“The San Francisco official known around town as ‘Mr. Clean,’” CBS News reports, “and the charity-promoting restaurateur whom federal officials say conspired to line their own pockets at the expense of taxpayers’ trust made brief appearances in court Thursday.”
“Mr. Clean,” is Mohammed Nuru, San Francisco’s longtime public works boss. Last month the FBI arrested Nuru on charges that he and restauranteur Nick Bovis schemed to bribe a San Francisco Airport Commissioner.
“The complaint describes a web of corruption involving bribery, kickbacks, and side deals by one of San Francisco’s highest-ranking city employees,” Anderson said in a statement. “The public is entitled to honest work from public officials, free from manipulation for the official’s own personal benefit and profit.”
The complaint also charges Mohammed Nuru with “using his official position to benefit a billionaire in China who was developing a large multimillion dollar mixed-use project in San Francisco, in exchange for travel and lodging, high-end liquor, and other gifts and benefits.” For many in San Francisco, the arrest was long overdue.
A February 19, 2004, report by Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada headlined, “Cleanup Wizard in a messy scandal. DPW aid has faced string of complaints,” noted that Nuru was born in England, son of a British mother and a Nigerian father, and came to the United States to study landscape architecture at Kansas State University. He graduated in 1987 and supervised construction projects in the United States and Saudi Arabia. By 2000 Nuru had become an executive in the San Francisco Department of Public works and “there were complaints how Mohammed Nuru, the dynamic protégé of Willie Brown, conducted the public’s business.”
As Susan Dyer Reynolds noted in Marina Times, Nuru’s ascent started in 1991 when he became second in command at the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, (SLUG), a nonprofit managing community gardens. Nuru came to the attention of then-California Assemblyman Willie Brown and worked for Brown’s mayoral campaign and his reelection campaign in 1999. In 2000 Brown hired Nuru as DPW deputy director of operations and “soon staff complaints rolled in about Nuru flaunting city rules and misusing public funds.”
As Reynolds has it, “as long as you have connections to the still-powerful Willie Brown machine, you can behave badly, fail miserably, and not only keep your job, but get promoted. That’s what Nuru has done under the leadership of three mayors, and he’s still going strong under the fourth.”
Since Mohammed Nuru took over as DPW boss in 2011, excrement has been piling up on San Francisco streets. As Daniel Greenfield noted, Nuru’s DPW paid a public relations firm $408,745 to produce reports claiming that San Francisco was spotless. Nuru was also embroiled in election controversies involving Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, whose events were packed with SLUG workers. Harris and Newsom called for a full investigation, Greenfield wrote, but “like all the other Nuru investigations, this one led to absolutely no meaningful results.”
The recent arrest by the FBI could prove different, and the lessons are already evident. Despite abundant evidence of corruption, San Francisco mayors Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, and Ed Lee basically looked the other away and held their noses. In similar style, under current mayor London Breed City, Mohammed Nuru did whatever he wanted and San Francisco’s new District Attorney wasn’t going after him.
Chesa Boudin, spawn of Weather Underground terrorists, refuses to prosecute public urination, public defecation, and “quality of life” crimes such as public camping, blocking sidewalks and soliciting sex. It took a federal agency, the FBI, to finally bust Mohammed Nuru, and the U.S. Attorney to prosecute him. This pattern is evident statewide.
San Francisco officials released previously deported criminal Inez Garcia, who in 2015 gunned down Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier. City officials rigged a trial and the Mexican national again walked free.
The illegal aliens who aided the flight of Paulo Virgen Mendoza, charged with the murder of police officer Ronil Singh, have already been sentenced to prison. That prosecution was handled by U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott. By contrast, Mendoza, a false-documented illegal with gang affiliations, is being prosecuted by Judge Ricardo Córdova, a former public defender appointed in 2003 by Democrat Gov. Gray Davis.
Córdova has postponed the suspect’s preliminary hearing until March 10. For relatives of Cpl. Singh, a legal immigrant from Fiji, it’s no justice and no peace.
Meanwhile, if convicted on current charges, Mohammed Nuru faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Nuru has been arraigned and released on $2 million bond and as CBS reported, “he is on paid leave.” So Mohammed Nuru again keeps his job as San Francisco’s Director of Public Works, but with no need to clean up the excrement now legally piling up in the street, courtesy of Chesa Boudin.
In San Francisco, part of Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district, indigents feel free to defecate in grocery store aisles and maps outline the most popular defecation areas. As Fox News reports, those include “the area of Market St., where the headquarters of companies such as Twitter and Uber are located,” and “the block that surrounds city hall.”
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