Similar things have been said about him by those entwined in the Shadyside dispute, though this wrangle would have one overarching difference: Nothing would get settled out of court. And even if it, too, had sprung from a "breached contract," the suit wouldn't stay that way for long. Morphing into a discrimination complaint, the emerging contention became perhaps Petrello's widest-ranging and most-ambitious personal litigation. But only after a certain trigger was tripped — Carena, the Petrellos' disabled daughter.
Tony and Cindy, who met in New Haven while Tony was at Yale, tried for many years to have children, but couldn't, according to court testimony. Then, in the summer of 1997, Cindy, a petite former New York tap dancer, got pregnant and six months later delivered Carena who was born with physical and neurological problems.
Photo by Patrick Bertolino
Tony Petrello's house (left) and Rahul Nath's home (right) have little space between them. If Petrello ultimately succeeds in buying Nath's house, he'll have the largest estate in Shadyside.
Photo by Patrick Bertolino
Tony and Cindy's art collection is renowned in Houston...
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Despite this, Carena showed improvement up until when, at age three, she suffered a stroke and lost her ability to speak. Her parents later erected in their courtyard a small bronze statue of Carena with Cindy in which the child almost looks healthy, even ordinary — "Carena at her best," attorney Sam Stubbs said. "Carena is a testament to the endurance of a pure soul," Petrello said in testimony.
The stroke's aftermath, however, was grueling. "In the world of families who have children with severe disabilities, they feel all alone," said Stubbs, who himself has a son, 24, with severe autism. But, Stubbs said, Petrello never discusses his daughter. "He's shy," Stubbs said. "Tony's a kind, warm, gentle man. But, like most who are as intelligent as he, he doesn't have a lot of chit-chat."
True, Petrello's money has been far more public than the man. It has splashed across Houston's opera and theater circuit, into local and national political coffers, and finally, in his and Cindy's largest contribution, toward the Neurological Research Institute at the Texas Children's Hospital to help cases like Carena's. They pledged $7 million, and Tony chaired the finance committee to build the center, ultimately netting more than $250 million. In February of 2011, Tony and Cindy received the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service.
There has, of course, been another use for his money: civil litigation suits. Numerous people estimated the Shadyside litigation alone has cost Petrello at least $2 million — and the lawyers' fees just keep coming. This, oddly enough, for a house Petrello wouldn't pay an extra $100,000 for and meet the Pruckas' asking price of $8.3 million.
But there was one more twist. And that was the City of Houston.
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Matt Prucka couldn't make sense of it. What had begun as something extremely ordinary — the sale of his house — had somehow turned into lawsuits filed in state and federal court against him and his wife, Sheri, and accusations that they and the Naths had conspired to discriminate against a disabled girl. "This is crazy," the Pruckas said to each other one night. Matt said, "This is all just a game to Petrello."
For one, the original lawsuit over an oral breach of contract was deeply confusing. Verbal agreements, even if there had been one, don't mean anything in Texas real estate — everything's got to be written. According to the state's statute of frauds, which governs land deals, a handshake just ain't enough. But what Prucka may not have understood then was that the original complaint didn't necessarily require merit, Sam Stubbs said. It just had to get them into depositions and afford David Berg, Petrello's long-time and immensely expensive lawyer, a crevice. Just a crevice. And then let Berg do his thing.
The discrimination allegations were "100 percent David Berg being creative," one Shadyside resident familiar with the litigation said. "David Berg is so fabulously skilled he could get you to say you have 12 toes...This never had anything to do with Carena. Nobody thinks it had anything to do with Carena in the neighborhood. Nobody.
"These houses turn over once in a lifetime and if you miss the opportunity, you're screwed. That house will never come up again. If you want to control your destiny, you have to buy the house. You got to get it and if you don't get it, you're screwed."
The resident later added: "It doesn't matter if you win (the case). It's a war of attrition."
The first battle was on May 14, 2008, when Berg launched a circuitous line of inquiry on Prucka. Prucka mentioned the home for Sheri was "enchanted." Things then picked up, question melting into question, later culminating in a very direct exchange. Prucka told Berg that Petrello had "a strike" against him because he wanted to change the home's "architectural integrity" by making it handicapped-accessible with an elevator, wider hallways and larger bathroom for Carena. He said his preference had been to sell to someone else.
With that, Berg apparently had everything he needed for a discrimination suit. "Berg had to figure out a plan B," Prucka's lawyer, Tom Fulkerson, said. "I don't know if he knew it going into the deposition, or stumbled into it." The breach of contract complaint vanished, and puzzling things began to happen.
The city got involved when the city attorney filed a criminal citation against Prucka for alleged discrimination against a disabled person under the fair housing ordinance — a first for the city, which had ostensibly passed the law in 2006 to protect the poor. The penalty carried a whopping fee of $500 — insignificant compared to the $8.3 million mansion at stake in the civil litigation. Later, after Annise Parker took office, the complaint was dismissed in 2011, and today the administration questions why the city had pursued the case, a spokesperson said. City Chief Prosecutor Randy Zamora, declined comment. Gordon Quan, who championed the ordinance while on City Council, also expressed surprise the city had filed the complaint. "The whole law was about poor people getting stomped on," he said, adding that the city wouldn't have even recouped its lawyers' fees with a $500 penalty. "I thought it was very novel they used it on some wealthy person, or maybe some smart lawyer decided we can hit them on this."
