Playing Possum

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed a bill in May 2009 authorizing the Brazos River Authority to sell the entire inhabited shoreline of Possum Kingdom Lake, not many people questioned it. But the odd thing is that the property in question had been sold exactly one month earlier to a good ol' boy that had earned the nickname "the River Card." While the Texas legislature had been busy considering the will of the people, the Brazos River Authority had been busy selling the land. The final sale price was fifty million dollars. The estimated value of the land was one billion dollars. Playing Possum offers a detailed analysis of the most costly political scandal perpetrated in Texas since the Sharpstown Stock-Fraud scandal. It involved the state's most powerful politicians-including the governor, the lieutenant governor, and the attorney general-but to this day very few people know what really happened. It also involved the leading candidates for those same offices in 2014. This true account reveals how the taxpayers of Texas were cheated out of approximately one billion dollars worth of prime Texas real estate in a story of high-stakes real estate poker.