The Great Minnow Hunt

The Section 8 bribery scheme started in early 1996, Jones testified, when the Housing Authority began relocating hundreds of tenants from housing projects that were about to be demolished. Jones was assigned to help Williams remove tenants as quickly as possible, and families slated for relocation were given Section 8 certificates, which allowed them to receive subsidized housing anywhere in the country. (Certificate holders pay about 30 percent of their household income in rent; the government covers the balance of the cost.)

Jones recognized the commodity value of the certificates and set out to capitalize them.

"I sold Section 8," Jones testified. "I went out and recruited people and sold Section 8. That's what I did in public housing. I would get up, see who wanted to buy it, bring it to Pat, and we would do it."

"Pat" was Patricia Williams, the manager in charge of the relocation push. Williams, 57, started at the authority in 1976, working as a secretary to various executive directors and eventually landing the position of property manager at the Potrero Hill projects -- a job she loved and did well for many years. She was kicked upstairs to the relocation department because she kept failing the multiple-choice test all property managers must pass in order to keep their jobs. ("She was nice, but not a bright candle," remembers one of her supervisors.)

The Housing Authority was in such a hurry to vacate the projects that executives decided to give Section 8 certificates to anyone who said they had lived with a relocating tenant, even if only for a few weeks. This policy was a blueprint for fraud. Jones testified that she provided her paying customers with the names and addresses of relocating tenants for use on false statements of cohabitation. Williams supposedly "verified" the false statements and issued the certificates. The prosecution, however, did not elaborate on one uncomfortable fact: Williams' bosses, including Janice Owens -- a member of a HUD-sponsored "recovery team" sent during 1996 to clean up the authority -- and Eligibility Manager Carmen Rosales, also reviewed the fraudulent statements and approved them.

The trial had its moments of absurdity.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Hemann took pains to paint Jones as a concerned mother of six who did not turn state's evidence until Williams betrayed her. Jones said she decided to testify against her partner in crime because she believed that Williams, who happens to be married to a Baptist minister, was prepared to testify against her, despite their previous agreement to "do wrong and be wrong together."

"I realized that the woman that I knew all these years to be a good church woman, go to church every Sunday, was really a liar," Jones said.

But it was Williams who had refused to testify against Jones.

Williams' defense attorneys argued, outside the presence of the jury, that Jones and her bribery conspiracy were protected at the Housing Authority by the political power of her father, Charlie Walker, the longtime mayoral associate. Hemann argued fiercely that Jones' relationships with Walker and Mayor Brown, whom Jones says is her godfather, had nothing to do with her confessed crimes, insisting that Williams was the leader of the bribery ring and that Walker's role, whatever it might have been, was irrelevant.

U.S. District Judge Charles A. Legge forbade the defense to mention Walker or Brown in cross-examining Jones, ruling that her relationships with her father and the mayor were irrelevant to the case.

Nonetheless, the jury found Williams guilty of only seven out of 26 bribery counts. They believed she conspired with Jones to sell public housing, and that she received some bribe money, but they clearly did not buy the government's case that she was the brains behind the plot. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, jury foreman Greg McGiboney said Williams "was almost as much a victim as anyone else.

"Inasmuch as we don't see her as an evil criminal, and she allowed herself to continue to be involved, she got left holding the bag."

Due to be sentenced next February, Williams faces six years in federal prison. Her attorneys are filing an appeal. When asked why she thought prosecutors chose to focus only upon her, she replied, "Somebody had to go down. I think the picture is larger than me. Once they put me in jail, the investigation will be over."

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In interviews with FBI agents conducted over the course of two months, Jones described in detail how she thought up, planned, and openly solicited bribes from her circle of acquaintances in return for housing. The FBI concluded that Jones was assigned to work with Williams on relocating tenants "because it was well known in the community that Jones was Charlie Walker's daughter, [and] Jones had some credibility and notoriety which made it easier for her to do this job." According to transcripts of FBI interviews, Jones acknowledged that she used her father's restaurant, called Uncle Charlie's, in Bayview-Hunters Point, as a place to conduct her bribery business.

Jones' statements to the FBI and trial exhibits, including memos among a variety of Housing Authority staffers, indicate that higher-ups at the authority, including Smith, Owens, and Rosales, all reviewed and approved some of the paperwork connected to the Section 8 bribery scheme. This paperwork typically included driver's licenses, income tax forms, and welfare forms that had different addresses than the phony statements of cohabitation filed by Jones' "customers." In other words, a simple comparison of dates and addresses would have been sufficient to spot Jones' and Williams' handiwork.

Also, Jones told the FBI that she gave Rosales gifts because she had "help[ed] people" who were not eligible get housing assistance. The gifts supposedly included a "ten-dollar baggie of marijuana," and two tickets to a fund-raiser, sponsored by Walker, for Mayor Brown. When asked about these allegations, Rosales' attorney, Tyree Jones, said, "No comment."

Not only do Jones' FBI interviews indicate that Housing Authority executives knew of the bribery arrangement, other trial exhibits show that the higher-ups had been repeatedly informed that public housing was being sold. Depositions in the whistle-blower lawsuit filed by Housing Authority clerks, for example, contend that Executive Director Davis knew about corruption in the relocation program.

U.S. Attorney Robert Mueller declined to comment on the Williams case or the status of the FBI probes into San Francisco's city government. Both the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI also declined to comment on evidence in the public record of apparent high-level involvement in bribery at the Housing Authority.

Federal Public Defender Barry Portman, who observed Williams' trial and has served as a defense attorney for three decades, views the situation this way:

"If Pat Williams is the top of the Housing Authority investigation -- that's not going very far up the ladder. In my experience this is where things generally stop, they seldom go beyond middle management. The United States attorney in this district has not delivered a Mr. Big since the 1950s."

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Bridgette Moore, a low-level eligibility clerk, was one of the most vocal complainers about fraud in the Section 8 program. Her deposition for the whistle-blower lawsuit alleges the agency's top officials knew about the bribery conspiracy. She helped FBI agents wade through a thousand relocation files to pick out the fraudulent ones.

In September 1999, the United States attorney charged Moore with felony conspiracy, alleging she processed some of Jones' fraudulent paperwork. By doing so, the government claimed, Moore was agreeing to be part of the conspiracy and furthering it. But high-ranking officials -- such as Smith, Owens, and Rosales -- also processed fraudulent paperwork, contends Moore's attorney, Susan Raffanti.

The case against Moore was eventually dropped, but Raffanti contends that the conspiracy theory used by the government to indict Moore could have been applied to the higher-ups.

There is an obvious contradiction between Rosales' claim to be a whistle-blower against Housing Authority wrongdoing, and her apparent role as a Housing Authority executive who signed off on paperwork related to the very bribery on which she has blown the whistle.

In December 1996, for instance, Rosales sent a memo to Davis complaining that the practice of giving Section 8 certificates to ineligible people was "bleeding the system dry." Court exhibits show that over a four-year period Rosales and other eligibility staff members repeatedly wrote memos to executive officers of the Housing Authority detailing "skullduggery" in the Section 8 program. Rosales provided the HUD inspector general with copies of these memorandums and chronologies of fraudulent acts she believed were regularly committed at the highest levels of the housing agency.

In January 1999, 10 eligibility clerks complained in a memorandum to the Housing Authority executive office. "How do we know that [Section 8] referrals from the Mayor's Office or those approved by administrators are not payoffs, whether monetary or not," the clerks wrote. "We should not have to work under such conditions. This causes a lot of stress on us."