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. In 2010, Frinzi became an executive and chief lobbyist for their flagship company, Goodman Networks Inc.
, a major contractor for AT&T, based then in Plano. In the years to come, however, Goodman Networks went into a downward spiral, culminating in 2021 with the company on the verge of insolvency with nearly $20 million in bonds coming due to outside bondholders in the next year, according to bankruptcy filings. 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. “For the first time in a long while I’ll be taking a break from being in politics full time, to become the CEO of my client’s company, Goodman Networks,” Frinzi announced in a Facebook post that October. “It’s a very interesting and new challenge, including that I’m going to execute a rebranding and listing the c.