Nor is it likely that Jimenez appreciated being sued. In one of his suits, O'Brien accused her along with Barrett of filing "backdated and false statements" about the incidents in Khator's office which were later used to support what he alleges are "false disciplinary charges" that could have brought expulsion.

Which is exactly what many in the history department, including "Dr. George," would love to have seen. Many of them say they live in genuine fear of O'Brien. "His temper has been displayed publicly," George says. "People are edgy." George says that he has even raised the specter of the Virginia Tech shooting spree in talking to the UH attorneys who have responded to O'Brien's lawsuits, to no avail. As to how O'Brien has managed to continue as a grad student with his thick file of disciplinary actions, including numerous violations of probation, George blames the school's lawyers, whom he calls "uncaring, utterly incompetent and horrific."

As ever, O'Brien still maintains the charges are phony. If he scares people, it's only as a means toward enacting justice. "What have those people accomplished?" O'Brien asks of his foes at UH. "Are they out in the streets trying to change the world? I don't think so. They're on the sidelines saying, 'Tim O'Brien's an asshole.' You know what? I'm trying to change the world."
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Lenwood Johnson lives and works in a shotgun-double in the Fourth Ward. The veteran activist's spartan office is literally packed to the rafters with the ghosts of Allen Parkway Village, the housing project he worked so long and hard to save through most of the '80s and half of the '90s. In the end, he scored a partial victory and staved off redevelopment for some but not all of the impoverished African Americans who called the project home. Other than boxes of files and piles of old newspapers and a few computers and printers, there's not much besides a Marlboro 100-filled ashtray in Johnson's bare-bones command center. His life is his cause and his cause is his life, and O'Brien now stands united with Johnson in both.

And perhaps their greatest mutual nemesis is Jackson Lee, who trounced Johnson when he ran for Congress in 2002's Democratic primary. Johnson believes that Jackson Lee's entire career is based on Republican money. She was funded by the GOP when she unseated Craig Washington in the '90s, Johnson alleges, and has been beholden to them ever since.

Since their meeting shortly after O'Brien moved to the Fourth Ward in 2003, O'Brien has become Johnson's protégé. "I think he's picked up some of what we used to call 'O.J.T.' — on-the-job training, in organizing," Johnson says of O'Brien. "I think he has learned, number one, that if you go to this door and it doesn't open, you go to the next door up. Two is persistence. You have to understand that it took from 1980 to 1996 to get where we are with Allen Parkway Village."

Johnson believes he has taught O'Brien media savvy and the art of embarrassing officials publicly. "You shine a light on what someone's doing so they can't operate in the darkness," Johnson says. "We had to snatch Mickey Leland from his safe haven and make him stand up. We did that in a number of ways, and I think Tim has learned to jerk people's strings that way."

Leland, Johnson points out, had a claim to fame as a champion of the poor. "That makes it easier for poor folks to reach out and snatch 'em back," he says. "But if they've never had that reputation, it's almost impossible."

As, he says, is the case with Jackson Lee. "Sheila Jackson Lee has no claim to fame for helping poor people."

O'Brien has utterly absorbed Johnson's sour views on the congresswoman, not to mention many of the elder man's views on life. Asked if he considered Johnson a father figure, O'Brien says no, that he's more of a mentor, but then later adds that Johnson's message and his dad's message were much the same: "Stand up and fight, don't just go along to get along."

O'Brien claims he won the congresswoman's undying enmity on November 6, 2006, the day Fourth Ward's Friendship Baptist Church burned down. O'Brien lived directly across the street. This was the second Fourth Ward church fire in as many years and O'Brien says he angrily told Jackson Lee, who was on the scene, face-to-face that she needed to do something about the blazes. "Bethel went down and you didn't do nothin' about it," O'Brien says he told the congresswoman. "My family almost got killed tonight. You never do nothin' for nobody. People are gonna get killed. You need to do something."