Overview

Gender

male

J. Bruce Bugg is a one-time Groce Locke & Hebdon tax attorney who became a wheeler dealer. He organized local investors to buy San Antonio Bank in 1984, merging it into Compass Bank the following year as cratering oil prices and S&Ls tanked the Texas economy.

Bugg then became the attorney and business partner of heirs to the oil-mapping fortune of Tobin Aerial Surveys. The Argyle Partners investment company that he organized made a failed hostile-takeover bid for Cayman Water Co. Bugg became vice chair of that Caribbean utility as part of a 1998 settlement between the two companies. Argyle teamed up with a developer later that year to build DoubleTree and Hampton Inns hotels in New Mexico and Texas.

As the San Antonio representative of the Dallas Cowboys football team, Bugg brokered a controversial 2003 deal in which the San Antonio City Council narrowly voted to pay the Cowboys $400,000 to do 21 days of summer training in the local Alamodome.