Former Dallas DA sued for burglarizing home of oil heir

Shortly before midnight last night, I filed a federal lawsuit against former Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins for sending an assistant DA and four armed investigators to burglarize the home of my client, Albert G. Hill, III, in 2013. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Watkins was worried about a March 7, 2013 state court hearing where Mr. Hill’s attorneys planned to question Mr. Watkins about prosecutorial misconduct, so he sent his goons into Mr. Hill’s home to try to find dirt / leverage before that hearing.

It didn’t work. As most people in Dallas already know, the March 7, 2013 hearing went very badly for Mr. Watkins, and Judge Lena Levario dismissed all criminal charges against Mr. Hill after hearing evidence of retaliation, bribery, and widespread corruption in Mr. Watkins’s office.  In September, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued a blistering opinion that outlined the efforts of Mr. Watkins and his staff to frame Mr. Hill and his wife, Erin, on the trumped-up charges of mortgage fraud.

Unfortunately, the burglary and the trumped-up criminal charges were only a small part of a scorched-earth campaign against Mr. Hill by members of his own family, particularly his father, Albert G. Hill, Jr. (a.k.a. “Junior”). My client is the first-born great-grandson of H.L. Hunt, Jr., the founder of Hunt Petroleum, and his family is one of the wealthiest in America.  In 2009, at the age of 39, Mr. Hill learned that his great-grandfather bequeathed most of his assets to Mr. Hill in a trust that he created shortly after Mr. Hill was born in 1970.

The lawsuit explains that Mr. Hill’s father and other relatives hid the trust from Mr. Hill and acted like it never existed, instead parceling up H.L. Hunt, Jr.’s assets among themselves.  When Mr. Hill started questioning other family trusts in 2007, the family panicked and declared war.  According to the lawsuit, family members and their allies ultimately bribed Mr. Watkins to bring the bogus criminal charges against Mr. Hill, hoping to shut down the civil litigation.

Now if that sounds like a tall tale, just consider the fact that the FBI caught Mr. Watkins’s chief investigator, Anthony L. Robinson, accepting a $200,000 bribe in an unrelated case, and Robinson pleaded guilty in June.  Robinson cooperated with the FBI, and my sources tell me that Robinson wore a wire and recorded Mr. Watkins discussing bribes. I do not yet know whether Robinson participated in the burglary of the Hill’s home, but I do know that four of the five alleged burglars worked for Robinson. … Read more