Disgraced former Public Works czar Mohammed Nuru will serve seven years in jail after pleading responsible to a federal fraud cost, a choose ordered Thursday afternoon, closing one chapter in a corruption scandal that ensnared senior officers and enterprise heavyweights, and shattered the general public’s belief in metropolis authorities.
Choose William Orrick learn the sentence in a San Francisco courtroom so packed that folks stood within the aisles and spilled into the hallway. Some wiped their eyes because the choose introduced his choice. Along with incarceration, Nuru will serve three years of supervised launch and 100 hours of neighborhood service, and pays a $35,000 positive.
Nuru stood silently beside his lawyer Thursday. Orrick ordered him to give up to authorities on Jan. 6, doubtlessly to a facility near his household in San Francisco — an lodging that his lawyer, Miles Ehrlich, requested in mild of the previous Public Works director’s medical situations. He suffers from diabetes and not too long ago had a coronary heart assault, Ehrlich mentioned in court docket.
Federal prosecutors sought to make an instance of Nuru, 59, requesting a nine-year jail time period. In a prolonged court docket memorandum, prosecutors argued {that a} “substantial” sentence would assist dissuade others who could also be tempted to make use of their workplace for private achieve. They described Nuru as “a quintessential grifter.”
The proposed punishment was triple the penalty sought by Nuru’s protection attorneys, who referred to as for 3 years’ imprisonment, mixed with the possible forfeiture of his metropolis pension. As the 2 sides ready for Thursday’s listening to in entrance of Orrick, an advanced portrait of Nuru emerged from their dueling filings.
He appeared as a power-hungry bureaucrat with sole dominion over a metropolis division that oversaw many profitable contracts, which Nuru admitted he handed out to buddies and cronies in change for cash and different bribes. But buddies who despatched letters of assist additionally introduced him as a loyal public servant and single father who indulged everybody in his orbit, and whose largess contributed to his undoing.
Each the prosecution and protection addressed the impulses that tugged at Nuru all through his profession. He “cultivated the picture of a person of energy, a changer of lives, and a dispenser of favors,” by controlling the purse strings at Public Works, prosecutor Alexandra Shepard mentioned throughout the sentencing listening to Thursday. Ehrlich pressured the significance of balancing “either side of the ledger” — the clear and the corrupt — in calculating Nuru’s sentence.
“You made the town’s aggressive bidding, allow processing and decision-making a farce,” Orrick instructed Nuru throughout a scorching speech during which he invoked the 12 years — from 2008 to 2020 — that Nuru spent buying and selling preferential remedy and confidential bidding data for worldwide journeys, jewellery, high-end wine, envelopes of money, kitchen home equipment and development work on his ranch in Colusa County, a sprawling dwelling that Nuru partly financed with laundered bribes, in response to the memorandum.
He persevered in that conduct at the same time as former state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, and ex-San Francisco Supervisor Ed Jew have been sentenced for corruption, Orrick and the prosecution famous.
When FBI brokers pulled Nuru out of a safety line on the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, he initially agreed to cooperate — then rotated and knowledgeable buddies who have been potential targets of the investigation, prompting his rearrest in January 2020. Early this 12 months, Nuru pleaded responsible to a federal fraud cost, triggered by an alleged failed try and bribe an airport commissioner.
“Throughout my time on the bench, I’ve needed to sentence individuals for actually horrible issues — gang murders, drug dealing, actually lethal stuff,” Orrick mentioned. “In some ways, what you’ve completed is at the very least as reprehensible, for my part.”
Nuru was the primary high-profile official felled in a Metropolis Corridor saga that steadily widened, with an online of allegations that options roughly a dozen different key gamers — together with former Public Utilities Fee head Harlan Kelly, who pleaded not responsible to federal bribery prices, and Mayor London Breed, who has not been charged with any crime however admitted to accepting items from Nuru.
Kelly’s spouse, Naomi Kelly, resigned from her publish as metropolis administrator — the highest-ranking unelected place in San Francisco authorities — after her husband’s arrest, although she just isn’t dealing with prison prices.
Former constructing inspection chief Tom Hui additionally departed after an investigation by the Metropolis Lawyer’s Workplace discovered he gave entry and preferential remedy to a allow advisor who admitted to fraud. Sandra Zuniga, the previous director of the town’s Repair-It Workforce and a onetime romantic companion to Nuru, stepped down and later pleaded responsible to prices of conspiracy to commit cash laundering after she was charged with serving to Nuru squirrel away the monetary proceeds of his schemes.
