Mission Details
Target: Jerry Eubanks
Theater: Pawhuska, OK
Operation: RAP SHEET
Description: Exposure of felony embezzlement history and financial irregularities from previous posts.
Disposition: M.I.A. — Resigned; accepted plea deal.
The oil-rich land of Osage County, Oklahoma has a long and painful history of outsiders arriving to take what does not belong to them. The Killers of the Flower Moon laid bare what happens when predators are given access and authority in a community that trusts them. Decades later, the same county would find itself hosting a different kind of predator, one who did not arrive with a gun but with a resume, a contract, and an alleged appetite for public money that belonged to the citizens he was sworn to serve.
His name is Jerry Eubanks. His title was City Manager of Pawhuska, Oklahoma. And by the time Guerrilla News correspondents arrived at Pawhuska City Hall in December to begin their civil rights inquiry, Eubanks had already been charged with felony embezzlement in connection with not one but two separate Oklahoma municipalities where he had previously worked, Fairview and Blackwell. He was still sitting behind his desk, collecting a taxpayer-funded salary, while criminal proceedings moved through the courts.
A Pattern Hiding in Plain Sight
What makes the Eubanks story remarkable is not simply that a public official is accused of theft. Corruption in small-town government is, tragically, not rare. What is remarkable is the pattern, a man moving from city to city across Oklahoma, ascending to the highest administrative post each municipality offered, and leaving behind questions about missing money and missing equipment every time he moved on.
Correspondents began pulling on this thread after receiving tips about a $449,000 expenditure approved through the Pawhuska Public Works Authority. The payment, or series of payments, had been passed before the governing board with almost no documentation attached. Board members had voted to approve nearly half a million dollars without being given any paperwork explaining what the money was actually for. A single invoice from one vendor accounted for $384,500 of that total. The invoice described the work in terms so vague as to be meaningless.
When correspondents walked into Pawhuska City Hall and submitted an open records request demanding the supporting documentation for that expenditure, including any contracts, work orders, or internal communications that would explain what service or product the city actually received in exchange for that money, they were met with a familiar bureaucratic response. The records clerk had gone to lunch. A form was available in the hallway. Someone else was handling a previous request. The paperwork, if it existed at all, was not forthcoming.
The Contract Clause That Should Not Exist
While pressing for those financial records, correspondents received information from sources inside the city that stopped them cold. According to those sources, Jerry Eubanks had negotiated an employment contract with the City of Pawhuska that contained a severance provision. That provision, sources alleged, required the city to pay Eubanks a severance package even in the event he was sent to prison on the embezzlement charges he was already facing in other jurisdictions.
Read that again slowly. A man who had already been charged with stealing from Oklahoma cities, a man whose criminal history was a matter of public record at the time of his hiring in Pawhuska, had allegedly negotiated a contract that would force taxpayers to cut him a check even if a jury found him guilty and a judge sent him to jail. Whether that clause was actually in the final contract was something correspondents were actively working to confirm through open records requests. But the mere allegation that such language had been discussed, let alone inserted, spoke volumes about the environment of unchecked administrative power that had allowed Eubanks to operate for as long as he did.
The Skid Steer and the Drone
The financial irregularities were not the only evidence being gathered. Drone footage captured during the investigation located a piece of heavy equipment on property connected to Eubanks, specifically a skid steer that correspondents believed may have been taken from one of the cities Eubanks previously managed. The Osage County Sheriff's Department assisted in obtaining the vehicle identification number from that equipment. Correspondents were actively working to match that VIN against municipal inventory records from Fairview and Blackwell, a process that, if successful, would support an additional charge of knowingly concealing stolen property.
That charge carries special significance because it is a continuous crime. Unlike a completed act of embezzlement, actively concealing stolen property on your land is an ongoing offense. For a man already navigating the terms and conditions of a criminal case, an additional active felony would represent a serious violation of those conditions, potentially accelerating his path toward incarceration regardless of the timeline of the original charges.
Court Days and Courthouse Steps
The investigation did not stay behind a desk. Correspondents traveled to the Kay County Courthouse in Newkirk, Oklahoma on multiple occasions to monitor the criminal proceedings directly. The courtroom camera prohibition meant that the proceedings themselves could not be filmed, but the reporting continued outside the courthouse walls, documenting arrivals, departures, and the slow grind of a justice system that moves at its own pace regardless of public urgency.
Community members across Oklahoma were watching. Viewers were calling the district attorney's office, politely but persistently, urging prosecutors not to offer Eubanks a deal that would let him escape meaningful accountability. One caller from South Carolina reported that a staff member at the DA's office had been receptive to the message, acknowledged that some callers had been inappropriate, and laughed in agreement about the seriousness of the situation. The phones were ringing. The pressure was building.
And then, in the weeks that followed the initial Pawhuska visits, something happened that small-town officials accused of corruption rarely expect. The public scrutiny held. The camera kept showing up. The records requests kept coming. Jerry Eubanks, the city manager who had allegedly moved from town to town leaving a trail of missing money behind him, who had walked into Pawhuska with active embezzlement charges on his record and still managed to hold the most powerful administrative position in the city, entered a guilty plea.
The Resignation and the Plea
Eubanks resigned his position as Pawhuska City Manager and accepted a plea deal on the embezzlement charges stemming from his conduct at previous municipalities. In the dry language of court records, the case was resolved. In the lived experience of the communities he passed through, the resolution was something more complicated. How many cities hired him? Who vetted him? Who looked at his background and decided the risk was acceptable, or worse, never looked at all?
The Osage County community, a place that the film "Killers of the Flower Moon" brought to international attention for a historical pattern of outsiders exploiting its people, had once again been positioned as a target. The difference this time was that the exploitation was documented on camera, the records requests were filed in real time, and the public could watch the process unfold.
The $449,000 in unexplained Public Works Authority payments remains an open question. The skid steer and its VIN remain subjects of ongoing inquiry. The employment contract and whatever severance language it may or may not have contained remain worth examining by whoever inherits the responsibility of cleaning up Pawhuska's administrative records. A guilty plea on some charges does not automatically resolve every question raised by years of movement through positions of public trust.
What Pawhuska Deserves
The citizens of Pawhuska are not abstractions. They are the people who eat fried catfish at Buffalo Joe's on a Tuesday afternoon, who pay their water bills to the Public Works Authority without knowing that the authority just approved a half-million-dollar expenditure that no board member could explain. They are the people who hired a city manager in good faith and discovered, through the work of outside correspondents rather than their own elected officials, that the man managing their city had been charged with stealing from other communities before he ever arrived.
They deserved better from the officials who hired Eubanks. They deserved better from whatever background check process, if any, preceded his appointment. And they deserve a full accounting of every dollar that moved through city accounts during his tenure, something that a plea deal on charges from other jurisdictions does not automatically provide.
The investigation into Pawhuska's financial records is not closed. Open records requests remain pending. The story of Jerry Eubanks may have reached a legal resolution, but the questions his tenure raised about oversight, hiring practices, and financial accountability in small Oklahoma cities have no plea deal attached to them.
If you have documents, tip information, or firsthand knowledge about financial irregularities in your city or county government, contact Guerrilla News through our website. Government transparency depends on citizens who refuse to look away. Share this article, watch the full video series linked below, and subscribe to stay current as this and other investigations develop.
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