Four years after North Texas home builder Scott Sherman completed a federal prison sentence for mortgage fraud, his new construction materials business received a $600,000 cash infusion.
The financial boost came from a blind trust set up to prevent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, from any overlap in their personal investments and their actions as elected officials. But previously unreleased records from the attorney general’s 2023 impeachment investigation show the trust was far from blind and did not shield the Paxtons from its business dealings, including the investment in Sherman’s business.
Before long, Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel, which Sherman built with his father, grew into a vast enterprise with various locations and subsidiaries. And along the way, some of those businesses stopped paying taxes to local governments, including school districts.
But as their tax debts stacked up, Wildcatter companies wired the Paxtons tens of thousands of dollars in the months leading up to and during the attorney general’s impeachment on charges of corruption and bribery. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Legislature and is now in an expensive and tight race for a U.S. Senate seat against Democrat James Talarico, a state lawmaker.
While Paxton has been in public office for more than two decades, the blind trust he established upon becoming attorney general has largely obscured his business dealings. The Paxtons’ investment in Wildcatter through that trust offers a new, previously unreported look at both the limits of that trust and the attorney general’s financial association with the very type of business executives whose prosecutions he typically celebrates.
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