Hall picks the rules to be broken

Some rules deserve to be broken, like the one that denied Ben Hall's mother entry to the front doors of a segregated South Carolina hospital in 1956 as she labored with him. True to form, Hall was not deterred. As the story goes, he was born moments later on the lawn.

This hard-charging determination is part of the allure of the wealthy trial lawyer and former Houston city attorney challenging Mayor Annise Parker. It's what helped him rise from a childhood of sharing a dirty washtub with several siblings to the majesty of Harvard Law School and the upper echelons of big city government.

But it's also what worries me about the guy.

There's a little megalomania in most everybody who runs for mayor or higher office. But there's a difference between breaking rules that need to be broken and disregarding ones that matter.

From paying taxes to handling of procurements as city attorney to the last minute canceling of a Houston Chronicle editorial board appearance a couple of weeks ago, Hall seems to think certain rules don't apply to him. In the latter example, Hall had insisted that the Chronicle deviate from policy and allow cameras from competing news organizations into a joint appearance with Parker. When the editor refused, Hall took his marbles and went home.

On taxes, the Chronicle's Mike Morris has reported that just days before Hall made his first campaign expenditures as a mayoral candidate, he and his wife agreed to pay the IRS more than $680,000 in back taxes and penalties to cover four years of deficiencies.

Conspiracy theory

Hall has blamed his former accountant for errors. But he's also offering a conspiracy theory, suggesting he and his law partners were the victims of repeated, "retributive" audits after they had sued the IRS for over $9 million in the late 1990s "and won."

Hall can't blame IRS vengeance on another tax problem, though: over the past decade, Hall has often paid his school taxes late, resulting in more than $130,000 in late penalties, interest and collection fees, Channel 11 reported in May.

Then there's Hall's self-proclaimed "reliably controversial" tenure as city attorney in the mid-'90s. Hall was never charged or indicted in connection with his handling of contracts, but he was accused and investigated aplenty. Several contractors and would-be contractors claimed Hall tried to pressure them into hiring certain minority businesses. One was a credit card collection firm First USA of Dallas.

Hall was quoted telling the Houston Press that First USA just didn't appreciate his power to call the shots: "What they didn't understand," Hall said in a December 1994 story, "was that if Ben Hall wanted to go out and just say, 'I want Timbuktu to collect this, and I don't care if Timbuktu is unborn,' the law permits him to do that."

A similar accusation about Hall involved Bayou City Enterprises, a subcontractor hired to help Municipal Collections Inc. collect delinquent traffic tickets and other payments. A private investigator who helped create Municipal Collections said he retreated from the city contract after heavy pressure from Hall to hire Bayou City as a minority subcontractor, the Houston Chronicle reported at the time.

A controller's 1995 review found that Bayou City had been paid even though it was acting as a "pass-through" and hadn't actually done any work. Then-Mayor Bob Lanier had said Bayou City was written into the city contract at the insistence of several council members who spoke with Hall and the mayor's chief of staff.

'Fanciful foolishness'

The Houston Press story, entitled "Boss Hall," which came on the heels of Hall's resignation from the public post, probes a lesser-known episode involving San Diego-based contractor, West Capital Financial Services Corporation. The company contracted with the city to collect older unpaid traffic tickets.

The Houston Press story cited documents and interviews suggesting Hall tried to strong-arm West Capital into sharing its contract with a company started up only months earlier by Robert Muhammad, then a member of Lanier's minister's advisory committee and head of the local mosque of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

Asked about the story this week, Hall called it "fanciful foolishness." He said that while he took seriously his duty to improve minority participation in city contracts, he never tried to strong-arm contractors, and he didn't directly choose subcontractors. His job was just to make sure contracts were legal.

In the story, Hall claimed the city didn't have to bid out the contract because ticket collection is a professional service exempt from the bidding process.

But after reviewing the law, it seems a stretch to consider ticket collecting a "professional service." The designation is reserved for architects, engineers, nurses and others whose services require, according to a Texas attorney general publication, "special knowledge" and "a high order of learning, skill and intelligence."

Hall said Tuesday he stood by his old argument: "The trustworthiness of the individuals to collect money is absolutely something that exempts it from this low-bid proposition," he told me.

Hall says I'm wrong if I think he disregards the rules. He may make unpopular decisions, but they're always within the law, never self-serving, and always just, he says.

"I'm not intimidated by any form of power," he told me. "The only thing that intimidates me is to seek a just result."

Means, it seems, be damned.