Listen to an audio version of this article. For the past decade, James Frinzi was a hired-gun lobbyist leveraging his deep political connections on behalf of an eclectic rotating roster of clients: investment firms in New York, various medical entities in Texas, the constitutional monarchy of Qatar, and the authoritarian defense minister of Indonesia. But Frinzi’s employer had long been the Goodman family, a quintet of brothers with a vast web of telecom businesses based in Texas.
By October 2021, James Goodman—the co-founder and majority owner of Goodman Networks—was the sole remaining board director and tapped Frinzi to act as CEO. Together Goodman and Frinzi, the former’s friend and “political fixer,” as a court document describes him, took control of the distressed company.
He was now the CEO, chairman, and majority shareholder of a publicly traded company, AMRR, which he later renamed MBG Holdings Inc. and which did business as Multiband Global. One of his first acts was to appoint Senator Paxton to the company’s inaugural board of directors.
Multiband Global turned out to be a house of cards constructed by Frinzi that would eventually collapse, according to court records and corporate filings. Interrelated federal lawsuits filed over the past 15 months depict Frinzi as a central figure in an alleged corporate fraud scheme involving Goodman Networks.
“Clearly, Mr. Frinzi is a bad guy and a bad actor, there’s no question about that,” Paul Silverstein, a lawyer for the bondholders, said at a hearing in December 2022. “But the Goodmans are way up there on the list. wasn’t the lone gunman here.” on the Paxtons’ ties to Frinzi, the senator’s board position at Multiband Global, and some of the bankruptcy claims against Frinzi. At that time, Frinzi denied allegations the trustee had made against him and downplayed the Paxtons’ involvement.
At the same time, Frinzi loaded Multiband Global’s corporate payroll with friends and family and spent eye-popping amounts of time and money on foreign business trips, according to the trustee. He also doled out gobs of campaign donations: Between 2021 and 2023, Frinzi contributed more than $300,000 to state and federal campaigns–including to Ken Paxton, according to campaign finance records.
Around this same time, creditors had petitioned to force Goodman Networks into bankruptcy. That effort dragged on for months as the Goodman family tried to maintain control of the company. By early 2023, attempts by the Goodmans and Frinzi to fend off, delay, or otherwise control the process were defeated. A routine bankruptcy case involves identifying a troubled company’s assets and creditors, then settling its debts through legal negotiations.
Seidel warned that Frinzi had been carelessly running Multiband Global, the key asset in the bankruptcy, into the ground while posting photos of his luxe lifestyle on Instagram.“What we see is Mr. Frinzi in Europe on a private jet being wined and dined and wining and dining people on a daily basis, fiddling while Rome Burns,” said a lawyer working for Seidel in a May 2023 hearing.
The serious allegations against Frinzi and Multiband Global contained in the interrelated court filings raise questions—which the Paxtons have so far refused to address—about the extent of their involvement with an alleged bad actor and his company.
Frinzi temporarily parted ways with Goodman Networks in 2015 and set up his own lobbying firm, but he returned to lobbying for the Goodman company in 2017, state records show. By that point, Goodman Networks was in crisis, with mass layoffs and anof top executives, and was forced to enter bankruptcy—separate from the second bankruptcy that is still ongoing—to restructure its debt. The company never fully recovered, though, as revenue continued to decline, according to court filings.
After Kosovo, the Paxtons journeyed on to Albania, without Frinzi, where they were hosted by Fatmir Mediu, a deeply connected member of parliament who chairs Albania’s small right-wing Republican Party. For years, Mediu has been involved inMediu posted several photos on his social media with the Paxtons and two of their travel companions outside a hotel in the Albanian capital of Tirana and in Vlore, a tourist destination with seaside resorts and casinos.
But FedEx, the largest creditor with its $81 million claim in the case, was unhappy with the trustee’s handling of the proceedings, court records show, and separately decided to take more aggressive action of its own. Late last October, the company dropped a bombshell lawsuit against Frinzi, James Goodman, and many of the other defendants being pursued by Seidel, alleging that their coordinated schemes amounted to a civil racketeering conspiracy.
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