Trump pardons former Plano mayor Jack Harvard decades after conviction

CLIFTON, Texas — Jack Harvard revs up the engine on his Polaris Ranger, fills up a bucket of feed — the price has gone up again — and rides around his nearly 1,000 acres of rocky grassland at the top of the rolling Hill Country. 

He’s got African porcupines, giraffes, red stags and zebras to feed in the broiling July heat. His hundreds of animals from several corners of the world roam the land, racing across fields and down cliff sides, as far as the eye can see.

He’s a long way from Plano.

He led the suburb through its growth spurt as mayor for eight years in the 1980s.  

Now he rules a new kingdom, a former drive-through safari he’s built into a breeding ranch for exotic and endangered animals with the help of his wife, four daughters and their kids. 

“This is Jack’s legacy, for his children and grandchildren,” his wife, Nancy, said in the back of the Polaris. She’s brought a bag of carrots to feed Bob, their giraffe.

It was here, on these rolling hills in Bosque County, that Harvard received the call he said he never expected. 

Nearly three decades after the former Plano mayor went to federal prison for banking crimes, President Donald Trump quietly pardoned him July 3. 

Harvard says he was wrongly convicted 30 years ago. 

“I don’t think I ever did anything illegal,” Harvard said in one of a series of recent interviews with The Dallas Morning News.

Trump’s pardon revisits crimes Harvard insists he is innocent of, but the prosecutor who helped convict him says he was rightly found guilty for. 

Now almost 80 years old, Harvard said the unexpected pardon has lifted a burden he has carried since the 1990s.

“It was very harmful to my family,” he said. “I always felt like someday I would be able to get a little bit of improvement on the situation.”

Nancy believes the pardon reflects the good her husband has done with his life. 

In addition to raising and selling animals on his Texas Safari Ranch, some endangered or extinct in the wild, he has spent his days hosting military training exercises for U.S. and NATO troops and doting on his nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren as their “pawpaw.” 

Harvard helped lead Plano through one of the city’s most significant periods of growth before the banking scandal brought down his political career. 

He was charged with breaking federal banking laws in two cases in the 1990s. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for clarification on the scope of Trump’s pardon. Harvard’s legal team believes he was forgiven by the president for both. 

Harvard was convicted in the mid 1990s, lost an appeal in 1997, spent more than three years in federal prison from 1997 to 2000 and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in restitution as a result of the convictions. 

Related: Trump pardons former Abramoff partner, 9 people convicted of violating vehicle emissions controls

A pardon is an expression of the president’s forgiveness but does not signify innocence, according to the Department of Justice. Harvard had applied for a pardon before, but his application was rejected by President George W. Bush in 2008 and President Barack Obama in 2013. 

Michael Savage, the retired assistant U.S. attorney who helped prosecute Harvard’s cases said the president had the authority to issue a pardon but that it didn’t change what happened, the jury’s verdict or the appeals court’s decision.

“A jury of twelve people convicted him. And the [appeals court] upheld his conviction,” Savage said. “It was a righteous conviction.”

Southern Methodist University professor Matthew Wilson studies political science and said Harvard’s kind of pardon is commonplace, “more symbolic than substantive” since he already served his time.

“The real importance here is … the restoration of civic good graces,” he said. “A presidential pardon is a real seal of rehabilitation and re-ingratiation into the community.”

Harvard’s presidential pardon is not the first granted to a former Plano mayor. 

In 2004, President George W. Bush pardoned David McCall, Plano’s mayor from 1956 to 1960. He was indicted alongside Harvard in one of his cases, connected to allegedly fraudulent loans made at Plano Savings and Loan, which failed in the 1980s. McCall died just days after the pardon. A plaza downtown is named for him. 

According to Harvard, the two former mayors also served time in the same federal prison in Fort Worth, where they occasionally shared lunch. Nancy recalled carpooling with McCall’s wife to visit their husbands at the facility.

Harvard served as mayor from 1982 to 1990. 

Elected four times, he led Plano through a critical time of growth in its economy and population in the ‘80s. He was known for his black cherry-colored Cadillac with “Plano” on the license plate and wore a watch bearing the city’s logo. He still has it, he said, but it’s stopped running. 

Today, he has an early Plano flag in his office drawer and shelves dotted with city memorabilia, such as the key to the city and an old mug with the logo. 

“I’m very proud of what we accomplished while I was mayor of Plano,” he said.

He also led Willow Bend National Bank, and its failure in 1990 cost taxpayers $25 million, The News reported previously. 

The allegations against Harvard included conspiracy, bank fraud, misapplying bank funds, falsifying bank books and bribery. 

Jeffrey Strand, an assistant U.S. attorney at the time who prosecuted Harvard’s case alongside Savage, characterized the former mayor as a powerful ex-banker who improperly used his influence, according to previous news accounts. 

“In his arrogance, he thought he could do what he wanted to satisfy his personal matters and his personal greed,” Strand said in a closing rebuttal in a 1995 trial. 

“I don’t agree with his comments at all. I did not misuse my influence … as mayor or chair of the bank,” Harvard said. The prosecutors “were unethical and they lied” about the bribe, he said; they knew he was innocent. 

Harvard was represented at one point by Abbe Lowell, a prominent defense attorney whose clients have included President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, New York Attorney General Letitia James and others under scrutiny from the Trump administration. 

Lowell is known as one of the most successful white-collar defense and trial attorneys in the country. But he did not win the former Plano mayor’s case.

Harvard said he is not a very political person these days. 

He has never met or spoken with the president, he said, and only learned of his approved pardon application shortly before the White House released the names of eleven individuals the president had forgiven. 