“The unhappy factor is that he wasn’t alone,” state Meeting Member Matt Haney, D-San Francisco, instructed The Chronicle. “The whole equipment of metropolis authorities was polluted together with his corrupt habits.”
Haney continuously clashed with Nuru whereas serving as a metropolis supervisor whose district included the Tenderloin and downtown neighborhoods that have been strewn with trash, a quality-of-life difficulty that Haney mentioned Nuru uncared for as a result of he was spending a lot time manipulating metropolis authorities to serve his buddies. After Nuru’s arrest in 2020, Haney pressed varied anti-corruption measures and tried to separate up Public Works by making a Division of Sanitation, which continues to be being litigated in Metropolis Corridor.
Chief among the many bribes Nuru took was $260,000 in development work on the ranch from businessman Walter Wong; a John Deere tractor and attachments from Balmore Hernandez, Alan Varela and William Gilmartin; a $36,550 gold Rolex watch from businesswoman Florence Kong; and an annual $150,000 donation from the town’s rubbish contractor, Recology, which Nuru break up between a Public Works anti-litter marketing campaign and a private slush fund, the memorandum mentioned.
Former Recology Vice President John Porter was indicted in July on bribery prices, whereas one other firm government, Paul Giusti, pleaded responsible in 2021. San Francisco restaurateur Nick Bovis, who prosecutors say bestowed upon Nuru $22,000 price of home equipment for the ranch, plus meals, leisure and kickbacks from his dealings with the town, pleaded responsible to wire fraud and trustworthy providers wire fraud in Could 2020. Kong pleaded responsible to bribing Nuru and making false statements to the FBI, and Hernandez, Varela and Gilmartin all pleaded responsible to wire fraud.
On Thursday, spokespeople for the FBI mentioned in a tweet that their investigation into the “long-running kickback scheme” was ongoing. Public Works printed a Twitter thread saying the division was “transferring ahead with steadfast resolve to construct again public belief,” with expanded ethics coaching.
Throughout the interval during which he maneuvered varied pay-to-play preparations, Nuru was one of the vital senior officers in Metropolis Corridor, a bespectacled caretaker who power-washed streets earlier than each ribbon-cutting, threw events for his employees and glided by the nickname “Mr. Clear.”
Beloved and admired by many, he maintained a cadre of supporters, as evidenced by the greater than 100 relations, buddies, Public Works staff, mentees and former colleagues who despatched letters to Orrick on Nuru’s behalf, praising his dedication as single father and his work growing neighborhood gardens in Oakland and San Francisco.
In a single letter, veteran metropolis bureaucrat Ed Reiskin — who helmed San Francisco’s Public Works division and Municipal Transportation Company earlier than he was named metropolis administrator of Oakland in 2020 — characterised Nuru as hardworking and efficient on the job, and gregarious in social settings.
“The instances we gathered round colleagues, meals, and household, Mohammed was beneficiant to a fault together with his culinary expertise, and shared the cultures of his mother and father,” Reiskin wrote, referring to Nuru’s Nigerian father and British mom.
Nuru’s attorneys chronicled his historical past of public service and his life elevating 5 youngsters after his spouse fell into drug dependancy since his arrest.
Nuru struck a contrite tone in a letter to Orrick, which began off with an apology, recapped his autobiography and chalked up his obstruction of the federal investigation to what he now views as misguided loyalty to buddies. He additionally emphasised his present well being issues, which could possibly be exacerbated by an extended jail time period, he and his legal professionals mentioned.
“As I’ve made a profession of offering second probabilities for individuals who ran afoul of the regulation, guiding, coaching, and inspiring them, I’m desperate to restore the injury I’ve completed and to work laborious to regain the individuals’s perception in our democratic techniques and the court docket’s perception in me,” Nuru wrote.
The whole episode — which seems to nonetheless be unspooling — “has left an indelible stain on our metropolis,” Supervisor Aaron Peskin mentioned, acknowledging the handful of optimistic penalties, together with tightening of ethics guidelines and extra scrutiny of Public Works, which turned “essentially the most investigated division” within the metropolis’s 150-year historical past, he mentioned.
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle employees author. E mail: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan
