Prosecutors said Ruel Hamilton paid off two former Dallas City Council members, but defense lawyers have maintained that no laws were broken.
DALLAS — After a week of testimony, a federal jury has began its deliberations in the retrial of a Dallas developer accused of bribing two city council members, one of whom was cooperating with the FBI and secretly recorded himself getting a $7,000 check.
If found guilty, Ruel Hamilton, 69, faces up to 25 years in prison..
The retrial is presided over by Senior U.S. District Judge Barbara Lynn, who also oversaw Hamilton’s 2021 trial.
Prosecutors say that, from 2013 to 2015, Hamilton gave more than $40,000 in cash and things of value to Carolyn Davis, who at the time was on the Dallas City Council and was the head of the city’s housing committee. They also said that, in 2018, he gave a $7,000 personal check to now-former councilman Dwaine Caraway.
Prosecutors say that both Davis and Caraway took the money from Hamilton, and promised to help him politically and to get his affordable housing projects approved.
Hamilton’s lawyers say the developer broke no laws and that any money he gave council members were consulting fees or help he offered so they could pay their family medical bills.
Four years ago, a federal jury in downtown Dallas found Hamilton guilty. Hamilton was sentenced to eight years in prison after that verdict, but an appeals court overturned the convictions in 2022 after determining that jurors in that trial were given improper instructions.
In both trials, the government’s star witness was Caraway. He testified in this trial on June 3.
During his testimony, prosecutors wanted Caraway to tell jurors about how he received a $7,000 check from Hamilton, which the government alleges was a bribe in exchange for Caraway’s political support. But Caraway repeatedly told jurors that he didn’t really consider Hamilton’s check a bribe, but rather support from a longtime friend to pay for healthcare bills. Responding to questions by increasingly frustrated prosecutor Chad Meacham, Caraway also balked at times at characterizing the $450,000 he took in the Dallas County Schools bus camera scandal as bribes — even though he pleaded guilty to those charges years ago.
Caraway did the same thing when he testified in 2021 at Hamilton’s first trial, insisting that, even though he signed plea papers admitting to crimes in the Dallas County Schools case, he really didn’t consider his actions criminal. That lack of contrition irked Judge Lynn; when she sentenced him in 2021, she shaved off only a few months, citing his “credibility while testifying.”
At this retrial, on June 3, under cross examination by Hamilton’s defense lawyer Tom Melsheimer, Caraway lauded Hamilton’s devotion to improving parts of southern Dallas that had been long neglected by other developers.
In March 2019, Davis pleaded guilty to taking the bribes, but she died in a car crash on July 15, 2019 before she could testify about any of it.
She was, however, recorded on wiretapped conversations recorded by the FBI bragging about all the money she took and how confident she was that she would never be caught. Evidence showed that, while she was on council, she laundered the payments through a nonprofit, Hip Hop Government.