This story has everything.
It has the streets of San Francisco.
I profiled Mohammed Nuru before he ended up on the national radar. The Nigerian immigrant and Willie Brown protege dubbed himself Mr. Clean and was making six figures claiming that he was cleaning up San Francisco. Instead, the city just got dirtier.
Mohammed Nuru landed a top job at the DPW where he promised to “get rid of those white managers.”
By 2004, four years later, Mohammed Nuru had been banned from any further dealings with his old SLUG buddies after the social justice group was accused of pressuring workers to campaign and vote for Gavin Newsom in the city’s mayoral election. (Newsom has since become governor of California.)
The event at which SLUG employees, many of them homeless or ex-cons, were forced to cast absentee ballots had been sponsored by Attorney General Kamala Harris.
Mayor Ed Lee appointed Mohammed Nuru to head DPW in 2011. That year there had been 5,547 “human waste incidents”. By 2013, there were 8,793 human waste incidents.
A 58% increase.
By 2016, the number of human waste incidents had tripled to 18,276.
More recently, Nuru finally got busted and the resulting scandal took down a nice chunk of San Francisco city officials. It also forced Mayor London Breed to reveal that she had dated Nuru and took a sizable gift from him which she had not disclosed.
Federal authorities charged San Francisco Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru and high-profile restaurateur Nick Bovis with fraud Tuesday following a public corruption probe. The schemes involved an envelope of cash, fraudulent city contracts, improper gifts from a Chinese developer and a $2,000 bottle of wine, according to authorities.
“The complaint alleges corruption pouring into San Francisco from around the world,” said David Anderson, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, at a news conference Tuesday.
Anderson accused Nuru of “corruption, bribery kickbacks and side deals by one of San Francisco’s highest-ranking public employees.”
Willie Brown is funding Nuru’s defense.
Meanwhile, Nuru just ended up in a very bizarre incident after he allegedly pulled a knife at a food bank.
Mohammed Nuru, the former Public Works director ousted in early 2020 and charged in a federal corruption scandal, was booked into County Jail No. 1 at 4:44 p.m. this afternoon after he allegedly pulled a knife on someone at the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank .
San Francisco Police responded to a call around 11:18 a.m., in which a victim told officers he was approached by an alleged assailant, who produced a knife and demanded the victim’s property, according to a police statement.
Nuru’s involvement was confirmed by Keely Hopkins, communications manager of the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank. Hopkins also confirmed that the property under question was a bag of chips.
According to Hopkins, Nuru — who has spent time volunteering at the food bank since being charged by the feds and leaving city employment — had approached the alleged victim in the break room. Nuru was purportedly holding a small kitchen knife, and the victim was eating a bag of chips. Nuru allegedly said this was all meant in jest, but the victim told police he felt threatened and left the food bank in fear of his safety.
The current official story is that Nuru was joking. But the official story is coming out of a city still being run by Willie Brown’s cronies.
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