You Can Fight City Hall. You Can Even Make It Apologize.

"G ood luck," I told Sean Dougherty. "I'll be thrilled if you win, but you won't."

How wrong I was. Among the myriad ways in which you can't beat city hall, having the District of Columbia apologize to you for improperly towing your car -- then getting them to deliver said car back to your home -- would have to be near the top of the list.

But that is precisely what Dougherty has achieved. The 32-year-old Shaw resident could barely believe it himself, but a combination of courteous persistence, strategic escalation and the power of being right allowed him to set the bar higher than ever for all who do battle with the beast that is the District government.

It all started on Friday the 13th, when Dougherty's 1997 Honda Accord was booted. Dougherty had feared this might happen because the District's Department of Motor Vehicles had botched his effort to fight three tickets. Dougherty got the tickets after the city gave his car a "courtesy tow" for parking in a street-cleaning zone; the District's tow man put the Honda at a meter on U Street NW, and by the time Dougherty figured out where his car was, it had been slapped with three overtime parking tickets.

That didn't seem fair, so Dougherty sought to have the tickets overturned. The city first lost Dougherty's request for a hearing, then mishandled it. After six months of hearing nothing, he called and was told to be patient -- don't worry, there's no danger your car will be towed.

Wrong. When Dougherty found the boot on his car, he called and wrote the motor vehicle office -- and bumped it up to his D.C. Council member, Jim Graham (D-Ward 1.) "I honestly don't think I should have to pay," Dougherty wrote.

Just hours after sending his plea for help, Dougherty discovered that his car had been towed away.

This was war. "It was the principle," Dougherty said. "I've gotten parking tickets in the past, of course, and I've fought them when I was in the right, and I've paid them when I was wrong. In this case, I'd never done anything wrong."

Many hours of phone calls later, the motor vehicles office conceded error. "I apologize for the DMV error which resulted in your vehicle being erroneously booted and towed," wrote DMV's Lucinda Babers. "We mistakenly sent you an appeals rejection letter which, in essence . . . made the three tickets subject to booting and towing."

Dougherty could pick up his car at the impoundment lot, no charge -- if he got there in 20 hours or less. Otherwise: storage charges.

Nothing doing, Dougherty said. "Even when there were shootings on my block last year, I wasn't this disappointed in my city," he wrote in one protest e-mail. "D.C. effectively stole my automobile."

He wasn't about to take time off from work -- he's a lawyer, if you haven't guessed by now -- pay for cabs and spend several hours to correct the city's error.

"I had this mental image of Mayor Fenty sitting in a fancy restaurant in Dubai while I was being taken to the cleaners," Dougherty says.

So he asked the city to deliver his car "back to my neighborhood, placed in a legal spot. . . . It'd go a long way toward helping me forget this experience and shouldn't be very difficult. And it only seems fair."

Ninety-four minutes after Dougherty sent that e-mail to his council member and the Department of Public Works, its chief, William Howland, wrote back with an apology and abject surrender: "DPW will put your vehicle back as close to the location that we towed it from. The vehicle will be delivered this afternoon."

Later that afternoon, Dougherty got word that his car had been delivered to his block.

Alas, our happy ending swerves a bit here. Dougherty went outside and found a car plastered with DMV tow stickers. But it wasn't his car; it was a Ford, with Florida plates. The city had delivered the wrong vehicle.

Another e-mail and two hours later, Dougherty was reunited with his Honda. "Staff has put your car where you saw the other car," Howland wrote. "I really, really am sorry for the confusion."