The Insider

Father of the Year
One thing you can say for City Councilman John Kelley: He's a doting dad, particularly on his 35-year-old son Shaun, a gym instructor and weightlifter who lived with his parents before landing at his current address, the downtown county jail.

After the earlier dismissal of a cocaine possession sentence against him was revoked late last month, Shaun Kelley was ordered to serve 90 days in jail to complete the ten-year adjudicated sentence on the second-degree felony. But he could be looking at more time since testing positive last week for codeine after the district attorney's office sought and received an order for a urine test. An investigation is now under way to determine how the younger Kelley obtained the controlled substance in the jail. The D.A.'s office is also seeking the revocation of Kelley's probated sentence on the cocaine possession, which could open him to a two-to-20-year sentence on the original offense.

According to sources close to that investigation, Councilman Kelley has pressured contacts in the sheriff's department to gain favorable treatment for his son, has apparently sent money orders to the jail commissary accounts of other prisoners who may have supplied drugs to Shaun Kelley in jail, and sent a senior Council aide to research the campaign and personal finance records of Mark Kent Ellis. He's the first-term state district judge who sent Shaun Kelley to jail after his adjudicated sentence had been improperly dismissed by Ellis's predecessor, Lupe Salinas, in Salinas's closing days in office.

First assistant district attorney Don Stricklin, who waged a three-year investigation of Salinas for campaign finance violations that cost the judge a presidential nomination for a federal bench, vowed last month to investigate other cases dismissed by Salinas before he left office.

Councilman Kelley told The Insider that he has taken no action that any parent concerned for the welfare of a son or daughter would not have done. He also claimed that Shaun Kelley is a pawn in the district attorney's investigation of Salinas. He did not deny sending money orders to the commissary accounts of other prisoners at the jail, but he refused to discuss why he may have done so. He referred questions to his son's attorney, Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, an old racing-bike buddy of the Kelleys. Haynes did not respond to a phone inquiry from The Insider.

District Attorney Johnny Holmes said he's seen no evidence of the councilman's direct involvement in securing Shaun Kelley preferential treatment, but he's irate about the June 6 records check on Ellis conducted by Kelley's city-paid aide, Florence Neumeyer, at the county clerk's office.

"I think that sucks," said Holmes. But he also conceded the judge's records are public information, and the check by Neumeyer broke no laws.

When contacted by The Insider, Neumeyer refused to say whether Kelley ordered the records search, and claimed she did it on her free time. "People check these records all the time," she said. Asked why she would check the records of a judge who had jailed the son of her boss, Neumeyer declined to comment further.

Councilman Kelley said Shaun's attorneys had made a routine request for information on Ellis. He refused to say whether he had asked Neumeyer to run a check on the judge, noting, "Council aides can do anything on their days off."

Kelley seemed oblivious to the ethical implications of using a member of his staff to research a judge who will be ruling on his son's case. "All those things are public records," said the councilman. "Anybody can pull records, and they're pulled every day. That's no big deal."

Retorted Holmes: "Seems to be poor timing if someone had an interest in looking at records that otherwise sit over there gathering dust, except when someone's running for office."

Ellis, for his part, said he finds it "a little hard to understand" why another elected official found it necessary to check up on him. He passed on saying anything more, citing the fact that Shaun Kelley's case is pending in his court.

Equally questionable but legal were the four contributions directed to the jail commissary accounts of two of Shaun Kelley's fellow prisoners. The money orders, as dictated by jail policy, were mailed in to be deposited in the prisoners' accounts and bore return addresses listing J. Kelley and E. Kelley as the contributors. Emogene Kelley is the councilman's wife and Shaun's mother.

Investigators suspect the commissary money went to buy favors for Shaun Kelley from fellow inmates, including that codeine that popped up in his urine. It seems unlikely that Shaun Kelley, who has plenty of credit in his own commissary account thanks to his parents, needed anything legal from the prisoners that the commissary could not supply.

Councilman Kelley would not confirm or deny that he sent the payments. "If I did that, that would be the business of me," he said. "I've had young people that I don't even know or just barely know that have problems from time to time, and I've gone down and given them money to help them pay a fine."