OAKLAND — Long before the FBI raids last summer that sent Mayor Sheng Thao’s career into a nightmarish spiral, an army of staffers appeared hard at work getting her governing plans for Oakland off the ground.
Across scores of emails and paperwork, the officials who helped steer the early days of Thao’s administration in 2023 negotiated key city appointments and discussed major land deals with political players, including those now accused of being Thao’s co-conspirators in an alleged bribery scheme.
Throughout those first 17 months as mayor, Thao was closely flanked by her longtime romantic partner, Andre Jones, who maintained a steady presence in the mayor’s dealings despite having no formal role in her office.
His influence and other inner workings of Thao’s orbit are laid out in thousands of city records seized last year by federal prosecutors and made publicly available this week.
The documents alone do not corroborate the criminal allegations laid out in federal indictments filed last January against Thao, Jones and father-and-son business partners David and Andy Duong — all of whom have pleaded not guilty and face federal prison time if convicted.
But many of the newly released records illuminate those who sought the mayor’s time and favor after she took office in January 2023, filling in new context for how her administration operated during what ultimately became a brief and tumultuous tenure in office. Voters recalled Thao in November, and she left office in December after the election was certified.
Key staffer in corruption case quickly got to work
Central to the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s corruption case is an allegation that the Duongs bribed Thao and Jones with money and political favors so the then-mayor would install their handpicked city officials for leadership roles. The goal? Granting the Duongs easy access to millions of dollars in public contracts.
The scheme allegedly involved Larry Gallegos, according to authorities, whom Thao pushed to appoint as a department leader but who eventually settled in as a deputy director in the city’s housing department. The emails made public this week reveal how Gallegos, then a program manager with a decades-long career at the city of Oakland, was ushered into his promotion early into Thao’s term.
Weeks after his March 16, 2023, start date in the new role, records show Gallegos already had begun talking business with an alleged co-conspirator of the defendants, Mario Juarez, who had started a homebuilding company with the Duongs named Evolutionary Homes.
Juarez, who in a newly released email introduced Gallegos to other company executives, is central to the alleged corruption scheme — with Evolutionary Homes a primary engine for the Duongs to obtain affordable-housing dollars. He was not among the defendants indicted January 17.
Around the same time, Gallegos received an email from Thao’s chief of staff, Leigh Hanson, with a personal invitation from the mayor to join a business delegation she was helping lead to Vietnam — a trip paid for almost entirely by the Vietnamese American Business Association, which is run by David Duong.
The trip, which included a number of East Bay elected officials, later helped federal prosecutors illustrate the close ties the Duongs held to the region’s politics.
Gallegos has not been accused by prosecutors of wrongdoing. But he resigned in January, the same day the indictments became public.
Duongs received extensions to long-sought purchase of Army Base
The documents released this week cast a fresh spotlight on an obscure facet of the alleged “pay to play” scheme between Thao and David and Andy Duong that focused on a much-debated parcel on a property known as the North Gateway, part of the larger former Oakland Army Base.
The alleged conspiracy — a deal struck on March 9, 2023, and memorialized in a text message from an unidentified co-conspirator sent by Andy Duong roughly two weeks later — included a promise to “get land deal at Army base done from Mayor staff,” according to the indictment against Thao. The deal also called for the city to purchase 300 modular units from Evolutionary Homes.
It all happened just as city staffers exchanged emails discussing the possibility of transforming the area into an emergency homeless encampment. The idea had gained new steam in 2022 when Councilperson Carroll Fife twice sought approval for the city to house homeless people at the North Gateway parcel.
Hanson also appears to have taken a personal interest in the property, according to a March 23, 2023, email found in the new trove of records.
Hired two months earlier as Thao’s top staffer, Hanson discussed the North Gateway property with a city project manager for the Oakland Army Base, who asked if they could “coordinate a Mayor and Council staff briefing” on upcoming work at the site.
The Duongs had been in talks for years to build a new waste-processing facility at the site, where the city had leased 12 acres of land to the family’s flagship business, California Waste Solutions, a garbage-handling giant that owns Oakland’s recycling contract.
California Waste Solutions had planned to begin construction at the base in December 2022 or January 2023, a relocation from the company’s West Oakland location, which has “long been a priority” for the surrounding neighborhood, according to a city memo.
The fate of that project remains unclear.
By summer 2023, the Duongs requested — and received — a nine-month extension on numerous deadlines to get the project up and running.
In February 2024, David Duong once again asked for another extension, citing “the unprecedented impact from the pandemic (which) has and continues to severely impact the recycling and financial markets.”
The company has yet to announce any groundbreakings at the site. On Wednesday afternoon, a city spokesman did not respond to a request by this newspaper for an update on the project’s status.
‘Does he need a title?’
The documents also detail Jones’ close involvement in Thao’s work as an elected leader.
Even as Jones was alleged to have been receiving thousands of dollars for a no-show job from the Duong family, according to the federal indictment, he also appeared to have sway on Thao’s work as mayor.
A couple weeks before Thao was sworn in, one of Thao’s trusted advisors, Brandon Harami, referred to Jones as among “my team members” in a city email. That same day, Jones was included in a meeting for Thao’s campaign, the records show.
Over the ensuing 18 months, he appeared by Thao’s side on some of her most high-profile out-of-town trips. He received a special briefing about the “chief situation” while the city searched for someone to lead the police department.
And in March 2024, only he and Hanson were mentioned as potentially accompanying Thao to a party hosted by Audible at the March 2024 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.
A day before the FBI’s June 20 raids, one of the mayor’s confidants said Jones had edited a statement from Thao for an NBC Bay Area story. Thao, according to the documents, said she was OK with its release sight-unseen “if Andre approved it.”
Through it all, Jones never appeared on the city’s payroll.
His mysterious job status became a subject of conversation ahead of Thao’s planned trip to Vietnam in 2023, which Jones attended alongside a cadre of local officials.
When Theresa Duong, a representative of the Vietnamese American Business Association, asked for Jones’ job title, Hanson said flatly “none,” before adding, “does he need a title?”
When told that Jones did need a job title for meeting materials, Hanson replied “entrepreneur is best.”