The rise of Wayne Dolcefino: How a former TV reporter gained power in Houston politics

This is the first of an occasional Houston Chronicle series spotlighting influential Houstonians.

The mayor of Texas City fought a recall petition of his own.

And nearly the entire board of the Houston Housing Authority was swept from their positions shortly before the mayor halted leasing on the agency’s brand-new $100-million affordable housing development. Federal authorities descended on the property in 2024 to conduct an investigation.

The figure who campaigned for their downfall? Wayne Dolcefino.

Dolcefino, 69, is not elected, not a billionaire, nor a developer. Instead, he has turned agitation into influence. He can tilt elections, trigger investigations and make life miserable for the people he fixates on. And he often seems to relish it.

His approach splits Houston. To critics, he’s corrosive. To clients, indispensable. Everyone uses the same word: relentless.

“That dog ain’t getting off the bone — he’s staying with it,” said Jim McIngvale, the businessman better known as the local celebrity Mattress Mack. “When you’re in a street fight, Wayne is a good guy to have on your side.”

Their street fight is wide-ranging, going after what McIngvale called “rampant crime in this town, crooked politicians and those who use tax money for frivolous reasons.” Every six weeks or so, he calls Dolcefino to ask, “You bust ‘em yet?” He’s paid upward of a $100,000 for Dolcefino’s services. 

MATTRESS MACK: The untold story of Jim McIngvale, the complex man behind Houston’s famous Mattress Mack

What are clients buying? Dolcefino calls himself a media and political consultant, armed with a private investigator’s license and name recognition from longtime Houstonians who know him from Channel 13’s heyday.

“Next to Project Veritas,” the right-wing nonprofit famous for its sting operations, “I think we are the biggest investigative journalism social media company in (the) country now,” he texted as his company reached 100,000 followers on Facebook. 

A typical engagement starts with a $750 consultation. If he takes the case, a $10,000 retainer covers early digging: records requests, editing time, legal fees. Hourly rates range from $100 to $375. His 11-person firm, he said, brings in “a couple million” a year.

His arsenal of weapons: public-records blitzes, stakeouts, 15-minute YouTube videos, lawsuits, press releases, tips to reporters, calls to district attorneys, complaints to Texas Rangers, Capitol lobbying and even recall petitions. 

He won’t name most clients. “I’ve had people who have met me behind a motel and given me cash envelopes,” he said. If someone tried to subpoena him, he’d invoke journalistic privilege all the way up to the Supreme Court.

“Nobody’s getting into our records. It’ll be a cold day in hell.”

Fans say he’s paid to do old-school investigative journalism — the kind that made him a Houston celebrity 40 years ago.

Ethics experts counter that a hired gun abandons the very bedrock of journalism: independent reporting conceived for the public’s benefit, rather than the benefit of a wealthy client.  

Detractors say that his videos insinuate more than they prove and that his real power is making it so unpleasant to serve in office that viable candidates opt not to run. 

Dolcefino is familiar with the naysayers and says he doesn’t mind people coming at him. 

“That’s all they can say about me — not that I was wrong,” he said. “The stories are legitimate stories. Now. They might not think they’re fair, right?” 

Dolcefino's roots

When I left Dolcefino a voicemail saying he was the first person who came to mind for a series of profiles on people who may not be household names but who wield real power, he said, “What the —?” and played the message again. 

I knew he had achieved a following as a longtime television reporter, back when airtime meant power, and that everyone in Houston-area journalism and political circles knew who he was. But when I asked Houston newcomers? His name elicited blank looks from my highly unscientific sample. 

However, among longtime Houstonians of a certain era, Dolcefino is one of the region’s iconic television personalities. Mattress Mack, for example, defined him as one of the city’s characters, “just like me.”

Dolcefino’s path to becoming a face and voice famous for moving Houston’s political ground began when he first moved to Houston in 1968 as a seventh-grader. His father moved them from Brooklyn to Bellaire because he assumed a Sacco Bros. Food Market meant it was Houston’s Italian neighborhood. It wasn’t. The culture, the accent, the hats were all unfamiliar. Even his wiener dog seemed to stand out.

But Dolcefino found his niche by high school, drumming in the marching band; leading Aleph Zadik Aleph, a Jewish boys’ organization; and becoming known for his comic imitations. That flair for performance and cultivating attention led him to radio. He dropped out of the journalism program at the University of Texas to take a full-time job at a radio station in Austin, switched from a music show to news “because they made 35 bucks more a month,” then moved back to Houston for a job at KTRH-AM, where he did a rundown of headlines that aired so early they joked the only people awake to hear it were fishermen.

When Garvin Berry was hired to be the news director in 1981, he found Dolcefino covering chambers of commerce in towns outside the city.

“That was like using a nuclear bomb to hit mosquitoes,” he told the Houston Post a decade later. He believed Dolcefino’s combination of a “showbiz quality” with a “CPA mentality” made him perfect for investigations — as he would prove when he uncovered a scandal in the parks department. The story cost 18 officials and city workers their jobs. It was one of his first tastes of toppling power and exposing wrongdoing through his particular brand of hard-driving reporting. 

In 1985, he went on to Channel 13, where he developed a knack for stories that cast suspicion on officials’ characters — broadcasting, for example, that a politician had been accused of assault years before.

Six years later, he aired the story that secured his place in Houston legend. The famous broadcast cemented his reputation for investigative journalism to such a degree that it still brings him clients and an audience today, even without a major network. But the resulting lawsuit, which was fought out in courts for nearly a decade, presaged the pressures that drove him out of broadcasting. And it also encapsulated the ambivalence many Houstonians felt about his reporting tactics — a fissure that has only deepened since he began working for himself.

It was, of course, the story that sank Sylvester Turner’s first campaign for Houston mayor. 

A defining controversy

A little after 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 1, 1991, Dick Murray’s staff was calling Houstonians as part of a Chronicle-commissioned poll when something extraordinary happened. 

Two candidates — one of them Turner, who was a state representative at the time — were in a close runoff for mayor. The election was anyone’s game, since nearly a quarter of voters were undecided. Murray’s pollsters were finding that Turner had erased former Texas Highway Commissioner Bob Lanier’s 6% lead in the days before the runoff. 

Suddenly, the Houstonians being questioned about the election were shooting back their own questions: What the heck was going on?

On their televisions was Dolcefino. And he had an election-rocking tale.

“What role did Houston mayoral candidate Sylvester Turner play in this tale of multi-million-dollar fraud?” he began.

He reported that a male model named Sylvester Foster had fallen into trouble with federal authorities, taken out multiple life insurance policies, asked Turner, a lawyer by trade, to prepare his will and applied for an emergency passport. The day after signing the will, Foster embarked on a boating trip off the coast of Galveston, during which he disappeared. 

Turner then began taking steps to carry out the will, which would have included collecting the life insurance proceeds. The will’s trustee was a friend of both men, whom Dolcefino identified as living in “a home he shares with mayoral candidate Sylvester Turner” (a detail that outlived the meat of Dolcefino’s reporting in the minds of many Houstonians). 

But Foster turned out to be very much alive, living under an alias in Spain. The Chronicle contacted him in September, but he had little to say about Dolcefino for a profile, other than that Dolcefino had reached out often, but their interest in speaking was not reciprocal. (“He told me you called,” Dolcefino said, when I mentioned this.)

By the end of the night, Turner’s support had fallen by 10%, Murray said in court testimony. He lost the election. 

Can true statements create a false impression?

When Turner sued for libel, the trial peeled back the curtain on Dolcefino’s reporting tactics. There is a high bar for libeling a public official: a report has to be false, and the defendant must either know it is false or have serious doubts about its truthfulness before publishing it anyway (what is known as “actual malice”).

The individual facts of Dolcefino’s report were, by and large, true, the state’s highest court eventually ruled. As he pointed out on the stand, he never declared that Turner was part of Foster’s life insurance fraud. But his story framed Turner’s quotes as “claims” and his actions as being taken “despite the signs of something fishy.” 

“The mayoral candidate questions the timing of the revelations and claims he, too, is a victim — not part of any conspiracy to conceal Foster’s European getaway,” Dolcefino said in his broadcast. “But if that’s true, Sylvester Turner was duped by overwhelming evidence and at least two legal clients with close ties to one of his closest friends.”

