John Coté
The San Francisco Chronicle
3/29/2014
As state Sen. Leland Yee aggressively campaigned in the 2011 San Francisco mayor’s race, he blasted interim Mayor Ed Lee as beholden to City Hall power brokers with “selfish interests” and vowed to “throw them out” if elected.
At the same time, Yee was allegedly soliciting $10,000 from an undercover FBI agent posing as a real estate developer who had already illegally funneled $11,000 to Yee’s campaign, telling the agent to “cover your tracks,” and boasting that “there’s tremendous opportunity in local levels … because whoever’s gonna be the mayor controls everything.”
Sifting through the layers of alleged criminality in a years-long FBI probe that ensnared Yee, notorious Chinatown gangster Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow and 24 others last week, the picture that emerges of Yee in a 137-page FBI affidavit is not the sleeves-rolled-up, 65-year-old Democrat with a knack for retail politics that Yee projected.
Instead, it’s of a man driven by money who was willing to skirt campaign finance laws, collect cash for meetings, trade political favors for donations, and even promise to facilitate an international arms deal worth up to $2.5 million. Now, a Chronicle review of his votes and campaign donations shows that money might have influenced many of his votes in the Legislature, too…
The article continues at the SF Chronicle.
