that?

Well, I was curious what exactly were those conflicts of interest. Well, I found out he represented a woman who invested in FourWinds. Her name was Denise Cantu. She invested $900,000. And it turns out that Uresti was her legal counsel in a wrongful death case where two of Denise Cantu’s children died.

That’s basically summed up in the lede of your story, which is a bombshell. I’ve never really considered what happens when somebody wins a lawsuit, and what do they do with that money? And it raises all kinds of questions about conflicts of interest when their lawyer gets involved. And oh, by the way, he’s making a commission off this.

Right. In this particular case, lawyers have certain obligations, rules they’ve got to follow. Uresti makes the point he was no longer her lawyer at the time he suggested she go see Stan Bates. And Denise Cantu testified that he didn’t advise her to put her money in FourWinds — but he did get a commission from her investment in FourWinds.

So at some point you have to interview Uresti. How did that go and do you have any tips about interviews that can get confrontational or can be difficult?

This particular interview wasn’t confrontational. Clearly I had to ask some tough questions. What I had done was basically gone through and written all my questions down. I don’t usually do that. But in a case like this, I want to make sure that I didn’t overlook anything.

This is pretty technical stuff, too.

Yeah. The funny thing was I had to call him back because I forgot to ask him a simple question. He got a $40,000 loan from FourWinds. And I had been hearing rumblings about where the money went. Fortunately he called me back. The question I forgot to ask was, what did you do with the money you had gotten from the $40,000 loan from FourWinds? So he did call me back and he answered that question. But I was knocking myself for forgetting to ask.

Can you describe how (Bexar County District Attorney) Nico Lahood got wrapped into this saga?

Yeah, he represented a gentleman by the name of Gary Cain. And from that trial, back in 2014, Cain was charged with four felony counts in a land deal involving Rackspace Hosting. Rackspace claimed it was ripped off by Gary Cain. Cain was found not guilty by a jury in July of 2014. Within a couple of months, he was brought on as a sort of a financial consultant with FourWinds, where he said he was helping raise financing for FourWinds.

Cain’s business is called Trinity Global. A document was presented in one of the court hearings that mentioned Nico LaHood was co-chairman of the company. And I thought, well, that’s kind of odd that LaHood the DA is in business with a former client. You don’t see that every day.

So one of the investors, Richard Thum, who is president of SA Five Star Cleaners, he felt like he had been ripped off by FourWinds. He told me that it was Gary Cain that recommended that Richard go see Nico LaHood and tell them what was going on at FourWinds. And so Richard Thum went to the DA’s office and met with Nico LaHood and his head of the criminal division. And they basically, according to Richard, expressed interest in the case. But they said to me that they advised him to go to the FBI. Richard did go to the FBI but he said he did it on his own. So the FBI took interest in the case and they’re looking into all this.

So now we have a couple politicians who are revising their financial statements.

Yeah. Uresti did go back and correct his financial disclosure form. And LaHood went back and corrected his after (Express-News columnist) Brian Chasnoff called and asked him why didn’t he disclose his business with Gary Cain?

You mentioned you’re drawn to conflict, and conflict makes for interesting stories. But there’s also a lot of legalese, a lot of dry information in these lawsuits. It’s complicated. How do you go about writing this and making this understandable?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m drawn to the dry stuff. I seem to find a lot of complicated stories. I just try to keep it simple as possible — in this case, leading with the human element of a woman losing two of her kids, and using the proceeds from the court settlement from the loss of her two kids to invest in this company. So that was the advice of my editor to do it that way.

Really, other than the top of the story, which got rewritten a few times, the rest of the story just kind of took it in a chronological order.

That’s probably one of the more helpful ways to approach it, right? Just walk through everything that happened.

Yeah, although we did put up high the stuff about not disclosing certain things in his financial disclosure forms. We wanted to get that high in the story to make it clear, you know, here are the issues. Then get into what went on.

But as far as bankruptcies go, I thought this was one of the juicier ones. Because you had a CEO who’s accused of basically spending money, flying in women, Victoria’s Secret, exotic cars, things that you don’t normally run across. So to me, I just thought, we’ve got different elements here that you don’t normally run across. Politicians. CEO accused of living a wild lifestyle. Things you don’t come across every day.

What’s next for Denise Cantu?

That’s a really good question because she’s got her lawsuit down in Cameron County. I had set up an interview with her, and then, basically at the last minute, her lawyers put the kibosh on it. Because of the pending litigation they didn’t want her speaking with me. So I don’t know.

Well, it was a great story man. Anything I didn’t ask that would be good to know?

No, I don’t think so. I certainly appreciate it. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on things but as far as FourWinds goes that’s pretty much over and done with. There’s nothing left to pick over.

The post How shoe-leather reporting uncovered a bizarre bankruptcy tied to Senator Carlos Uresti appeared first on John Tedesco.