The jury sided with Turner, finding that Channel 13 and Dolcefino should pay Turner $5 million and $500,000 in damages, respectively. 

“He asked about all the bad stuff — he didn’t look for anything good,” one juror said afterward. “You better get the facts right on that kind of story, because it is too powerful to take back later.”

The tension between whether Dolcefino had been fair and whether his actions were protected by the First Amendment became more evident as the case moved up the court system.

The appeals court ruled that the jury had been incorrect in its finding that Dolcefino had acted with actual malice and that no damages should be paid. But at the Texas Supreme Court, justices fractured over how to view Dolcefino’s report. 

They all agreed that, for the most part, the individual statements in the broadcast were true. (There were some facts you could quibble about, the court decisions allowed, like whether Turner’s innocence would’ve meant he was duped by one or two of his legal clients, since a woman he provided with legal services might not technically have been a client. But such quibbles were not “substantial,” they decided, since they didn’t change the impression left on an average viewer.)

But then the state Supreme Court justices examined a different question: Even if the individual statements were substantially true, were they arranged in a way so that “by omitting key facts and falsely juxtaposing others,” they created a “substantially false impression”? 

The majority answered yes.

“The broadcast’s misleading account cast more suspicion on Turner’s conduct than a substantially true account would have done,” said the majority court decision. 

Take, for example, when Dolcefino said that, after Foster disappeared, Turner began the legal effort to “get (their) mutual friend… appointed as administrator over the estate.” The justices said the report should have mentioned that Foster’s will specified the friend as executor. “Although Turner’s actions were those of any lawyer probating an estate, the broadcast’s failure to put them in the proper context falsely suggested that Turner abused his position by handpicking his friend to handle an estate worth millions,” said the decision. 

Similarly, the broadcast didn’t mention that Foster’s father was the primary beneficiary of the will and of most of the life insurance, so viewers might have thought that Turner and his friend stood to gain those millions.

While the Texas high court reached the unexpected conclusion that substantially true statements had added up to a substantially false picture, they still agreed that Channel 13 and Dolcefino could not be found guilty of libel. The facts had been arranged to paint a false picture, but not an intentionally false picture, they said — because federal law had a much higher bar for proving that intentionality than they had used for their test of truthfulness. 

But even on the state Supreme Court, opinions were splintered. Three of the eight judges participating in the opinion said the bar for libel had been met: “Where sensationalism is sought at the expense of truth, actual malice may be inferred.” Two others said they would’ve required a higher bar to say that an omission or juxtaposition created a false picture. After all, they said, “Public figures criticized in the public press frequently complain that the media has not told the whole story and that had it done so, they would have appeared in a more favorable light.”

The paradoxical ruling gave both sides what they needed to propel their careers forward. Turner had, before a jury of fellow Houstonians, cleared his reputation enough (or, in Dolcefino’s view, scared the media enough) to run again for mayor in 2003 and to win in 2015. Dolcefino had earned a place in the city’s psyche — and a keen understanding of exactly how far you could go when criticizing a public figure.

His name became shorthand for pugnacious reporting that wouldn’t let go of a subject (he aired 70 broadcasts about bilingual teachers cheating to get their certifications), reporting that was at turns ambitious (he’s won two awards from the prestigious Investigative Reporters and Editors association) and theatrical (were fire-code inspectors looking into the safety of topless bars a little too often?). 

Photoshoots in magazines and newspapers play up that image. In his studio, Dolcefino has a framed Houston Press cover depicting him in a leather jacket hoisting a gun in the air with the words, “Does Wayne Dolcefino shoot first and ask questions later?”

“Is this a collage?” I asked, squinting, not able to imagine how they could’ve convinced him to take such a charged picture.

“No, they did a whole photo shoot!” he said.

Working by his own rules — and for himself

Turner went on to become mayor (nearly a quarter century after his torpedoed first attempt), the man who faked his death went on to become a Hollywood actor and Dolcefino went on to win a bookcase full of Emmys. 

But after Disney’s acquisition of ABC and a number of high-profile suits involving television investigations, the station’s lawyers became more and more involved in stories, according to Dolcefino and his news director at the time, Dave Strickland.

“Every single document we saw, they’d want to talk,” Dolcefino said. “They’d want to look at every interview we did, want to see every conversation.” 

