How did a Kansas businessman go from freshman lawmaker to GOP pariah in 18 months?

Kansas state Rep. Michael Capps can be a difficult man to find. But on the afternoon of Nov. 15 he was sitting alone on a hallway bench at the Sedgwick County Courthouse, thumbing his phone and waiting for his attorney.

It was more trouble for the freshman Republican, who has had plenty since running for the Statehouse in 2018. A former employer won a $215,000 judgment against him this fall for helping a competitor. A judge ordered him to a hearing to go over his financial assets.

Capps doesn’t answer calls and only sporadically returns emails. His downtown Wichita office stays under lock and key. When a reporter knocked recently, someone peeked through the blinds but didn’t open the door.

“I don’t think you guys have been fair by any stretch,” he said when approached before the hearing.

“I think there’s something to be said for me.”

What can be said is that Capps, 41, has become the closest thing in Kansas politics to a pariah.

In less than 18 months he’s been disavowed twice by his party. He has resisted repeated calls to resign and drawn a Republican primary challenger ahead of the 2020 election.

As a candidate in 2018, the Kansas Department for Children and Families found that he emotionally abused boys as a court-appointed volunteer. The investigation’s findings were reversed on a technicality and Capps won his race. But the state GOP cut ties with him.

This fall, he was linked to a video that leveled bogus sexual harassment claims against Rep. Brandon Whipple, the Wichita Democrat elected mayor Nov. 5.

This time, the Sedgwick County Republican Party declared him “persona non grata” until he acknowledges his wrongdoing.

“In politics, if we want to be able to have a true moral high ground and a moral say on anything, we have to be able to confront our own inequities and failings,” said executive director Ben Sauceda.

The Air Force veteran’s troubles follow more than a decade marked by financial reversals, questionable business behavior, broken relationships and personal tragedy.

But his connections to the anti-Whipple video, coming on the heels of the abuse allegations, have brought a new level of attention.

“You don’t want to think you’re working with people who would do that sort of thing to a colleague,” said Rep. Jarrod Ousley, a Merriam Democrat who shares a Capitol office with Whipple.

Capps declined to comment beyond a brief courthouse interview and refused to answer written questions. He provided the following written statement:

“After carefully considering your questions, I have no interest in responding to what clearly appears to be a media slime ‘hit piece’ on me. I will add that it is sad that print journalism today far too often gravitates toward modern yellow journalistic click bait. Thank you for your interest.”

‘The smartest lazy guy’

Capps was born in Wichita in the late 1970s, the only child of a single mother who worked helping prepare lunches for the Wichita public school district.

“I was always the priority,” he said in an interview last year. “She made sure I had every one of my needs met. She scraped and sacrificed for years and went without to make sure I had what I needed.”

As a kid, he was fascinated with computers and technology, he said, and by his early 20s he was putting those skills to use in Air Force. He worked as a radio operator and studied at the Community College of the Air Force, which has locations around the world.

After leaving the military in the mid-2000s, Capps enjoyed a moment of personal and professional success.

He adopted a 7-year-old boy, Chaz, who he met when they were paired by Big Brothers/Big Sisters in Wichita in 2007. Capps was granted primary custody after he filed a child in need of care petition due to the mother’s health problems, court records show.

Chaz later played football on scholarship at Washburn University in Topeka.

“My dad is a really good man,” Chaz said in a 2015 interview. “Really nice, really considerate and he takes great care of me and has always been there for me.”

Capps also found a business partner in Christian Kentling. Working out of their basements, they started Frontier Technologies, a company that offered a variety of information technology services.

By 2007, company had grown to eight full-time employees. Capps and Kentling hoped to eventually expand to a dozen locations or more.

“He was actually a good business partner at the time,” Kentling said.

A year later, Frontier Technologies was dead, an early victim of the Great Recession. Court records show Capps had unpaid sales taxes from 2007 and 2008 totaling nearly $21,000, a debt that was eventually paid.

