-Caveat Lector-
Q: What's a "Democratic" administration?
A: One where the most predatory and corrupt among women, homosexuals,
blacks and other ethnic minorities get a chance to rip off everyone TOO.
[Note to non-San Franciscans: The City's mayor, Willie Brown, an
African-American Clintonoid "Democrat," was the mentor of ex-mayor, now
Senator, Dianne Feinstein (whose husband Dick Blum, if I recall, was Richard
Nixon's investment banker.)]
Blacks hail FBI probe of 'set-asides'
City anti-discrimination programs not working, they say
by Chuck Finnie and Lance Williams
San Francisco Examiner, Sept. 16, 1999
San Francisco's enforcement of its affirmative action
rules came under heavy criticism from African American
business owners and laborers who said they were glad the
FBI launched a criminal probe into The City's minority
set-aside program for public works contractors.
The Board of Supervisors heard the complaints Wednesday
during a public hearing about the FBI investigation.
Little information about the probe was provided, though.
Some proposed reforms were discussed. But the hearing
became largely a forum for complaints about how
contracting dollars are awarded.
Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano called for
tougher penalties against firms that violate the
minority contracting ordinance and said the Human Rights
Commission had asked for legislation that would
permanently bar from city contracting any company
convicted of defrauding the minority set-aside program.
The Ethics Commission should be given authority to
investigate complaints about contract awards, Ammiano said.
Speakers in the audience were particularly critical of
the Human Rights Commission, saying it had failed to
ensure that minority companies get a fair share of public
works contracts.
"You deserve an FBI investigation," said Beth Aaron,
executive director of Bay Area Black Contractors. "If
they (the Human Rights Commission) had done a good job,
the FBI wouldn't be here."
The hearing, held by the supervisors Finance Committee at
the request of Ammiano, was the first at City Hall since
The Examiner reported in April that the FBI had opened an
investigation into city contracting and was focusing on
the set-aside program run by the Human Rights Commission.
On July 31, FBI agents investigating suspected criminal
wrongdoing in city contracting sealed off the commission
office for two days, seeking subpoenaed records related to more
than a dozen contractors as well as personnel records and
appointment books or daily calendars of some Human Rights
Commission employees, including its executive director, Marivic
Bamba [[the City's only Filipino department head, accused of
disproportionately favoring her own countrymen, who operate a
kind of "Filipino Mafia" already monopolizing several professions
here by deliberately excluding members of any other race]].
Federal authorities have refused comment on the probe,
but people interviewed by the FBI have said agents are
exploring allegations of fraud and favoritism in the award of
city contracts, particularly where government dollars were
intended to go to economically disadvantaged minority- and
women-owned businesses.
At the hearing Wednesday, representatives of other
minority groups and women also testified, and a representative of
Mayor Willie Brown defended his administration.
But it was African American business owners, tradesmen
and advocates for black contractors who turned out in the
biggest numbers.
They voiced utter frustration over a system through which
hundreds of millions of dollars in construction and other
contracts are awarded each year but which they said
discriminates against them. They blamed not just the
commission, but also elected city officials for failing
to keep a tighter rein on the agency.
"All this money has changed hands and has not trickled
down," said Gerard McKinney, a young black carpenter who
said he lives in Bayview-Hunters Point.
"I'm hoping the FBI does its job but goes after the
bigwigs, too," McKinney said.
A focus of the investigation, according to people
interviewed by the FBI, is Hunters Point trucker Charlie
Walker, a friend, former law client and political booster
of Mayor Brown.
Walker, who served a three-year state prison term during
the 1980s for grand theft, attempted extortion, perjury
and tax evasion for bilking city minority contracting
programs, has received $825,000 in set-aside contracts
since Brown took office.
The FBI also sought city records under subpoena on a
company called Scott-Norman Mechanical Inc., which has
obtained $55.1million as a minority subcontractor on San
Francisco International Airport's $2.4-billion
expansion since the commission ruled it eligible for
minority set-aside contracts.
According to documents filed in a San Francisco lawsuit
that pitted partners in Scott-Norman against each other,
virtually all of the company's business affairs - hiring
and firing workers, supervising construction projects
and financing the entire enterprise - are controlled by
Scott Co. of San Leandro, a $199 million mechanical
contracting firm owned by whites.
The FBI also sought city records on Tutor-Saliba Corp.,
the white-owned construction giant leading the SFO
expansion.
Bamba, the executive director of the commission, did not
attend the hearing Wednesday and hasn't returned
messages seeking comment.
She sent a staffer in her place to the hearing to explain
her agency's procedures for determining eligibility for
minority contracts and enforcing requirements that large
contractors use disadvantaged minority- and women-owned
businesses.
Ammiano said supervisors were hamstrung in their
questioning by a federal court order that bars city
officials served with subpoenas from discussing
documents sought by the FBI as well as the city attorney's
concerns about her own investigation into minority
subcontracts awarded to Scott-Norman.