When asked for an example, he said the legal department protested when he wanted to compare something the former mayor of Kemah had said to a Nazi prison guard’s catchphrase in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes.” Multiple stories were killed.

Strickland said television had “given up” on taking the financial risk of certain types of investigative stories. 

Dolcefino, who was being paid $325,000 a year, parted with the station with two years left on his contract, which was paid out, he said.

He walked away from television with money in the bank and something rarer: total freedom. For the first time, the man asking questions would answer only to himself.

Public records crusader

Alan Atkinson is one of the few people who are open about paying Dolcefino’s consulting company, which he says serves an important role in a weakening journalism ecosystem.

In 2019, Atkinson learned that the Houston Housing Authority planned a 1,400-unit complex in the East End, primarily offering below-market-rate units. It was near property, including a walk-and-bike trail, that he’d developed himself.

Atkinson, a former lawyer, questioned both the concentration of low-income units and the site’s contamination. It was right next to a former city incinerator. Could residue still pollute the soil?

And he was suspicious of how the housing authority was handling the deal. It was a public agency required by law to discuss the project at a public comment session. But the agenda item didn’t mention the addresses in question — he would’ve gone if it had. Plus, people with political connections had profited from the deal, making him even more suspicious. 

He reached out to the Houston Chronicle and local television stations, including Channel 13. It wasn’t his first time reaching out to the news — for example, he credits his 2001 tip about a fishy land deal with leading to newspaper articles that raised questions. A Department of Justice investigation followed, culminating in a government official admitting to accepting bribes.

When Atkinson reached out to the Chronicle and sued the housing authority — getting a judge to halt the purchase until the housing authority put it on the agenda again with the location more clearly specified — the real estate team at the Chronicle, of which I was a part, wrote about the court injunction and the neighborhood’s protests against the developments. The city continued building.

“Having gone through conventional news sources unsuccessfully, I went to Wayne,” Atkinson said. He remembered Dolcefino’s investigative stories, including the Turner story, from the ’80s and early ’90s. “He was one of the leaders of that genre.”

To Dolcefino, there was enough smoke that he suspected a story. He began issuing records requests — more than 165 at the city, state and federal level. And he sued the federal government over records from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The department settled, agreeing to release documents.

“I’ve tried personally,” Atkinson said. “If I, as a private citizen, ask them (for these records), they run circles around me. They say no.” 

He declined to say how much he’s paid Dolcefino, but said it was affordable compared to the cost of obtaining the records through discovery in a lawsuit. “And it’s a lot more effective.”

The records showed that the housing authority was aware of environmental concerns before it purchased the property but later unearthed lead-laced ash time and time again during construction. 

Dolcefino released over a dozen videos on everything from the ash to the threat of a nearby radio tower collapsing. The clips raced across the neighborhood and Facebook. News organizations took up the story, and John Whitmire brought up the controversy on the campaign trail. Once elected, he overhauled the board and paused the development. And in the fall of 2024, local media spotted federal agents testing the soil. (The apartment complex has since been cleared to begin leasing by the state’s environmental agency and welcomed its first renters this year, though federal agencies did not confirm or deny whether their investigation was ongoing.)

800 MIDDLE STREET: Toxic ash is delaying this $100M affordable housing project. What did Houston officials know?

Dolcefino said he started talking to the FBI about the case, and the FBI had begun its investigation shortly after he started working for Atkinson. 

“When the FBI showed up on my doorstep four-and-a-half years ago, my wife freaked out,” Atkinson said, laughing. “I said, ‘Great! I’ve been waiting for them! ’”

Smoke vs. fire

Dolcefino brought up this story when making the case for his business model. He argued that all news was either partisan or, at the very least, trying to force stories to fit with their publication’s worldview, and he said that the Chronicle’s coverage of the East End housing project was a case in point of our “ridiculously pro-Turner” reporting.

I was surprised, since I had been part of that coverage, and corruption by the mayor would’ve been a big story to miss. I pointed that out. 

“It was so obvious, so early, what was going on,” he responded. “It was a giant scam that people got rich off of.” 

