pro-tax campaign, says he has been told that Gray defected to opposition groups. “If, in fact, that did happen — if, in fact, it turns out to be true and he left — he burned a bunch of bridges for no reason,” Jacob tells The Pitch. The sales tax was doomed regardless of Gray’s position. But the whose-side-is-heon-today mystery was just one of many signs indicating a troubled campaign.
Overtaxed continued from page 7 poured $200,000 into Citizens for Fairness — almost all the committee’s cash. It also paid $40,000 to Freedom Inc., a longtime black political club in Kansas City that’s sometimes considered influential to its voting bloc and has a reputation for requiring payment from political interests that seek its endorsement. Freedom Inc. came out against the salestax measure on October 3, saying that funding translational research wasn’t the responsibility of Jackson Countians. Two days later, Bradshaw paid Freedom Inc. $25,000. Gray has been known to work with Freedom Inc. in the past. Pro-tax campaigners became suspicious that Gray was in league with Freedom Inc. again when the political club’s anti-sales-tax mail arrived at Kansas City houses. The well-produced pieces resembled direct-mail items that Gray had sent in previous campaigns. John Carnes, an Independence lawyer who has worked with Gray (and sometimes against him) in prior political contests, took up ranks with Citizens for Fairness, spreading the word in eastern Jackson County about the faults of the proposed sales-tax increase. “I think the Freedom people may have had some discussions with Pat, but I don’t know,” Carnes says. “I don’t know if he was for it or against it.” Freedom Inc.’s and Citizens for Fairness’
materials would prove influential in sinking the sales tax. Patterson says he understood that polls dropped “like a lead balloon” after Freedom staked its opposition. Freedom Inc.’s Kiki Curls and Gayle Holliday could not be reached for comment. If Gray took up ranks with the opposition after signing on with pro-tax campaign committees, it wouldn’t have been the first time he crossed the street in the middle of a political campaign. Gray was hired by former development lawyer Dick King in the 1991 Kansas City mayoral race. The two didn’t work well together, and Gray was fired from the campaign. He quickly started working for Brice Harris, a communitycollege administrator handpicked by the local business community to challenge King. Both candidates ran an exceptionally sleazy campaign in the primary, a race neither won. Emanuel Cleaver went on to beat Bob Lewellen in that year’s general election, marking the first term in the Kansas City may-
Anti-tax mailers or’s office for the present-day congressman. And Gray is widely believed to have doublecrossed former Jackson County legislator Henry Rizzo in 2010. Gray worked as Rizzo’s consultant in a race against 2nd District challenger Crystal Williams. But he also worked on behalf of Terry Riley, another Jackson County Legislature aspirant who was challenging incumbent Fred Arbanas. A mail piece went out that summoned imagery from the crime movie The Usual Suspects by depicting all the incumbents in a police lineup. “I was shocked to find out that my consultant, who I paid to represent me, was also partly behind the negative mailer that hurt me in the last two weeks of the campaign,” Rizzo told The Pitch in 2011. Rizzo lost that race to Williams. Gray passed Rizzo’s complaints off as “political gossip.” Larry Jacob, a political consultant with the Dover Strategy Group, which worked on the
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December 12-18, 2013
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oe says his pre-campaign polling showed that 58 percent of the Jackson County electorate would have voted in favor of the sales tax. Campaign critics have quietly surmised that such a result came from a push poll — the kind that asks questions in a manner designed to elicit the response a campaign committee wants to hear. Roe disputes this, saying no reputable firm does push polls. But there’s no doubt that the campaign got off to a terrible start once news of the ballot measure made the front page of the August 8 Kansas City Star. And things didn’t get easier once Bradshaw got involved. Bradshaw, a physician who later became a personal-injury lawyer, has been working on proposing some form of statewide sales tax in Missouri for medical research for the past 30 years. The Jackson County proposal seemed to co-opt some of his ideas, and he set out to defeat it with his own money.