Last week, state Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio, and Mayor Phil Hardberger announced an effort to fix a city ordinance that was meant to protect San Antonio’s diminishing tree canopy from urban sprawl. A loophole in the ordinance allows real estate developers to bulldoze trees for ranching and farming.

For those who want to learn more, here’s a YouTube video of the April 3, 2009, press conference, and a collection of news stories that followed the twists and turns of this issue:

There were several follow up stories:

Related: Why is state Sen. Carlos Uresti facing charges? This news story had the answers months ago

Villarreal and Hardberger don’t think the bill has a very good chance of becoming law at the Texas Legislature, where the real estate industry has a strong lobby. You might ask them, why bother? And you might ask the journalists covering this issue, why bother writing about it if nothing is going to change?

As the reporter who learned about the loophole, I still think it’s a public service to figure out what’s going on at West Pointe, and share that information with a few hundred thousand of my closest friends who read the newspaper.

Related: How to reach John Tedesco, investigative reporter in Houston, Texas

Really, that’s all journalism is about, despite what you may have heard from Rush Limbaugh. It’s about digging up facts, putting the pieces together, learning something new about how the world works, and telling people about it.

That, in itself, is a worthy cause.

The post Local officials try closing loophole in San Antonio’s tree ordinance appeared first on John Tedesco.

Inner-city Councilwoman Mary Alice Cisneros was put on the defensive this week after revelations that she’s pushing the sale of two downtown cultural icons, Market Square and La Villita, to the politically connected Cortez family.

The proposal was presented Thursday in a closed-door City Council session and was greeted with strenuous objections by Cisneros’ colleagues, several said.

“We had a presentation of an interested party looking to purchase the square and La Villita, and a majority of us said, ‘No way,’” Councilwoman Lourdes Galvan said. “The gem of our history and culture is simply not for sale.”

Related: A tough year for the mainstream media. But is watchdog journalism really dead?

The story put Cisneros on the hot seat and she later said the deal was dead.

I found one of her comments interesting:

Cisneros acknowledged Friday that she had discussed a project with representatives of the Cortez family, but said only: “Whatever you are telling me I heard, if I heard it, was in executive session and should not be up for public discussion.”

This comment leaves the impression that public officials are barred from discussing what happens at government meetings when they go behind closed doors to discuss legal matters and other sensitive topics.

Actually, Cisneros and other officials are perfectly free to talk about what happens in executive session. That’s according to a 1989 opinion from then-Attorney General Jim Mattox.

Mattox had been asked whether the Texas Open Meetings Act prohibits public officials from publicly talking about closed-door meetings. State Sen. Kent A. Caperton feared that prohibiting that kind of talk would be a violation of free speech.

Related: How to share news tips with an investigative reporter

Mattox determined that the law only prevents officials from releasing documents related to the topics discussed in executive sessions. “It does not prohibit persons who are present at the executive session from afterwards talking about the subject matter of the session,” Mattox wrote in the opinion.

So if you want answers about a topic that interests you, wave a copy of this AG opinion anytime a public official tries to tell you she can’t talk about closed-door meetings.

The post La Villita for sale: Can Texas officials talk about closed-door meetings? appeared first on John Tedesco.

Anton Caputo, the environmental reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, won this year’s Risser prize for his series about the impact of climate change in Texas.

The $3,000 prize is named after James Risser, a Pulitzer-prize winning journlist who wrote about environmental problems that are unique to the Western United States.

Anton wrote about shrinking Texas coastlines, long droughts, and how state officials are ignoring the problem.

Here’s how the first story starts out:

SURFSIDE BEACH — Charles Watson stands by the side of the road smoking a cigarette and snapping photos with a digital camera. He seems transfixed as he watches his family’s longtime beach home jacked off its pilings and rolled slowly down the street.

Several neighboring houses in this sleepy coastal town will meet the same fate this very day.

Forty years ago, 200 feet of sandy beach buffered Beach Drive from the sea. But today, the surf runs freely between the pilings and over the remains of concrete foundations.

The erosion has become so severe that Texas declared the property a public beach and gave the owners a choice: Take state money to cover the cost of moving the house or go to court.

Click here to check out Day 1 of the entire series.

The post Express-News reporter wins prize for environmental reporting about eroding beaches appeared first on John Tedesco.

Hi, I’m a guy who works for that ink-covered relic called a “newspaper,” which you probably haven’t bothered to read if you’re my age or younger.

That’s too bad. Because as stodgy as newspapers can be, there are days when they live up to their promise and show us what’s really going on in the world.

Want some examples? Check out my blog for links to stories written by my colleagues at the San Antonio Express-News, the city’s daily newspaper.

This blog will include a “how we did it” section and resources for journalism students. And along the way, hopefully we’ll find some ways to keep watchdog journalism alive at a time when newspapers are struggling.

I want people to get their hands dirty reading their local ink-covered relic. Sometimes, it isn’t just a boring pile of paper.

The post Welcome to John Tedesco’s journalism blog appeared first on John Tedesco.