Dolcefino brought up a company (owned by the former chair of the housing authority and a county commissioner’s wife) that had facilitated the deal and had likely received a brokerage fee. It was true that the company had brokered the deal (and had profited handsomely from many Houston Housing Authority deals), as the Chronicle had reported. But while the millions raked in by the consulting group had brushed up against many readers’ sense of right and wrong, we hadn’t found evidence that it was illegal. And I couldn’t see any benefit to Turner. 

TAX-CREDIT DEALS: Who’s cashing in big on Houston’s affordable housing system? Not the renters

Dolcefino then cited an interview he had published with a board member whom Turner had not reappointed to the board while the land deal was being discussed. In it, Dolcefino asked if she thought the reason she hadn’t been reappointed to the board was because she was asking too many questions. “Yes, and I think I was going to ask more questions,” she said. 

But what was Turner’s motive, I asked, and what exactly was the proof of his involvement? 

“Sometimes I see the smoke, but I can’t see the gun yet,” I said. 

“Sometimes you’re never going to see the gun,” he replied. “Sometimes there is so much smoke that why don’t we just report that?”

Master of confrontation

There’s a signature shot in many Dolcefino videos: Dolcefino, in a suit, following harried-looking officials with a mic while lobbing pointed questions and prompting viewers to read into their discomfort.

“Part of his allure, and part of his greatness, is his ability to take stories, and just by his aggressive questioning — ” Strickland, Dolcefino’s former news director, paused to put it into words. “You can’t really BS the guy,” he concluded. “He does something a lot of reporters don’t do, which is the follow-up question.” 

“People like the confrontations,” Dolcefino said. “People liked to see me mess with people on TV. They weren’t even sure they knew what the hell it was about. They just liked it.”

He’s likened confrontation to oxygen, breathing life into a story by grabbing people’s attention and setting the stage for his next video. And he’s a master of it, even when he’s not the one initiating. Take, for example, the time a Montgomery County precinct chair tried to turn the tables by hitting record on her phone and asking if he was working for a state politician she deemed a Republican in name only. 

“No,” he said, looking directly into her camera, lounging against the back of his seat. It took him a few quick barbs before she was on the defense (“No, it wasn’t a stupid question!”) as Dolcefino’s own camera captured the scene, which he quickly put on YouTube. 

She took her own recording to Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, who aired it on his online video show as an example of how people were galvanized by the Republican Party’s push to censure members who weren’t right-wing enough.

Asked whether he thought Bannon’s video was fair, Dolcefino said he didn’t. “It would’ve been nice if they’d had me on to respond,” he said. 

“But look,” he said. Bannon’s purpose, in his mind, “was to promote a purity agenda” among Republicans. His perspective — that Republicans shouldn’t be fighting Republicans — hadn’t been included, even when he reached out to offer it, he explained, because of the point he had made to me earlier: “The media is all about narrative.”

And when it comes to narrative, he’s a fighter. He punched back with another video, saying he did it pro bono. “Eating your own when the real fight is with left-wing freaks is insane,” he said, teeing up a clip from Bannon’s video.

Shaping narratives, one question at a time

Of course, Dolcefino is an outlier in his ability to turn confrontation into currency. 

By and large, his ability to shape a narrative around his questions makes those on the other side squirm. They say that, because of Dolcefino’s business model, they believe nothing they say will be cast in a flattering light. 

An exchange between the Harris County Sheriff’s Office communications advisor, Jason Spencer, and Dolcefino showed that tension. Spencer answered Dolcefino’s questions via email. But Dolcefino pressed for an in-person interview with a detective or the sheriff, saying that otherwise, he would report “that the sheriff refused an interview.”

“Respectfully, you can report that we don’t sit for interviews with private investigators hired by political campaigns, plaintiff’s lawyers, etc. for the explicit purpose of creating hit pieces disguised as journalism,” Spencer replied.

“The extra insults are not only false in this case, it makes me want to tell you to go screw yourself,” Dolcefino shot back. “In fact I will. Go screw yoursel (sic). Tell the sheriff we will find him when we need him at a place of our choosing Either at home or at a scene. Tell him to look for me tell him what you said so he knows I’m way more interested now bEnjoy (sic) your day.” 

I asked him about the exchange. “I have little patience for people that we pay, that taxpayers pay, to provide public information, deciding for themselves whether or not that information should be provided,” Dolcefino said.

