The FBI agents looking into activity at Mayor Paul Dyster's City Hall became aware last week of a July 17 telephone call in which Dyster asked the city Law Office for its assistance.

How can I get rid of Guy Bax?" the mayor said.

That morning, Bax had been named in an affidavit prepared by the FBI investigating the influence in City Hall of local plumber John Gross. Later that week, Bax -- along with plumbing inspector George Amendola and electrical inspector Peter Butry -- were suspended with pay, creating a nightmare in the Inspections Department that continues to this day.

Perhaps the sharp-eyed federal agents will see Dyster's phone call as part of a pattern that stretched back nearly a year, after Bax was openly critical of the city's economic development efforts.

At a City Council meeting in October 2008, Bax told Council members that Economic Development Director Peter Kay and City Planner Tom DeSantis "couldn't develop a cold," without the Inspections Department overseeing the demolition of buildings. He said that, if Dyster or City Administrator Donna Owens wanted to get rid of him, his office was just upstairs from theirs.

After that, a long line of questionable characters paraded before the Council and the city Planning Commission with complaints about Bax. These included block club activist Roger Spurback -- who had by then moved away from the city -- Emma Chapman, a former landlord whose property management license had been taken away by the state, and Galeb Rizek, a Niagara Falls Boulevard hotelier and anti-development zealot who successfully blocked the creation of 150 jobs by Ashland Advanced Materials at an abandoned factory near his hotel.

These organized attacks received significant newspaper coverage over a period of weeks, and not once did Dyster or Owens rise to defend the city employee. Bax's resultant suspension has cost the city tens of thousands of dollars between his continuing salary and the overtime put in by remaining Inspections Department employees to cover for him. When the salaries of Amendola and Butry are added, along with the overtime racked up covering for them, the cost to Niagara Falls taxpayers has been well over $100,000, and continues to rise every day.

Guy Bax is in the trouble he's in because he steadfastly refused orders to illegally shut down Frank Parlato's One Niagara Building and to deny Parlato any further approvals. These orders were handed down by City Planner Tom DeSantis, who went so far as to write them down in an official memo.

When all is said and done, the FBI may have a far more interesting case on its hands than was previously thought.