Hello San Francisco. I'm attending the April meeting of the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council. David Woo is hosting. https://hanc-sf.org/24-home/593-how-to-join-the-january-14th-hanc-meeting

Topics on the agenda this evening:
• Joe Eskenazi with the latest on the FBI investigation into City Hall
• Renee Curran discussing the state of tenant protections
• San Francisco Radio Club discussing ham radio and radio communications in SF

Joe Eskenazi is starting.

JE: I was told to go for 20-30 minutes, which is a lot, even for corruption in SF. I'm going to start answering a few questions from Lisa Awbrey.

JE: Is the investigation widening? Probably. You don't spend years and years and dollars just to pop the head of SFPUC and Public Works. If people are operating on the up-and-up, they have nothing to worry about.

JE: Sandra Zuniga is now cooperating with the feds—she was the head of the Mayor's Fix-it team, and Mohammed Nuru's girlfriend. Her charging documents show she was part of a money laundering operation since 2010.

JE: *If* you were going to get someone in the Mayor's office, this is how you'd do it. 2010 is 4 years earlier than the original charging documents from when she pleaded guilty.

JE: Also Walter Wong, permit expeditor. Big Matt Gonzalez guy and Rose Pak ally. Wong was allegedly doing deals with Chinatown elders in exchange for Julie Christensen votes in 2014.

JE: Also Harlan Kelly in the SFPUC was served up to the feds by Wong. He was essentially being bribed to help out his buddy on a bid.

JE: We're watching the feds work up the chain on corruption, but also look at how they're interacting with disadvantaged communities. Law enforcement wants to use weak links. Harlan Kelly's wife was charged, and they have children. There can be heart-wrenching results for them.

JE: Also Walter Wong. I understand he's not a well man, phyiscally. He probably doesn't want to spend the autumn of his life incarcerated. It depends on how hard they want to lean.

JE: My reading of the charging documents is that the feds had their eye on Mayor Ed Lee. They interviewed him during the Shrimp Boy fiasco, but there were no charges even in contact with an undercover agent. It's not hard to see that that was their scope.

JE: Ed Le passed away, and the feds pivoted. The Nuru wiretaps go back 5+ years, and when he blabbed about it he made the feds angry and complicated their investigation.

JE: What does the investigation touch? There's the Recology case for one. There was the $100M settlement. The real question is who knew what, when?

JE: It doesn't look good for the City. It took two years for the problem to come to fruition. City Attorney had to file suit.

JE: What happened is an error—let's call it that—where certain revenues were not counted by Recology in yearly reports. That was found by the City in 2018. They then realized they had done it for 2017, too. And yet, nothing was done and we all kept paying inflated rates.

JE: I don't think we're close to the bottom of it. You could say the City works at a leisurely pace, but there's a nefarious reading: Recology didn't catch this, Public Works didn't catch it, and a consultant didn't catch it.

JE: Recology might have realized they were being squeezed from both ends—by Nuru and someone else in Public Workers. So that's the darker suspicion, that goods and services were being extracted from Recology. It's discouraging that it took so long for Public Works to do anything.