Contractor challenges alleged bribery scheme at HISD

As a Sunday ritual, onetime Houston school board member Larry Marshall would ride his bike to the home of his political campaign treasurer, Joyce MossClay, to eat dinner and talk shop.

Each had a consulting business. Moss-Clay said she saw Marshall as a mentor and regularly paid him a majority cut of the fees she received from clients, according to court records. In 2009 alone, she paid Marshall more than $59,000.

On Monday, a Houston jury heard conflicting descriptions of the payments.

Jonathan Brush, Marshall’s attorney, said the payments were the result of a legitimate business relationship between the school board member and Moss-Clay.

However, Kelly Greenwood Prather, an attorney for a local construction company suing the pair, alleged that the payments were part of a bribery-and-kickback scheme, an attempt to steer contracts to certain vendors in the Houston Independent School District.

The statements came during the first day of a trial stemming from a December 2010 federal lawsuit filed by the Gil Ramirez Group. The upstart construction firm, run by Gil Ramirez Jr., alleged that it lost out on $2.3 million in Houston school district work because it did not participate in the alleged pay-to-play ploy.

In opening statements to the jury, the attorney for the Gil Ramirez Group described Marshall as a well-connected trustee who also worked as a consultant for school district vendors or potential vendors. Marshall, a former teacher and high-level administrator in HISD, served on the school board from 1998 through 2013.

“Obviously, we cannot depend on trustee Marshall to protect the billion dollars,” Prather said, referring to the school district’s budget.

Brush asked the jury to focus narrowly on whether Marshall harmed the Gil Ramirez Group. Brush described the company as having sour grapes for losing work after ranking poorly in the district’s bid evaluation process.

“This case is a business dispute,” Brush said.

“There is no bribery here,” added Moss-Clay’s attorney, Wendle Van Smith.

The case has dragged on for six years during appeals, repeatedly raising questions about the fairness of the competitive bidding and contracting process in the nation’s seventh-largest school district.

As part of the case, the Gil Ramirez Group also is suing two competing construction contractors, RHJ-JOC and Fort Bend Mechanical. Both were among MossClay’s clients. Houston ISD was dismissed from the case because it is protected as a governmental entity.