The Great Minnow Hunt

In the summer of 1999, FBI agents raided two departments of San Francisco's city government, seizing boxes of records from the Human Rights Commission and the Housing Authority. The daily press reported that the FBI was investigating possible wrongdoing by Charlie Walker, part-time trucker and longtime legal client, friend, and political supporter of Mayor Willie Brown. The coverage by the dailies was intense, and repeatedly pointed up the connections between Walker, previously convicted of grand theft, attempted extortion, and defrauding the city's minority contracting program, and Brown, spurring the mayor to complain that the papers were making it appear he was a target of the investigation, when he was not.

Eighteen months later, Willie Brown is untouched, Charlie Walker remains uncharged, and the investigation seems to be winding down.

For all the media Sturm und Drang associated with it, the federal investigation appears to have started and stopped with relative small fry. The Human Rights Commission part of the probe, for example, seems to have run out of steam after a midlevel manager, Zula Jones, was indicted on charges she had helped a San Leandro construction firm illegally obtain tens of millions of dollars in construction contracts at the airport.

The FBI investigation of the San Francisco Housing Authority also seems to have stopped after hooking minnows -- even though public records, including the FBI's own investigative reports, contain significant evidence of wrongdoing by high-level Housing Authority officials.

Last September, a federal District Court jury found Patricia Williams, the relocation manager for the Housing Authority, guilty of taking bribes to provide subsidized housing certificates to people who were ineligible to receive them. Williams was convicted, partly, on the basis of testimony from Yolanda Jones, Walker's daughter, in a plea agreement that may spare Jones from a prison sentence. Assistant United States Attorney John H. Hemann claimed Williams was a kind of mastermind whose conviction would "correct the problems at the Housing Authority and make sure they stay corrected."

The jury that heard the government's case against Williams did not entirely agree. Although they convicted Williams of seven felony bribery counts, jurors found her innocent of the majority of the bribery charges filed against her, and several later said they saw her as a victim of circumstances, rather than a prime mover in the bribery scheme. Those jurors reached this conclusion, even though court rulings prevented them from knowing of the full extent of the connections between Jones' father and Mayor Brown, or of Walker's apparent influence at the Housing Authority.

The U.S. attorney's focus on Pat Williams as a top wrongdoer at the Housing Authority seems to be belied by a wide variety of public documents:

• FBI reports of interviews of Yolanda Jones and an initial indictment filed against her indicate that Jones was the leader of the bribery conspiracy. After Jones agreed to testify against Williams in return for a reduced sentence, the U.S. attorney amended the indictment to portray Williams as the ringleader.
• In sworn depositions taken as part of a whistle-blower lawsuit, four Housing Authority employees claim the agency's top officials knew about bribery in regard to the sale of public housing vouchers for years, and did nothing to halt it.
• In documents filed as exhibits in the Williams' trial, an unidentified official in Mayor Willie Brown's office is accused of ordering public housing vouchers to be given to ineligible individuals, bypassing thousands of people on waiting lists.
• A HUD inspector general's report issued nine months ago recommends that the Housing Authority's executive director, Ron C. Davis, be punished with the "strongest administrative action" for, allegedly, misusing federal money and practicing favoritism in the awarding of contracts. Michael Zerega, a spokesman for the Inspector General's Office, said last month that the sanction recommended is indeed strong -- a permanent ban against Davis' participation in all programs of the federal government.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco declined repeated requests for comment about its handling of the Patricia Williams and Yolanda Jones cases, and the prospects, if any, for additional prosecutions of Housing Authority employees. An FBI spokesman said he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of an ongoing investigation of the Housing Authority. Federal grand jury testimony usually is not disclosed to the public. It is, therefore, extremely difficult for outsiders to say with certainty that the probe of the Housing Authority is at an end, or to know the facts that prosecutors possessed when they made decisions about how to proceed.

Still, interviews with Housing Authority insiders and defense attorneys, a variety of news reports, and even the court statements of a federal prosecutor suggest that the conviction of Williams, a midlevel functionary, heralds the end of the federal investigation of criminal activities at the Housing Authority, leaving wide open a basic question: In using Yolanda Jones' testimony to convict Pat Williams, was the U.S. Attorney's Office pursuing a criminal mastermind, or netting a minnow as sharks swam free?

