Closing arguments are set to begin in a significant four-week federal trial against former Houston ISD official Brian Busby and vendor Anthony Hutchison.
The pair faces a 33-count indictment that includes charges of conspiracy, bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds, wire fraud, witness tampering, and willfully filing false tax returns.
If convicted, they could face serious prison time—up to five years for conspiracy, up to ten years for bribery, up to twenty years for wire fraud, up to twenty years for witness tampering, and up to three years for each tax count.
The defense team, which includes notable attorneys Rusty Hardin and Dick DeGuerin, has presented arguments over the past three weeks to counter the government’s allegations.
Part of their strategy has involved discrediting what the prosecution has labeled an alleged bribery ledger maintained by Hutchison, arguing instead that it is a record of gambling activities.
During the trial, Hutchison has claimed that five pages found in his black spiral-bound day planner, filled with school names, invoice amounts, and other dollar figures described by prosecutors as bribe amounts, actually pertain to gambling debts.
Prosecutors have connected these amounts to initials or names of four former district officials and one former board member, all of whom have testified to receiving cash from Hutchison and have entered plea agreements with the government.
In an intriguing moment, Busby’s attorney, Dick DeGuerin, requested that Hutchison take the stand to explain the ledger, but Hardin replied that Hutchison would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights.
Witness Diane Nicholson-Jones, a longtime employee of Hutchison, described the ledger pages, initially claiming they represented Hutchison’s gambling winnings.
However, during her testimony, she acknowledged her uncertainty about the pages and expressed surprise upon seeing HISD school names included in the notes.
“I don’t know what that is. I don’t,” Nicholson-Jones stated when asked to decipher the disputed pages.
The trial has delved deeply into Busby’s personal finances, with jurors reviewing extensive documentation, including spreadsheets and payment records.
Prosecutors have closely examined Busby’s cash deposits, which reportedly exceeded $3 million between January 2015 and July 2021, including over $777,000 in 2018 alone.
The government has argued that these deposits indicate Busby’s failure to report his income accurately, emphasizing the suspicious nature of some deposits, which occurred just below the $10,000 threshold requiring cash payment reporting to the government.
Testimony revealed that these deposits were spread across a myriad of accounts—18 bank accounts, four loans, and one credit card—but Busby claimed several accounts were unrelated to the case at hand.
Busby asserted that he earned income from a variety of sources, including investments in real estate, profits from a daycare he and his wife owned, and revenue from a cleaning business.
Additionally, Busby mentioned managing over $200,000 in cash for his aging mother starting in about 2009 as part of his financial history.
In a rebuttal, FBI forensic accountant Katherine Prado testified that cash deposits to Busby’s accounts dramatically declined in the months following an FBI raid on Busby’s home in February 2020.
During that raid, prosecutors presented photographs showing bundles of cash discovered in Busby’s closet, some of which were tied to bands from a Cleveland bank.
Busby contended that he has never been to Cleveland except for some shopping, suggesting any connection was purely coincidental, as he typically reuses money bands for cash organization.
In a related development, Hutchison’s defense called Tracey Alexander-Watson, a former employee of Hutchison, to testify about how Hutchison determined charges for playground wood chips supplied to HISD.
The defense argued that Hutchison based his pricing on an old contract that dated back to 2013, and they involved him relying on documents from that period for proposals made in 2018.
Prosecutors, however, pointed to evidence suggesting that Hutchison’s charges exceeded the actual costs of materials purchased.
For instance, the prosecution indicated that Hutchison’s business charged HISD approximately $685,000 starting in 2018—significantly higher than the acquisition costs of those materials, as per the exhibits presented in court.
Alexander-Watson admitted that Hutchison had often referred to earlier contracts pertaining to playground maintenance while determining charges, but the government maintained that these old documents did not apply to purchases made in 2018.
The defense also presented a spreadsheet, noting that the amounts required for playground mulch were consistent with what Hutchison charged HISD.
For example, the required amount at Wilson Elementary School corresponded exactly with the proposal submitted,
although the defense faced counterarguments about overcharging and discrepancies in delivery amounts.
The prosecution pointed out how a 20% markup in Hutchison’s pricing closely mirrored a similar framework included in a 2018 grounds maintenance contract.
Yet the defense argued that the 2018 grounds maintenance agreement did not explicitly include playground mulch, suggesting that those services could have predated the official agreement for purchasing.
As closing arguments approach, both sides are preparing to make their final cases to the jury, underscoring how the allegations against Busby and Hutchison have unfolded through extensive testimony and complex financial analysis throughout the trial.
image source from：http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/education/hisd/article/alleged-gambling-sheet-busby-hutchison-trial-20278567.php
