Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile

Of the dozens of building contractors punished by the state of Mississippi for preying on victims of Hurricane Katrina, one stands out from the crowd of mostly small-time, fly-by-night operators: Call Henry, a Florida-based firm with hundreds of employees that each year earns tens of millions of dollars from contracts with the Department of Defense, NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The company boasts on its Web site about its rosy prospects for new federal business. But at the same time, it has closed up shop in the hurricane zone and is ignoring customers there who say that their homes are falling apart after Call Henry repaired or rebuilt them. The state Attorney General's Office is considering launching a criminal investigation against the firm. And the company is appealing a $10,000 fine that the Mississippi State Board of Contractors levied after finding that Call Henry exhibited “gross negligence or misconduct” in its contracting business.

“They shafted people right and left,” said a sobbing Mary Bobbitt of Waveland, Miss., who hired Call Henry to fix her three-bedroom, one-bath ranch-style home after it was inundated by Katrina’s deadly flood tide. “They came in from Florida thinking they could make a whole bunch of money and then they left. They just left us.”

Complaints against Call Henry are a small fraction of the Katrina-related accusations against contractors that have been investigated by Mississippi building officials and the state Attorney General’s Office. The attorney general has 377 open investigations of contractor fraud and has made 58 arrests. “Mississippi experienced more of this type of fraud in the wake of Katrina than ever before,” said spokeswoman Jan Schaefer.

Separately, the state is looking into whether the company reimbursed Mississippi for thousands of dollars in sales tax it collected on its jobs in the state.

Company refuses to answer questions
The company refused to answer any questions from msnbc.com concerning its work in the state.

But interviews with about a dozen Call Henry customers in Mississippi and Louisiana, and other sources familiar with the firm’s work, indicate the company left a wide trail of tears, broken hearts and botched jobs. At least two families in Hancock County have sued the company, alleging that their homes still need hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of reconstruction, long after Call Henry crews finished working on them.

The homeowners tell strikingly similar stories of how they came to do business with the firm. Their property devastated by Katrina and local builders booked up for months, they were attracted by Mississippi newcomer Call Henry’s advertising and promises to get them back in their homes quickly.

They said the firm’s president, Henry Foster, visited with many of them personally. Tall, bespectacled, neatly dressed and charming, Foster exuded a take-charge demeanor they found reassuring after their harrowing ordeal.

“He took me,” customer Tina Falgout of Bay St. Louis said of Foster. “He painted this big, beautiful picture. He told me I would have this beautiful house when I was done.”

Dr. Helen Fosmire of Gulfport had a similar reaction. “He seemed to be very experienced and down to earth and reasonable to deal with,” said Fosmire, a radiological oncologist who already had been burned by a roofing contractor when she met with Foster.

Some customers liked the fact that Call Henry appeared to be a family-run business. They said Foster assigned his son, Chris, the company’s human resources manager, and his daughter, Robin Stroud, already a Gulf Coast resident, to run the Mississippi operation. A grandson also worked on a construction crew, they said.

When prospective clients went to the Call Henry Web site, they found press clippings and marketing information describing the firm as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America. The site says the firm offers a wide array of services, from “aerospace test operations” to a “proprietary enterprise software system,” and brags of numerous federal honors and outstanding evaluations for service, safety and efficiency.

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