Most of the group were people who violated federal emissions law. Also on the list was a former business partner of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and, tucked at the very end, the former Plano mayor. 

A statement from the White House cited Harvard’s “upstanding record” post-conviction for the pardon, including his work raising endangered animals and letting U.S. and NATO soldiers use his ranch 35 miles west of Waco for training exercises.

Harvard owns the ranch and “world-class breeding facility” in Clifton, according to its website. The ranch hosts exotic wildlife, both endangered species and animals extinct in the wild — around 1,000 animals roaming on hundreds of acres, including dozens of red stags with velvety antlers, baby wildebeests and an angry mama antelope with winding, protective horns.  

Texas is the heart of the exotic animal industry in the U.S., and the state allows for the hunting of exotic animals on private property. 

Harvard said no animals are hunted at the ranch and it is closed to the public. While the property used to welcome guests for events, it is now entirely private, he said. He sells the animals mainly to other ranches and breeders. 

For over 15 years, Harvard said he’s allowed the U.S. Army and NATO soldiers from the Netherlands to use the land for “war games,” free of charge. The troops “plan and execute challenging, realistic and rigorous training events” according to a certificate given to Harvard awarding him for public service.

Chinooks and Apache aircraft land on the property during these exercises, and NATO soldiers yell in Dutch as they scour the land for American soldiers. Harvard has taken videos of the training over the years, all right in his backyard between herds of animals. 

Once, a pack interrupted two groups of soldiers firing blanks from machine guns.  

“About 15 wildebeests came strolling right across the middle of them,” he said. “Everybody just died laughing.”

Harvard, who said he served in the military as an airborne soldier in the 1970s, said he sometimes hosts the soldiers overnight and buys them pizza. He still has his boots from his time in the military, and wears a shining airborne brigade pin in his Texas Safari Ranch baseball cap. 

“I’m proud of the fact that we’ve … overcome the problems of the past, and we’re doing OK,” Harvard said.  

In Harvard’s application for clemency, his lawyer — a longtime friend and ally of the president — argued he had been targeted by a Democratic presidential administration. 

Peter Ticktin, the Florida attorney who represented Harvard in the application, said he’s known Trump since they were 15 years old, when they were classmates at New York Military Academy, a private college preparatory school. 

“We lived together in the barracks,” Ticktin said. “He was a good guy.”

The lawyer has represented several people connected with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and said he developed “a wonderful relationship” with Ed Martin, who was appointed the U.S. pardon attorney in May of last year. 

Trump trusts him and his pardon applications, Ticktin said. In Harvard’s, he emphasized his tenure as mayor in “one of the most Republican regions in the nation.”

“His charges were brought by a weaponized department of justice under former President Bill Clinton,” the application states, which was “trying to create blame for the savings and loan banking crisis” that distressed the nation’s financial sector in the ‘80s, Ticktin wrote.

Related: From Perot to AT&T: A timeline of Plano’s major business expansions and relocations

Harvard’s prosecution came during the federal government’s sweeping response to the savings-and-loan crisis, marked by risky lending, weak regulation and widespread fraud that cost taxpayers billions of dollars and toppled hundreds of financial institutions.

One of Harvard’s four daughters, Chayse Harvard, believes her father’s pardon was not politically motivated, but was granted because of his generosity at his ranch in Clifton. 

“They went on and lived their lives just continuing to be good people,” she said of her parents. 

Harvard said he’s conservative and has made major donations to support Republican campaigns but, according to federal records, has never contributed to Trump’s.

At Harvard’s home in Clifton, a chandelier made of antlers hangs from a lofty ceiling, the walls dotted with taxidermied heads from his hunts in Africa and a bison emerging from the wall by the heavy door — his “stuffies,” Nancy calls them. 

A Christmas tree made of antlers sits on the back porch, which overlooks rolling hills and the safari’s old “Western town.” Holidays are big for the family, and Christmas is spent in the McKinney area, where their daughters live. 

Chayse was born in 1991, after her dad served as mayor, and from roughly first to fourth grade, he was in prison. 

She remembers visiting him every week, swinging in the playground outside the facility in Fort Worth and making paper airplanes with another girl visiting her father in jail. 

Her family focused on rebuilding. “We didn’t really talk about it. We just moved on,” she said. She never doubted her dad’s innocence.

“He was still the best dad in the world, one of the best people that I knew,” she said. He hired former inmates and used to teach classes at the prison, she said. 

When she went off to college, her dad’s involvement with the military began. She would bring friends to see the helicopters land on the property.

“My dad is very passionate about America,” she said. “He loves that they come out there and that he’s able to give back in that way.”

Indeed, “God Bless the U.S.A.” plays as his phone ringtone. 

Her parents are also big supporters of the arts, she said. The walls of their home are covered in local, Western paintings — for Jack — and original Russian artwork — for Nancy. A Bosque County arts group named a theater for the Harvards recently for their contributions. 

The pardon was “unbelievable, almost surreal” for her family, Chayse said.

“On one hand, it means so much,” Chayse said. “But on the other hand, it doesn’t change anything … he and my mom have already spent all the time rebuilding their life.”

He’ll continue working the family’s commercial real estate business, which Chayse helps run, and spending time on his ranch with family. 

“I appreciate what the president has done,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting it. … I was hopeful of it, but you never know.”

Chayse said it closes “a very difficult chapter of our lives” — years of separation from her father, scrutiny from classmates and the challenge of starting a new life. 

She still remembers her dad’s first dinner home from prison — pot roast. She makes it almost every week now. 

“It’s sacred,” she said. 

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