Kenny Breiner, who filmed city council meetings for Dolcefino, said that footage was sometimes cut in ways that removed context. For example, in Kemah, one video showed a city council member, Doug Meisinger, saying he didn’t like sitting on the city council that much. Cut out was the lead-up to his statement — “When I see something wrong, I’m standing up against it. I’m railing against it. I’m not going to pander. I’m not going to. I don’t like being up here that much.” 

“He’s the one that said it,” Dolcefino responded. “I didn’t say it.”

The final straw for Breiner? When he gave the city council members the courtesy of letting them know when the mics were on, he said, Dolcefino made a crude remark that he must be getting off with someone on the council. They cut off relations. 

“They had his cell phone number and were calling him,” Dolcefino said regarding why they parted ways. “I have a tapestry of the ‘Godfather’ in my office … You don’t talk about the family.”

One city politician tried to make the case that being the target of Dolcefino’s reporting wasn’t impactful. “It’s kind of just money thrown away.” But he asked that his name not be used. When asked why, he explained that he was exhausted by the “political circus” launched by Dolcefino and his client — so much so that he wasn’t running for reelection. He was afraid that speaking against Dolcefino would lead to another round of videos targeting him and his business. 

Dolcefino has said that getting set loose to investigate small-town public corruption is his favorite type of assignment. He thrives looking into governments and agencies where weakening newsrooms no longer have the resources to regularly assign a reporter to cover or dig deep. 

But while his business model makes it possible to do that type of resource-intensive, sustained investigation, it also brings into question whether it’s good for democracy for that level of scrutiny to only happen on one side of an issue — and when it’s paid for.

For one thing, only those who can afford his services can benefit from them. In multiple cases, he began making videos favoring one half of a couple as wealthy as a small town in divorce proceedings. (Dolcefino ended up quoted in a Wall Street Journal article about rich husbands who hid their assets from their wives so that they would be at a disadvantage during divorce.) 

For another, according to Jane Kirtley, director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota, central to the idea of journalism is the independence to tell stories in the way you think will best serve the public good.

“It’s about setting out to provide the whole context for what you’re reporting,” she said, “not bits and pieces that might be misleading, even though they’re true in and of themselves.” 

She wasn’t familiar with Dolcefino, but speaking generally of his business model, she said, “the concern … when somebody is hired to pursue a story where a specific outcome is sought is that they might — I’m not saying he is — but they might incline to not pay attention to anything that would contradict what the end goal is.”

On the other side of the microphone

When Sean Skipworth, the former mayor of Dickinson, saw my text asking if he’d like to speak for a profile on Dolcefino, he felt a rush of adrenaline. If he talked, would it trigger another round of attack pieces? 

“It was like PTSD,” he said.

A political science professor at the College of the Mainland, he had decided to run for mayor to implement practical, nonpartisan fixes, such as allowing permit applications to be filed electronically. In his first year in office, for example, he realized that 911 calls were routed to the police station via City Hall — a problem that created multiple points of failure during a power outage. In response, he purchased generators. 

But the issue of building a city center, which would create a hub for shops and restaurants in the largely residential town, became unexpectedly contentious. It was during that period of heightened tensions that he began hearing Dolcefino’s name. The media consultant was requesting records from the city.

Dolcefino also called Skipworth, asking to film an interview to include in his videos. Skipworth declined but said he was happy to discuss the issues over the phone, and they spoke for 20 minutes. But his explanation was not included in subsequent videos, which continued for two years. 

The videos ranged widely in their criticisms. One involved a former city employee — Dolcefino Media said she alleged in her resignation letter that Skipworth had asked her to influence an election. The video paired that statement with an unidentified document. You had to pause and zoom in to understand what that document was calling fraud: He’d reportedly suggested someone look into running for a city council district seat rather than an at-large seat. A later video implied he had ulterior motives for making parking at a garage in the city center free (a federal grant they were using, Skipworth says, required the parking to be free). Another showed a developer whose apartment complex had been shut down for code violations, implying someone connected to the city “sabotaged” his boiler. 