Capps and Kentling formed another company, Integrated Technologies, but split up, amicably. Kentling had what he thought was an indemnification agreement protecting him from future liability. In 2015, however, Capps filed for bankruptcy after borrowing heavily and then selling the firm. He listed $273,000 in debt, much of it from a business loan provided to him and Kentling by Meritrust.

In court documents, Kentling said he had been unable to proceed with his claim of indemnification because of the bankruptcy. As a result, Meritrust pursued him for the debt while Capps was shielded.

“Mike’s the smartest lazy guy I know,” Kentling said.

After the sale, Capps went to work for Cybertron as a “VP Technology Services,” according to his LinkedIn. The arrangement quickly fell apart.

Cybertron alleges Capps conspired with another employee to convince clients to move to a competitor, Century Technology Solutions, despite a non-compete contract. Cybertron sued him for allegedly sharing customer lists, contracts and other confidential information.

This past October, Capps was ordered to pay $215,000 in damages, attorney’s fees and interest. He plans to appeal the decision, court documents show.

After the October ruling, Capps was ordered to bring financial documents to the Nov. 15 hearing, set up to help Cyberton garnish the money Capps owes.

A reporter who attended was barred from viewing the documents and ordered to sit out of earshot of discussions.

Capps insisted during a brief interview beforehand that the civil disputes and bankruptcy hearings are “just a part of doing business” and don’t affect his job as a state lawmaker.

Capps sues Pizza Hut

When they were business partners, Capps and Kentling would sometimes talk politics, Kentling recalled. But there was no discussion of running for office, he said.

As the Legislature grappled with court decisions that Kansas schools were inadequately funded, Capps decided to get off the sidelines. He ran for Wichita school board in 2015, contending that his business experience would help the district do more with less.

“I keep hearing, ‘We can’t succeed with what we have. This isn’t going to work.’ But I don’t believe that,” Capps told a gathering of Republicans.

That campaign, and a 2016 bid for Kansas House, both failed.

The early political setbacks were followed by a crushing personal loss.

On Feb. 17, 2018, Capps’ mother, Karen Capps, and his grandmother Juanita Capps had just pulled their SUV over to wait for a funeral procession to pass. A Pizza Hut delivery driver rear-ended them, sending the SUV into an electric pole. Karen, 56, died at the scene.

Capps sued Pizza Hut, alleging its promises of fast delivery contributed to his mother’s death. This September, he reached a $625,000 settlement. It’s unclear what bearing, if any, the money will have on his legal dispute with Cybertron.

As Capps grappled with his mother’s death in the spring of 2018, he tried again to launch a political career. He filed for House District 97 in southwest Wichita and named Les Osterman, then a Wichita lawmaker, his campaign treasurer.

But Osterman said Capps never asked for his permission. In fact, Osterman said, he had met Capps a few years earlier and didn’t know him well. Capps later apologized.

“But you know, to me that’s the old saying, you do it and then worry about apologizing for it later, if you understand what I’m saying,” Osterman said. “And I don’t play those games.”

Capps re-filed, with a new treasurer and a new district — District 85, which includes sections of northeast Wichita, Bel Aire, Kechi and Benton. His Democratic opponent, Monica Marks, challenged Capps’ candidacy, alleging he didn’t live in the district. An all-Republican panel of state officials dismissed the complaint.

After the retiring lawmaker, Rep. Chuck Weber, resigned, local Republican officials appointed Capps to fill the vacancy. He went into the election as a sitting lawmaker.

But within weeks of the appointment, Republicans began backing away from Capps.

Local television reported in August 2018 that the Kansas Department for Children and Families found that Capps had emotionally abused boys while he was a court-appointed special advocate volunteer. The agency didn’t say when the abuse allegedly occurred.

Capps appealed the decision to the Office of Administrative Hearings, which reversed the finding because of a technical error. The reversal did not address the underlying facts of the case, DCF said.

