To anyone grabbing an after-work drink at the Rustic one chilly night in February, they might have looked like any group of professionals having a casual dinner on the popular Uptown spot’s sprawling patio.

They wore jeans, and some wore sweaters. For people who run in Dallas’ business circles, some of the faces might have even seemed familiar. But observers couldn't have known that the party a couple tables over wasn't an ordinary crew of colleagues kicking back after work.

Among the diners were eight representatives from Amazon, the e-commerce mammoth, along with a curated roster of locals and Dallas Regional Chamber staffers. And their meeting, over high-end Tex-Mex, was the culmination of months of research and more than a million dollars’ worth of work by expert consultants and economic developers.

It was the painstakingly orchestrated answer to a question: If you had less than two days to persuade one of the world’s biggest and most visible companies — Amazon — to create as many as 50,000 highly paid tech jobs in Dallas-Fort Worth, how would you do it?

Even though Amazon eventually picked Long Island City in New York and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Va. — a Washington, D.C., suburb — for its second and third headquarters, Dallas officials say the big effort they put forth should pay off by attracting other companies to North Texas.

The 61-week search process put Dallas atop many rankings of best places in the country to do business.

6 a.m. 'bombshell'

Mike Rosa doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who carries his heartbreaks with him.

A no-nonsense professional who prefers to work just outside the spotlight, his tenure as the Dallas Regional Chamber’s head of economic development has been marked by a string of high-profile corporate scores involving companies like AT&T and Toyota.

Still, Rosa keeps a list of the ones that got away on his watch, "just to remind me how much work we did."

It may not have been the first thing he thought of early on the morning of Sept. 7, 2017, when he and his boss, chamber chief executive Dale Petroskey, were alerted to a piece of news that had just begun rippling across the internet. But in the months that followed, that list stayed in the back of Rosa's mind.

He did not want Amazon to end up on it.

The tech giant whose headquarters dominate downtown Seattle was on the hunt for a second home. Up for grabs were $5 billion in investment and 50,000 jobs.

Instead of quietly reaching out to consultants, real estate brokers and business advocates in a handful of cities, Amazon did something completely different.

The company issued a news release and posted an unadorned request for proposals from metro areas around North America, kicking off what's been described as the Super Bowl of economic development and cracking wide open the typically secretive corporate site selection process. It gave the undertaking a catchy name: Amazon HQ2.

“Amazon at 6 o’clock in the morning dropped this bombshell on the country,” Petroskey said. “My first reaction really was, ‘Thank God we’re in Dallas — we’ve really got a shot at this.’”

Later in the day, the company would see the beginnings of a sustained backlash from advocates who say Amazon is paving the way for secretly approved, multibillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded incentive packages to become the new normal — a backlash that regional officials would have to navigate delicately.

But on that September morning, Rosa mostly just tried to follow instructions.

“They invited a response to an email address,” he recalled. “I said, ‘OK, it’ll probably be my job to reply to it,' so I just did.”

That was the easy part.

In a region made up of lots of cities — fast-growing suburban ones, ones with skyscraper-filled downtowns, each out to grab a bigger slice of a rapidly expanding economic pie — chamber executives knew they'd need to do some serious wrangling.

It's a role they've played before. But in past cases, like when Toyota was exploring the area for its North American headquarters, the chamber and representatives of the company involved could control the terms of competition free from public scrutiny. Not so with Amazon.

Which meant that within a couple of hours of Amazon's announcement, Rosa and a counterpart with the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce started fielding a deluge of calls from leaders throughout one of the most active business and real estate communities in the country.

The process of getting officials onboard a regional pitch, Rosa said, was like “herding lions and tigers, not cats.”

The Dallas Regional Chamber, the largest of 175 chambers of commerce in Dallas-Fort Worth, announced that it would put together a single proposal for the region, as requested by Amazon. Regional chamber officials set a deadline of Sept. 29, 2017, for cities to send details about their best sites.

Rosa and his colleagues promised not to disclose any of the cities’ incentive offers — much to the chagrin of advocates for transparency. The chamber has said that keeping incentives secret is standard practice for competitive reasons.

