OAKLAND — The sprawling federal inquiry that became public last month with an FBI-led raid at Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s house now appears to be needling its way into the Oakland Police Department, according to new federal grand jury subpoenas served to the city attorney’s office.
The U.S. Attorney’s office ordered city officials to hand over all Oakland Police Department internal phone number directories since the start of March, according to the subpoenas. The agency also asked for all Oakland police reports since April 1 involving the politically-connected Duong family, who run the city’s contracted recycling company and an obscure housing company making homes out of shipping containers.
The new trove of documents sought in the subpoenas — which were issued July 10 and July 12 and first reported by Oaklandside — signal the first known mention of the Oakland Police Department in an investigation that has roiled Oakland’s political scene.
The investigation came to light in stunning fashion last month, when FBI agents on June 20 simultaneously raided Thao’s house and addresses connected to David Duong, his son Andy Duong and their recycling company, California Waste Solutions.
An initial subpoena issued days after the raids pulled the curtain back on the investigation. Federal prosecutors are also seeking records involving Andre Jones, Thao’s partner of 10 years and a well-connected political veteran who once served as chief of staff to Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan.
Investigators also sought documents concerning development of the Oakland Army Base, plans for local homelessness declarations and appointments to a host of boards and departments across the city, including for the Port of Oakland.
For more than a decade, Duong-led California Waste Solutions touted plans to build a massive new recycling plant on a 12-acre parcel at the former Oakland Army Base’s North Gateway site. The multi-million dollar project aimed to move the company’s main recycling plant from Wood Street to the Port of Oakland as a way to alleviate congestion, vehicle emissions and the blaring, early-morning noise of trucks rambling down streets in West Oakland.
But that project appears to have been waylaid by delays. Despite plans by California Waste Solutions to break ground in December 2022 or January 2023, construction has yet to start work on the plant, according to Sean Maher, a city spokesperson. He said that the company “has obtained its permit from the state and submitted all its building applications to the City,” but offered no other details on the status of the project.
The grand jury’s first subpoena also sought information about Evolutionary Homes, a company sharing an office building with California Waste Solutions and focused on housing homeless people using refitted shipping containers.
The company was founded by the Duongs and Mario Juarez, a political operative and two-time Oakland City Council candidate who is alleged to have been at the center of controversial mailers targeting Thao’s rivals in the days leading up to the 2022 mayoral election, which Thao ultimately won. Juarez was later charged with a felony earlier this year after prosecutors say he wrote bogus checks to pay for the mailers. More recently, he was assaulted and shot at in the days and weeks before the FBI raids in attacks that remain under investigation by Oakland police, according to his attorney and authorities.
The housing company became increasingly vocal over the last year about its desires for a slice of the city’s funding to curb homelessness. In December, Evolutionary Homes was among “a half dozen other companies” who reached out to Councilmember Carroll Fife with ideas for addressing the issue, the councilmember said.
In a tour of their showroom – located in the bottom floor of the building housing California Waste Solutions – Fife examined the homes being built by the company. The man leading that presentation was Juarez — someone whose ideas to address homelessness “sounds like everybody’s,” Fife said. “He was just a little more aggressive.”
Juarez would later be among at least six people affiliated with the company to be named in the grand jury’s first subpoena.
The more recent subpoenas issued over the past week appeared to tread new ground regarding city finances and funding sources.
A subpoena issued July 10 asked for “all sources of federal funding the City has received” from the start of 2021, along with “the names, email addresses and cell phone numbers of all attorneys who have worked in the Oakland City Attorney’s Office” since Jan. 1, 2022.
Two days later, a superseding subpoena dropped any mention of requests for the city attorney’s office’s roster and its attorneys’ contact information.
No charges have been announced in the FBI’s inquiry. Such investigations are known to move slowly and cast a wide net, local attorneys and experts say.
Thao has vehemently denied any wrongdoing while vowing to “not be threatened out of this office.” She repeatedly stressed that she is not a focus of the investigation, and suggested last month that federal agents had suspiciously timed their inquiry in coordination with a recall effort to boot her out of office that qualified for the Nov. 5 ballot.
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