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The FBI's investigation of the Human Rights Commission broke into public view in the spring of 1999, when the San Francisco Examiner began publishing a series of reports that questioned the propriety of the agency's actions in approving construction and trucking contracts awarded by the Airport Commission. As the city's chief enforcer of affirmative action laws, the Human Rights Commission can make decisions that essentially control the awarding of city contracts.

In September 1999, the San Francisco City Attorney's Office filed a lawsuit against the Scott Company of California and an African-American plumber from Hunters Point, Alvin P. Norman, accusing the contractors of creating a minority-owned front company to get preferential treatment in bids for city contracts at the airport. The U.S. Attorney's Office subsequently brought criminal charges against Zula Jones (no relation to Yolanda Jones), a senior contract compliance officer at the Human Rights Commission, alleging she had aided the Scott Company and Norman in the illegal scheme.

According to many press reports based, in part, on grand jury subpoenas, federal investigators were at one point looking into allegations that Krystal Trucking Inc., a white-owned trucking company associated with Walker, had been given unfair competitive advantages by the Human Rights Commission. But neither Krystal nor Walker has been charged, and at least one news report has suggested that Walker will not be indicted.

The FBI's August 1999 raid on the Housing Authority was inspired by allegations of bribery contained in a whistle-blower lawsuit that had been languishing in federal District Court since 1995. In that lawsuit, Carmen T. Rosales, the former head of the Housing Authority's eligibility department, which processes applications for public housing, and Michael V. Meadows, a former director of maintenance at the authority, claimed that authority executives systematically lied to HUD in applications that brought the authority tens of millions of dollars in federal grants.

The lawsuit also accused former Housing Authority Executive Director David I. Gilmore of ordering Rosales to give housing subsidies to 148 ineligible people, including someone referred to the authority by an aide to then-Mayor Art Agnos. (Agnos is currently the head of the HUD office that administers the western region of the U.S., including San Francisco.) Agnos did not return calls seeking comment for this story.

In an incendiary amendment to the lawsuit filed in early 1999, Rosales said that bribery was rife in a housing subsidy program known as Section 8 (i.e., Section 8 of the United States Housing Act of 1937). The amendment was backed by sworn depositions by Rosales and three Housing Authority eligibility clerks who testified that they had been getting phone calls -- for years -- from enraged people who claimed they had paid thousands of dollars to Yolanda Jones for public housing they had yet to receive. Rosales and the clerks said, under oath, that they had transferred the calls to Ronnie Davis, the Housing Authority's current executive director.

Within the boxes of records they seized from the eligibility office, FBI agents found several dozen fraudulent Section 8 applications. Tracy Baker, niece to O.J. Simpson, subsequently confessed to paying Yolanda Jones for housing. Her testimony led federal investigators to Jones, and then to Pat Williams. Where they, apparently, stopped.

In the fall of 1999, federal agents arrested Jones, Williams, a Housing Authority eligibility clerk, and a score of the "customers" who'd allegedly paid Jones for Section 8 certificates they did not qualify for. That indictment portrayed Jones as the ringleader of a bribery conspiracy, within which Williams played a real, but not the leading, role.

Months of interrogation by FBI agents followed. Alleged co-conspirators testified against supposed fellow schemers, and most of those who cooperated received probated sentences in return. Only Williams stood firm in refusing to plea bargain. She says that she did not go along with the demands of FBI agents that she implicate Housing Authority executives, or even Jones. Williams contends that, although she did process a few fraudulent documents, she did it to help poor people. Williams says she did not take bribes; she did not see Jones take bribes. Williams admits to accepting small gifts of money from Jones.

In return for the possibility of receiving a reduced sentence, probably probation, Jones agreed to testify that Williams was the mastermind of the bribery conspiracy. The U.S. attorney rewrote the original indictment, dropping its many references to Jones' leading role, and appointing Williams as the big fish of the conspiracy.

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Williams' trial started in late August of this year. A plea-bargaining platoon of Jones' customers testified that they paid Jones for public housing, with two witnesses saying they passed relatively small amounts of cash to Williams. Jones, however, testified that she split about $70,000 in bribes with Williams.

Jones, 40, created an unforgettable figure on the stand. Six feet tall, svelte, and caustic, she often tap-tapped her long, gloss-white fingernails impatiently as she described how she and Williams operated their illegal business. Jones told the court that her official, $50,000-per-year job as a relocation clerk at the Housing Authority was a sham. She seldom showed up to work, yet high-level executives, such as Barbara Smith, director of housing development, signed off on her time cards.