They also promised not to pare down the region’s submissions. If a city sent in a site, the chamber would get it to Amazon.

“We’re neutral,” Rosa said. “We did trust that nobody would submit junk, and nobody did.”

And so, while officials around North Texas sized up their potential offerings — some more publicly than others — on Sept. 13, a small delegation that included chamber leaders and Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings headed to Seattle.

Substance over stunts

The group's mission? Figure out the best way to stand out in a crowded field. Already, observers were ranking cities' odds, speculating about their chances and tearing apart the criteria laid out in the RFP. Amazon didn't elaborate.

The delegation couldn’t meet with Amazon officials beyond touring the headquarters, but chamber spokesman Darren Grubb had a friend who connected the group with a former Amazon employee. The meeting solidified a guiding philosophy that favored substance over stunts.

It confirmed for them, for instance, that they had made the right choice in deciding not to light the downtown Dallas skyline Amazon orange and project the words, "HQ2 - SAY YES TO DALLAS," on the Omni hotel and Reunion Tower during the Dallas Cowboys' nationally televised home opener against the New York Giants.

“They’re not about marketing; they are about numbers, they’re about facts,” Petroskey said. “They’re about the six-page memo.”

The following weeks were a blur of late nights eating pizza and poring over research. In a war room, a wall covered with yellow sticky notes reminded the team of the tasks it had left.

D-FW's Amazon HQ2 war room. (Dallas Regional Chamber)

Dallas’ Boston Consulting Group office offered to help pro bono.

Dylan Bolden, managing director of the office, said the firm has partnered with the chamber on projects periodically over the last eight years. Contributing time and expertise to efforts that are likely to make the region better — and more attractive for potential Boston Consulting Group recruits — he said, is a win-win.

"Having Dallas be a better place to live, having Dallas have more thriving businesses is good for us, too," Bolden said.

The office sent over three staffers to work on the Amazon pitch essentially full time, while a couple of others rotated through to help. When all was said and done, Boston Consulting had contributed roughly $1.2 million in services to the cause.

As the deadline approached, Petroskey said, "we were all dead tired, and I said to the group, ‘If it makes you feel any better, there are 100 other cities around the United States that are doing the same thing right now.’ ”

Last Oct. 17, Rosa shipped off the result.

The main pitch took the form of a password-protected website with thousands of details about each of 59 sites in 23 cities across the metroplex.

A massive spreadsheet listed out data points such as how far each location is from DFW International Airport, how many restaurants are within a mile and how many software developers and computer jobs are already within 10 miles.

The pitch also included five spiral-bound, 253-page books that featured 29 sites officials wanted to highlight, along with regional information.

On Amazon's deadline, Oct. 19, the chamber released a video to the public featuring sunny aerial shots of the region and smiling people.

'This is a sign'

Amazon thanked 238 metro areas for sending their offers and promised to get back to them, but the frenzy continued.

News organizations (including this one) ranked cities that could be top contenders. New Jersey agreed to give Amazon tax breaks worth billions, and others would soon follow suit. Government transparency watchdogs pleaded with them not to.

All the while, Amazon stayed mum. The company, which never had any legal obligation to choose from among the proposals it had solicited or to even go through with the second headquarters plan in the first place, didn’t lay out next steps in a selection process.

Rosa said he periodically checked in with a designated Amazon contact, trying not to seem needy.

“You have to trust your feel — you don’t want to smother,” he said. A couple of times, he said, he sent over links to reports rating Dallas highly among HQ2 contenders.

But once again, on Jan. 18, Amazon managed to surprise observers by dropping a list of 20 finalists. Dallas was among them.

The timing worked out fortuitously for Dallas chamber officials, who had been prepping for the group’s annual meeting that afternoon. Being able to announce the news to a cavernous ballroom full of local business heavyweights like Emmitt Smith and Charlotte Jones Anderson was a coup.

“It was the craziest thing,” Petroskey said. “It was the biggest annual meeting in our history. ... We thought, ‘This is a sign.’”

The announcement sparked furious new speculation and gave advocates more specific targets. Richard Florida, an urbanist who has spoken out against the use of incentives, called on cities to sign a non-aggression pact. LGBT advocates lobbied Amazon to choose a place whose legislators had track records of protecting equal rights.

Amazon started telling the officials it was working with to keep quiet about the search process.

In Dallas, it was close to a month before word got out about Amazon representatives' brief tour of the metroplex in February.

By the end of it, the people involved would sign more than 60 nondisclosure agreements forbidding them from talking about what they’d seen.

Showing off Dallas

For Rosa and the chamber team, wooing corporate executives is nothing new. It’s a core job responsibility.

Still, he said, Amazon was something else.

In a call on Jan. 22, Rosa said, chamber officials were told that envoys from the company would arrive in Dallas for a visit on Feb. 12.

That gave chamber officials just a few weeks to plan a roughly two-day visit that would not only highlight the region's business climate and wide variety of potential sites, but would dispel any notions of Dallas informed by the '80s TV show.

Rosa and the team wanted to rebut questions about the region's relative lack of dominant research institutions and difficulty building a strong educational pipeline for kids growing up in the region.

The group also wanted to head off concerns that Dallas is a part of Texas, where a blood red, socially conservative state Legislature could be a major turn-off for a tech company that will need to recruit a young, diverse workforce. They wanted to demonstrate that Dallas is a place where LGBT families won’t be the targets of sideways glances, discrimination — or worse.

“We wanted them to see diversity,” Rosa said.

Early in the process, Mayor Rawlings spoke with Gov. Greg Abbott about Amazon's concerns. "I told him Texas politics and the Legislature was a concern on Amazon's list and he told me, 'You don't have to worry about that,'" Rawlings recalled.

In the morning, the group of eight from Amazon ate blueberry muffins and yogurt at the chamber's Ross Tower headquarters while they met privately with executives from the region’s major employers, including Toyota, Fluor, AT&T and American Airlines, whose CEO, Doug Parker, cleared time for a conference call.

“We certainly had lots of options,” Rosa said. “We were thinking about scale. ... We wanted to make sure we had a pretty decent mix of locations in the region — didn’t want them talking to companies all at the same intersection.”

The group had lunch at Cafe Momentum, where they were served locally sourced cuisine by ex-juvenile offenders working in the downtown restaurant's post-release internship program. Chamber officials noted its similarity to an Amazon-supported program in Seattle, FareStart.

There, they talked with leaders of the Dallas County Community College District, the universities of Texas at Dallas and Arlington, the University of North Texas and Southern Methodist University.

A tour of sites Amazon expressed interest in was mapped out to avoid rush-hour traffic. Chamber executives left time for detours through neighborhoods so the Amazon reps could check out housing options. They headed nearby to East Dallas and Lakewood.

"They all pulled up Zillow on their phones and we could see their reactions in real time. They were excited," Rawlings said.

North Texas officials made sure to explain the region’s use of managed toll lanes and to show them Dallas Area Rapid Transit — although the group didn’t actually ride any trains.

They did, however, take the McKinney Avenue Trolley to dinner in Uptown.

The chamber stocked the trolley car with young professionals to answer questions about housing costs, their favorite restaurants, where they had moved from and why.

They picked the Rustic for the meal in an effort to keep it a low-key affair — Amazon had said it wouldn’t accept fancy meals or lavish gifts.

“What we decided to do was no elected officials,” Rosa said. “Just some of our leaders and young people.”

The guests included a mother of three from Carrollton and the Rev. Neil G. Cazares-Thomas, a pastor at a large LGBT-affirming congregation on Cedar Springs Road, not far from the heart of Dallas' well-established "gayborhood."

Chamber staffers sat around the core party as a buffer so no one would overhear their conversation. They had all signed NDAs.

“They really enjoyed the dinner — that was our impression,” Rosa said. “Another thing we thought to do was make sure they got some rest. We didn’t want to overextend our program.”

Still, when the Amazon group took off, they left behind a homework assignment. They wanted more data.

On March 5, Rosa said, the chamber sent Amazon more than a Harry Potter novel’s worth of information in response to questions about a smaller group of sites.

“It was a deeper dive,” he said. “It had a lot more input from the communities on the real estate and the incentives.”

Patience required

And then, Rosa said, they waited.

They waited as observers speculated that the whole public search would end with a bidding war between Washington, D.C.-area sites after all.

They waited while Amazon did battle with its hometown of Seattle — where skyrocketing costs of living have caused friction — over a head tax. The chamber offered no commentary when Arlington revealed that Amazon had rejected its offer of nearly $1 billion in incentives to redevelop Globe Life Park after the Texas Rangers leave for a new stadium next door.

Petroskey said he restrained himself from peppering Jeff Bezos with questions or overwhelming him with a laundry list of D-FW's strengths when the Amazon CEO spoke at the George W. Bush Presidential Center in April.

“I didn’t try to do the tough sell,” Petroskey said with a laugh. Bezos, he added, told him that his team loved its visit to North Texas.

Dallas, Bezos told him, is a different city from what it was 20 years ago. And that, Petroskey said, felt like a win.

In early August, chamber officials got what they saw as proof positive that if there had been any more internal culling beyond the 20 public finalists, D-FW again had made the cut: Amazon came back.

Although the news had gotten out that Amazon also returned to Chicago and Miami, Dallas officials said they hoped the company would reward clear efforts to adhere to its rules.

This time, the Amazon delegation was a bit smaller, and the scope of the trip more focused.

On Aug. 9, the group had breakfast at the top of Reunion Tower with its spectacular views that gave them a full view of what Amazon decided was "the site" — in Dallas, anyway. It had been offered as one of three downtown Dallas proposals earlier in the process, Rawlings said. It stretched from Union Station and the former Dallas Morning News building, south to the Cedars and Southside on Lamar and then east to 20 acres behind Dallas City Hall to Interstate 30.

"They were fascinated by Union Station and The Dallas Morning News building and how they could repurpose them," Rawlings said.

This time, the group lunched on brisket from Pecan Lodge in Deep Ellum and then headed back downtown. Amazon toured The Dallas Morning News building and heard a presentation from Robert Decherd, CEO of A. H. Belo Corporation, which owns The News. Decherd also talked broadly about downtown Dallas and new park projects that he's leading.

"They made us believe that they liked us but never said, 'You are the one,'" Rawlings said. The city made its incentives offer totaling up to $1.1 billion, but Rawlings said not a lot of time was devoted to it. "It didn't seem like a make-or-break thing," he said, and "they never asked, 'Is this the best you can do?'"

The one-year mark

The one-year anniversary marking Amazon's ballyhooed search came and went in September. Northern Virginia emerged from within the D.C.-area contenders as a favorite. Rosa said his office continued to host visitors, to pursue other leads. (More than 40 companies expanded in or relocated to North Texas during Amazon's 14-month decision-making process.)

Weeks of silence filled the void between Amazon's second visit to Dallas and decision day. The conversation slowly began to shift to the power corridor between the nation's capital and the nation's financial nerve center, with New York City entering the discussion as a contender along with D.C. But in various reports quoting people familiar with Amazon's internal deliberations, Dallas remained in the mix.

In the end, Rawlings said Amazon's leadership had a fascination with the East Coast that couldn't be overcome. Amazon's official reasoning focused on talent: Only New York and D.C. together could provide the density of technologists it'll need to hire.

A heartbroken Rawlings turned the defeat into a challenge for state lawmakers to boost spending on public schools and universities so cities like Dallas can build a deeper talent pool for the next Amazon that comes along.

Amazon's decision won't "make or break" D-FW's momentum, Petroskey said. But it did give regional leaders a better sense of its strengths and weaknesses.

For Rosa, it means adding Amazon's name to that list he keeps.

"Certainly we'd like to win," he said. "It's why we play the game."

Staff writer Maria Halkias contributed to this report.