THIS GUY'S GONNA WRITE OUR CODE OF ETHICS?

By Juan Montoya
If anything, our new Mayor Tony Martinez has shown his political naivete when he cavalierly assigned contract City Attorney Mark Sossi the keys to the kingdom by assigning him the task of producing a code of ethics for city employees and officials to follow.
"It's like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse," quipped Argelia Miller in a letter she wrote Martinez soon after he came into office.
Perhaps the new mayor does not recall that it was Sossi, at the behest of a majority on the city commission that included Carlos Cisneros, Ricardo Longoria, Charlie Atkinson and others, to challenge a watchdog group in court after they were sued for taking health insurance, mileage and other benefits that were not enumerated in the city charter.
A state district judge did not buy Sossi's argument that since they were not specifically enumerated in the negative, that the commissioners could continue at the trough because the city charter did not specifically prohibit them.
Sossi's soaring oratory and smoke and mirrors were unceremoniously rejected by the court, but not before he nailed the city for a reported $40,000 in fees to represent the commissioners in an indefensible position.
Before the issue reached the courts, Sossi was also put into the charter review committee where the group discussed the possibility of allowing the mayor and commissioners to give themselves at a level of their own choosing.
This despite the fact that voters, in a preview charter amendment election, voted down the amendments that would have accomplished the very same thing.
More recently, Sossi's decision to represent Jessica Tetreau-Kalifa in court when Atkinson challenged her residency for the position of commissioner for District 2, has been criticized because no one authorized the expenditure of city money on behalf of that candidate.
Perhaps Sossi's shining moment was when the visiting judge admonished him for saying that Atkinson's attorney was "crap."
But perhaps the most damning indictment of Sossi's ethics was his doling out city jobs to his former law firm, Willette&Guerra.
Miller reiterated her concern that Sossi had let out city-paid contracts to Willette and Guerra LLP, "a firm that had sued him and won a judgement of $167,00. He took money that belonged to the firm...and was sued and lost..."
"At the time I wrote the letter," Miller continues, "he had given Willette and Guerra city contracts in excess of $37,000. Now in 2011, records indicate he has given them contracts for over $75,000 from January to March 2011."
Miller wrote Martinez that it was hard for her and others to understand how Sossi "could favor a firm that sued him and that he owed $167,929 to as of 8-09-2009. It is also hard to understand how the city of Brownsville allows this arrangement.
"Is the fox guarding the hen house on legal contracts?" Miller asks.
Miller claims that she knows of indications that some of the cases being handled by Sossi might never close due to the continued delay in petitions for summary judgements and continuances asked for by the law firm in question.
"There are indications that some of the cases will never be closed because they are being paid by the hour and multiple motions or requests for summary judgements can be filed to continue the cases," she wrote Martinez. "The fox is surely guarding the hen house."

Attorneys who have seen Sossi in action in the courts say he is relentless in representing his paying clients, to the point where he is not above fudging the truth to get his way. Others who have lawsuits against him are not flattering in their portrayal of his tactics.

"He is ruthless," said one. "If you don't watch him closely, he'll steal your lunch whether he's right or wrong. He doesn't care."

Now that Martinez has indicated that he wants to have a hand in writing the code of ethics along with Sossi, we wonder how this is going to work. Is the priestly Martinez going to co-author a code of ethics with a person who has been documented to have taken money that didn't belong to him and then hired the aggrieved parties to assuage their purses and their sentiments at public expense?