At the end of March, Mayor Finizio told me he had not changed his mind about hiring back Al Mayo, the black firefighter whom he fired almost immediately after taking office.

The mayor, I wrote then, said he was confident in the legal grounds for firing the first black firefighter hired by the city in more than 30 years.

The column, which ran March 25, shocked both Mayo and his lawyer, Gary Cicchiello, when they read it.

At that point they were waiting to sign a settlement agreement, initiated by the mayor, that would have given Mayo his job back with back pay and would have released the city from any claims he may have made for being improperly fired.

They were waiting for the paperwork from the city's lawyers to sign. The details had all been worked out in confidential negotiations, they said.

Instead, Brian Estep, the city's lawyer, left a voice mail message over the weekend at Cicchiello's office, saying the deal was off, Cicchiello said. The voice mail message followed on the heels of the column.

"It was like I lost the job twice," Mayo told me last week.

Indeed, the mayor effectively fired him a second time.

I'm still not sure which was worse, firing him the first time, without just cause, or reneging on the agreement to rehire him, giving no reason at all.

What most troubles me, though, was the mayor's loose relationship with the truth.

Cicchiello told me Monday he got a call "out of the blue" from the city's lawyer saying the mayor wanted to rehire Mayo. Those talks resulted in an agreement, he said.

Mayo exchanged some text messages with the mayor's assistant, Zak Leavy, with Leavy indicating everything was going OK and was "in the hands of the lawyers."

Then Finizio told me just before I wrote the March 25 column that he had never changed his mind about hiring Mayo.

He then repeated this strange - I'll call it an assertion - in a general statement to the press March 30: "My original decision regarding Mr. Mayo's employment was never reversed and still stands."

Really?

Even if the mayor wants to challenge attorney Cicchiello's statement that the city's lawyer told him the mayor initiated the talks to rehire Mayo, how would the mayor explain those talks? And they did occur. I saw emails and text messages to prove it.

Is the mayor suggesting the city lawyer initiated the talks on his own? That assertion almost would be easier to accept than a 20 percent tax hike.

In his comments last month about firing Mayo, Finizio said the lawyers assured him that a video with Mayo showing the middle finger was legal grounds enough to fire him.

Mayo told me Monday more about the incident. He said the video was taken by another recruit while the students were fooling around one morning, before the official start of the day at 8 a.m.

Mayo also has pictures of other recruits also fooling around and giving the finger to the camera. Some of those incidents occurred during class hours, and apparently those white recruits were not fired from their departments.

The only person who has acted perhaps even more dishonorably in all of this is Wade Hyslop, a black city councilor who Finizio has asserted all along signed off on the original firing of Mayo in December.

Mayo told me that Hyslop asked to meet with him back then and called him in for a meeting in City Hall. Mayo said Hyslop told him he hadn't participated in the firing and couldn't guarantee anything but would talk to the "powers that be" and see whether he could help him get his job back.

Since then, Hyslop has refused to discuss the case and has not attended two meetings held in the city by the NAACP in part to address it.

State Rep. Ernest Hewett, another black leader from the city, has rallied behind Mayo's cause, saying what happened to him was "wrong, wrong." The city's new black deputy fire chief, Henry Kydd, said last week he selected Mayo to be hired when he was interviewed and would welcome him into the department.

Hyslop at least owes the community an explanation as to why he agreed to the firing of a black firefighter, especially since some of the blame for the lack of diversity in the city fire department can be laid at his feet, as a black political leader in the city for so many years.

A delegation of NAACP officials and representatives of the black firefighters association plan to attend a City Council meeting later this month and ask Councilor Hyslop to explain himself.

I wonder what he will say. Or maybe he will duck and hide again.

THIS IS THE OPINION OF DAVID COLLINS