My old friend, Darrell Dorgan, and I decided to sit in on the sentencing hearing for Jason Halek on Monday morning. A couple of old, retired newsmen, we both went there thinking we were going to see the full measure of the law applied to a Texas con man responsible for one of the biggest pollution violations in North Dakota …
If everything goes as planned Monday morning (which would be unusual — nothing much has gone as planned in this case) Jason Halek will walk into the federal courthouse in Bismarck tomorrow morning as a free man, and walk out— figuratively, if not literally — in handcuffs, headed for a federal prison. You’ve read about Halek here many times before. …
If you’ve been following the saga of Jason Halek on my blog for the last four years, you know that on July 31 he was supposed to be sent off to jail for dumping 800,000 gallons of poisonous oilfield brine down an abandoned well south of Dickinson. I last wrote about him on April 13, the day he pleaded guilty …
Jason Halek wandered in and out of Bismarck on Wednesday. He wasn’t all that excited about being here, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t stick around to visit with old friends, instead likely heading back to Texas to sell some more used cars. For a couple more months. I wrote about Halek last month, after his lawyer negotiated a plea agreement …
Well, it looks like Jason Halek (pictured above) is finally going to the pokey. Remember Jason? He’s the fellow who dumped more than 800,000 gallons of salty, oilfield wastewater into an abandoned oil well southwest of Dickinson in Stark County, North Dakota, and then attempted to cover it up. And his partner in crime, Nathan Garber, might be sitting in …
We return now to an old, familiar story, a story of some really bad guys doing some really bad things to the North Dakota environment (or enviornment, as the Bismarck Tribune spells it in really big headlines on the front page today — have you ever seen a worse newspaper?), getting caught by state “regulators,” then given a slap on …