Paul Fielding, who held the District 11 seat on Dallas City Council for nearly six years, was known for being blunt, prudent and quick-witted. Journalist and former mayor Laura Miller once praised his intelligence and ethics; he has “never, ever been afraid to speak out against the monied, mighty and powerful,” she wrote in a Dallas Observer piece published in 1996.

The same man that North Dallasites applauded for his bravado spent 41 months in prison for eight counts of fraud and conspiracy. Businessman Sam Feldman and consultant Gail Cooper were indicted in the case as well.

Prosecutors proved Fielding, then vice president of Mason Rich, defrauded the company’s investors while using its money to “finance businesses of insiders and fund transactions for their own benefit,” the Dallas Business Journal reported in 1996. Fielding also bribed Electronic Data Systems into a $1 million contract with a janitorial firm of which he was associated, among other schemes, the Dallas Morning News reported.

“The federal cases against Fielding, Feldman, and Cooper are massively complex — a mountain of paper, phone tapes, and cooperating witnesses that the authorities will reveal only when a jury is seated four months from now,” Miller wrote in the 1996 Observer article. “But the larger truth also lies in the public record that has accumulated on those three men over the last 23 years — more than 88 separate civil, criminal, divorce, and bankruptcy cases filed in Dallas and Denton counties, hundreds of pages of City of Dallas records subpoenaed by the FBI, and reams of corporate records filed with the Secretary of State and Texas Comptroller’s office in Austin, along with deed records, arrest reports, traffic violations, city purchasing records, code enforcement citations, and federal and state tax liens.”

Fielding, as Dallasites knows, is not the only city councilman to be prosecuted by federal law. Don Hill is being released from prison early because of terminal illness, and Al Lipscomb faced a federal bribery conviction.Â