The developer later retained the high-profile attorney Tony Buzbee to potentially file a lawsuit over the shutdown; Dolcefino’s son worked for Buzbee during this period. (Dolcefino said he thinks the developer “asked me if I knew a good lawyer,” and that he believed his response was, “‘Hey, my son works for Tony Buzbee, call him.’”)

And outside the stories, the public grew less civil. Online posts detailed the movements of the city manager and his family. Commenters threatened, “This is Texas, get a rope,” and, “You know how long crabs take to clean a corpse. Don’t ask how I know.” Skipworth began having campus security walk him to his car.

DYSFUNCTION IN DICKINSON: Inside the growing political unrest of a small town near Houston

That energy was channeled into an effort to recall Skipworth, which didn’t get off the ground before the regular election. Skipworth won, and his detractors announced their intent to launch another recall petition as soon as the law allowed. 

There was no end in sight. It was one battle after another to keep a job that had evolved to include threats and the uncertainty of whether such words portended real violence. Skipworth decided to resign. The resignation would trigger a special election to fill the vacancy.

That summer, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was shot at a rally. Skipworth’s reaction was visceral. “I cannot let these people win,” he remembers feeling. He told his wife it was crazy, but he was going to run for mayor in the special election triggered by his own resignation. 

That August, he went to the bank before a city council meeting, and the parking lot seemed to swim before his eyes. He called 911 and went to the emergency room. His blood pressure had skyrocketed; after monitoring, physicians concluded there was nothing wrong with his heart. Skipworth believes he had a panic attack. 

While he was in the hospital, the city council voted to take away his physical office space. He never filed to run in the special election and never returned to City Hall. Employees boxed up his things, which now sit in his garage; he can’t bear to unpack them. He hasn’t figured out how to fill the hole left behind by the many hours a week he used to spend working as an unpaid civil servant. 

He dwells on the time he showed a Channel 13 reporter the conditions people lived in at the apartment complex that came to be featured so sympathetically in Dolcefino’s videos.

“Back when (Dolcefino) worked at Channel 13, he would’ve been covering this story. The people that are having to live in a slum — he would’ve been their advocate,” he said. “Ten years ago, I would have been walking with you.”

There’s another node where what could have happened branched off from what did happen, and he thinks about it. 

“When all of this started, like with that land deal. In an alternate universe, if I had called up Wayne and … I had given him $50,000 (to investigate someone else); he never would have said a single bad word about me. Ever.”

'It's all I know'

“It’s hard to respond to that,” Dolcefino said when I presented him with Skipworth’s alternate universe. “I don’t have a single client that I believe is not on the right side of the fight. That’s my rule.” 

If he believed his client was on the right side of the fight, he believed Skipworth was on the wrong side. And so if, in an alternate reality, Skipworth had called about being his client in this fight? He might have started the case, he said, but believes that as the facts came back, “I would have had a very difficult time working for him.”

In his no-holds-barred journalism, where it’s fine to be unfair as long as you’re right, the stakes of determining which clients to accept, and of ending the relationship if the evidence comes back showing things to be too gray, are high. 

“Look, would I rather still be an investigative reporter doing what I did 30 years ago with the people that ran ABC back then? Sure.” But times had changed, he said, and his brand of reporting, which hounds government organizations to produce public records and often requires going to court, is expensive.

For those who have worked with Dolcefino, who have been targeted by Dolcefino, even Dolcefino himself, there’s a nostalgia for the way things used to be. A time when journalists were more responsive and less worried about lawsuits and had the resources to ferret out corruption at all levels of city government.

“I’m one of the last Mohicans from that era of longform,” he said. “I get to do 15-minute, 12-minute-long videos … No one else can do that in Houston. Or anywhere for that matter.”

He kicked back in his chair, and the legs of his green linen suit hiked up, revealing novelty socks purchased by his office manager. “I’m not for everyone,” they said in block letters.

And he’s never going to stop, he said — “Because it’s all I know.”

He’s always thinking about what he calls “cases,” he can’t imagine retiring because he doesn’t know how to relax, and besides, he loves Houston — and who is going to do this when he’s gone? 

Speaking of: “If you’re reading this: When I croak, I want all the people that I’ve done stories on to come. And they can sit in their own section. You know how they have the husband-and-wife section? We can have the investigative section.”