Capps nevertheless used the decision to claim vindication, calling the allegations retaliation for telling DCF a foster parent allowed a registered sex offender into her house.

“The allegations leveled against me were and are categorically false and untrue,” Capps said in a statement at the time.

Kelly Arnold, then the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, said the party was unaware of the allegations when precinct committee members appointed him.

Party officials spoke with Capps about the investigation and allowed him to give his side. But “none of it was satisfactory,” Arnold said.

Republicans called on Capps to withdraw. He refused and won, beating Marks 53.98 percent to 46.02 percent.

Not every Republican has abandoned him. Debbie Baker, a Republican precinct committeewoman who lives in Capps’ district, expressed frustration with the Sedgwick County Republican leaders for condemning Capps on behalf of the party.

“He’s a good Republican, if you ask me,” she said.

Business ventures with councilman

Capps entered the Legislature isolated.

Committees are the bread and butter of most lawmakers, but House Republican leadership assigned him to just two. Both committees — Insurance and Local Government — are often low-profile. Five of the six bills he has sponsored have so far failed to advance and remain in committee.

Just one, a bill requiring doctors to notify patients that abortion medications may be reversible, passed the House. Capps sponsored the measure along with dozens of other lawmakers.

Still, colleagues say he shows up and does the work of legislating. Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat, said Capps has been more involved than he would have expected, given the allegations against him.

“Given his past history of his runs for office and the nature of his prior campaigns, I had presumed that he would have little if any competence as a legislator. That view has changed,” Carmichael said.

Even as Capps slowly rebuilt image at the Statehouse, his alleged involvement in a campaign video would lead to the next controversy.

Since 2018, Capps started two businesses with Wichita City Council member James Clendenin. VR Business Brokers of the Heartland helps people buy, sell and merge privately-held companies. The other, Makin Dough LLC, operates an edible cookie dough shop.

Capps and Clendenin share an office suite in a Wichita building along with Matthew Colborn, Capps’ campaign manager and CEO of Colborn Media.

Colborn is alleged to have produced a video in that building leveling false accusations of sexual harassment against Whipple, the Democratic candidate for Wichita mayor. The video was posted online in the weeks before the election.

A woman told The Eagle that Colborn paid her to appear in silhouette and read the accusations on camera.

Capps is linked to the video at multiple points. The company that bankrolled the ad — Protect Wichita’s Girls LLC — shares a mail-drop with Krivacy LLC, a Capps-owned firm. Krivacy was also the original creator of protectwichitagirls.com and owned rights to the web domain.

While Capps at first could not explain the connections, he said during a radio interview just days before the election that he had been in the room when the ad was approved by Dalton Glasscock, chairman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party. Glasscock has denied any involvement.

Capps made the allegation against Glasscock soon after Glasscock and other county GOP leaders issued a statement calling on the lawmaker to resign.

Capps stands by his version of events. During the brief courthouse interview, he said he had no knowledge of the video until Glasscock brought it to his attention.

“And even then, it was really brought to my attention for purposes of ‘What’s your opinion of this? What do you think of this?’ And he was given those opinions and he still decided to move forward with it,” Capps said. “So yeah, I would certainly stand behind the truth.”

Capps did not say what opinion he gave of the video.

Marks, Capps’ 2018 Democratic opponent, said she’s weary of the calls for his resignation. “The voters voted him in and I believe that the voters who voted him in deserve him,” she said.

House Speaker Ron Ryckman and House Majority Leader Dan Hawkins both said voters in the 85th District will decide who they want representing them. Ryckman, an Olathe Republican, reiterated his concerns with the abuse allegations but said “in a democracy the power doesn’t rest with me.”

Capps faces a primary challenge from Patrick Penn, who grew up in foster care and has the backing of the previous two Republicans to hold the House seat.

Penn promises to return the seat to a “true conservative.”

This story was originally published December 1, 2019 at 5:00 AM.