WIND SETTLEMENT GIVES BISD SHORT SHRIFT, LAWYERS WIN

By Juan Montoya
Remember the headlines announcing the nearly $10 million in wind damage settlement announced by Houston hurricane-damage lawyer Steve Mostyn and his cadre of Hidalgo--based lawyers?
Mostyn represented the Brownsville Independent School District against the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association and used numerous racist and hateful emails from TWIA officials he obtained from the association through the discovery process.
Well, at the time we thought it was too good to be true, and apparently, it was.
BISD is not getting $10 as it was reported. In fact, the district will  be lucky bit it gets $2 million of the $9.2 million the BISD settled with  the TWIA, and from Gab Robins North America Inc., an insurance underwriter.

The lawsuit was filed by the then-BISD trustees for claims they say weren't paid following a 2008 hurricane.

Steve Mostyn, a Houston-based lawyer, revealed the details of the settlement Saturday to the BISD.
"The bulk of the settlement will be split between Mostyn and the lawyers, who will net about $4 million, the insurance companies, who will get another $4 and the rest – about $2 million, will go to the district," said a lawyer acquainted with the case.
Many of the local counsel associated with Mostyn and his firm are based in McAllen, among them Ramon Garcia, the Hidalgo county judge and his associates.
Mostyn, who has made an empire specializing in hurricane damage claims, has also contributed heavily to the campaigns of prominent Democrat candidates, and specializes in going after the claims denied by the TWIA.

In 2012, Mostyn, founder of the Mostyn Law Firm, established himself as a mega donor when he contributed $3 million to Priorities USA Action, a pro President Barack Obama PAC.

Some local attorneys say that Mostyn, through local go-betweens and Political Action Committees, (PACs) is also contributing heavily in the 2004 school board elections of the BISD.

Sources say that foremost among the candidates said to benefit from Mostyn's interest in the BISD have been former Coach Joe Rodriguez and, incidentally, Cesar Lopez. The go-between to the candidates is said to be BISD board attorneys Baltazar Salazar whose offices are also located in Houston.

In an article published online in the "Washington Examiner" this month, writer David Yates states that: "In just the past three months, the Mostyns have contributed more than $2.3 million to Texas candidates, with the bulk of the funds going toward state Sen. Wendy Davis, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, campaign finance records show."

In his webpage, Mostyn says that the three hurricanes that devastated the Texas Coast from Houston to Beaumont, and Galveston to the Rio Grande Valley damaged countless homes, businesses, churches, schools, and government office buildings.

A large number of cases filed for damages by insurance companies in these areas for their clients were denied by the TWIA.

"In courthouses in Galveston and the Rio Grande Valley, and in the state capitol in Austin, we revealed tens of thousands of instances of insurance company misconduct," he wrote in his company's website.

"Our team of lawyers and investigators spent thousand of hours reviewing millions of pages of documents, emails, and internal insurance company memos. And our engineers and experts proved that insurance companies had denied, delayed, and underpaid billions of dollars in covered claims."Mostyn claims that "evidence we uncovered led to a criminal investigation of one major national insurance company and a US Department of Justice investigation of another."

Mostyn made hundreds of millions of dollars suing TWIA, the sole provider of windstorm insurance in the state.

As previously reported by a tort-reform group, in the latest round of campaign finance reports reveal the Mostyns donated $200,000 to Texas House candidate Susan Criss, a former Galveston judge who presided over the majority of Hurricane Ike suits.