At the outset of the hearing, Ammiano said he would seek to
change the minority set-aside program and believed the
Board of Supervisors should play a larger role in
monitoring the commission's work.
"If in fact we are fouling our own nest," Ammiano said,
"we have to hold ourselves and the certification process
responsible."
_____________________________________________
[HUD-funded] Housing Authority bribery arrests
Feds charge 25, including head of subsidy program and former aide
by Jim Herron Zamora with Ray Delgado
San Francisco Examiner, Sept. 22, 1999
Federal agents, leading a bribery investigation at the San
Francisco Housing Authority, have arrested the head of the
agency's relocation office and her former deputy.
Patricia Williams of San Francisco and Yolanda Bradley of
Richmond were arrested Tuesday along with six others in
connection with an alleged scheme to defraud a rent subsidy and
relocation aid program for poor tenants.
Williams, 57, head of the Housing Authority's relocation
office, and Bradley, 39, her former aide, were accused of
taking payments in exchange for federal rent-subsidy
certificates.
They appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court, pleading
not guilty to felony charges, and were released on $10,000
bond each. The six others, none of them Housing Authority
employees, also appeared for arraignment.
In addition, authorities issued arrest warrants or court
summonses for 17 others in connection with the alleged bribery
scandal.
"I would think that the staff would have more integrity
than that," said Sululagi Palega, the president of the Housing
Authority Commission, the MAYORAL-APPOINTED body that oversees
the agency. If these "people (took) advantage of people who are
disadvantaged and at the lowest point in their lives, (they) are
pretty low themselves," he said.
The Housing Authority manages U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development-funded apartment complexes and financial
assistance to poor people living in privately owned rental
housing.
In the criminal complaints against Williams and Bradley,
unsealed Tuesday along with the indictment and supporting
documents from the FBI and HUD investigators, the women are
accused of accepting bribes and creating a bogus paper trail that
allowed people to illegally receive housing vouchers, which can
be worth up to $1,000 a month.
The government alleges that between 1996 and 1998 they
doled out federal subsidy vouchers to ineligible applicants who
paid them from $1,200 to $2,500 each. The so-called Section 8
vouchers allow public housing tenants to move into market-rate
apartments. The vouchers pay up to 80 percent of a participant's
rent.
According to the government's complaint, Williams accepted
two bribes worth a combined total of $3,000 and then sent false
paper work to HUD to gain approval for the fraudulent applicants.
Bradley, who worked at the agency from March 1994 to March
1999, accepted eight bribes, the government alleges. Bradley
allegedly gave people bogus information for use on housing
application forms, then buttressed the applicants by writing
false memoranda to HUD.
Bradley is the daughter of controversial San Francisco
community activist and trucking contractor Charlie Walker, who is
one focus of a separate ongoing FBI investigation into city
contracting and a minority set-aside program run by the San
Francisco Human Rights Commission.
Bradley was terminated from her $52,000-a-year job with
the Housing Authority for undisclosed reasons in March.
Williams was suspended without pay from her $72,000 position
Tuesday, said Housing Authority spokesman Carl Williams.
Tuesday's arrests came nearly two months after the FBI made
an unannounced raid on the housing agency's offices, reportedly
in search of evidence of the alleged bribery scam.
Ronnie Davis, the authority's executive director, has
said the local agency requested the FBI-led investigation after
hearing talk about bribe paying in the housing programs.
The six people arrested along with Williams and Bradley
and the 17 others named by the government were indicted by
a federal grand jury for allegedly making false statements to
help themselves or others get housing vouchers.
Most of them submitted fraudulent applications claiming
they lived in public housing projects slated for demolition in
1996-98, the government alleged in court records, and based on
those applications, they were given vouchers to pay for rental
housing elsewhere.
The Section 8 vouchers are popular among public housing
residents eager to move out of the projects. About 6,500
families live in San Francisco under the Section 8 program.
Housing officials have estimated that several thousand families
were issued Section 8 vouchers in San Francisco and then used the
subsidy to find cheaper rental housing outside The City, mainly
in Oakland and Richmond.
The alleged bribes occurred at a time of massive upheaval
in The City's public housing system. Beginning in 1996, five
large public housing projects were torn down or renovated through
the $115 million Hope VI project, causing thousands of residents
to seek new homes.
Williams oversaw the relocation of several thousand
low-income families.
Bradley now goes by the name Yolanda Jones, her attorney,
Steve Teich, said in court Tuesday. Teich said that his client
was completely "taken by surprise" when she learned that FBI
agents had shown up at her home Tuesday morning while she was at
her job in the East Bay. Teich declined further comment outside
of court. Neither the other defendants arraigned Tuesday - nor
their attorneys - would comment, as well.
Palega, the housing commission president, said he was
glad that the agency and the commission contacted federal
investigators with rumors of improper activities.
"I'm not embarrassed," Palega said. "I'm glad we're
the ones who brought it to a close. (The authority), if
anything, should come out of this halfway clean."
Palega said he was saddened by the allegations, but "we
hope that people hear the calling and learn from this."
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