OAKLAND, Calif. — On the final full day of the Biden administration, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and recycling executives David and Andy Duong with bribery and conspiracy.
A former Democratic donor, David Duong, supported President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden before shifting his allegiance to Trump. He endorsed Trump in 2016, donated more than $250,000 to the Trump Victory PAC in 2020, and contributed another $155,000 in 2022 to a Republican committee backing congressional candidates.
Duong fled Vietnam when Saigon fell and came here as a boy. He worked the streets of Oakland at night, picking up cardboard to sell. From that, he built California Waste Solutions, the biggest recycling company in the Bay Area, serving more than 1.4 million people in Oakland and San Jose. It was a business empire no one predicted from a penniless refugee on the sidewalk.
David Duong
THE INDICTMENT AND THE RAID
Prosecutors said Duong’s goal was simple: bribe the mayor to help extend the city’s recycling contract, improve the terms of a lease Duong held at the Port of Oakland, and push a proposal for Oakland to buy modular housing units for the homeless from a new firm Duong ran with his son and a man named Mario Roberto Juarez.
Sheng Thao became mayor of Oakland in January 2023. By the middle of 2024, a recall was underway to remove her from office.
The money behind the “grassroots” recall effort, some $500,000, came from Philip Dreyfuss of Farallon Capital.
THE RECALL MONEY AND THE COAL MOTIVE
Farallon’s hedge fund had more than $2 billion tied up in coal deals since 2022; Thao had stood against coal exports at the Port of Oakland.
Half a million was cheap compared to what was at stake.
The recall looked weak at first.
But everything changed on June 20, 2024, when, six days after Dreyfuss got enough signatures to qualify for a recall on the November ballot, federal agents raided the homes of Mayor Thao and David and Andy Duong.
The raids hit the news. It dominated the recall coverage and knocked the support out from under Thao. The voters removed her from office in November 2024.
The Biden-appointed US Attorney for the Northern District of California indicted her and Duong two months later.
The indictment does not allege that Thao personally took any money from Duong. The total amount alleged to be bribed was $170,000 ($75,000 in political mailers + $95,000 in payments to Jones).
There is no claim of cash, gifts, payments, or campaign contributions from Duong or any of his companies to her.
Instead, prosecutors advance a theory that the bribe was paid in the form of $75,000 that Duong paid to his partner, Juarez, to put out a mailer targeting her opponents during the 2022 campaign, and $95,000 after her election for an alleged no-show job Juarez arranged for her partner, Andre Jones.
The alleged bribe, if it was a bribe, went sideways in every way a bribe could. City records and the indictment show that Oakland never bought any modular units. The recycling contract was never changed or extended – it already runs till 2034 – a deal the city signed years before Thao was mayor. No lease at the Port of Oakland was altered.
If it was a bribe, it was destined to fail.
A BRIBE THAT COULD NEVER WORK
The City Charter is clear. Major contracts — the recycling deal, big purchases like modular housing, and any lease changes for city-owned property — all need approval from the City Council. The mayor does not get a vote.
In this alleged bribery case, the allegedly bribed mayor did not even try. The indictment does not allege that she even proposed anything to the council that the government says Duong bribed her to do.
Could one rich man weaponize justice?
Most people would find that hard to believe. Sure, Dreyfuss could buy a recall—the facts are there. He paid the ‘volunteers’ who got the signatures. Five hundred thousand dollars and 40,000 signatures later (about $12 a signature), it’s on the ballot.
But could the same money, the same goal—coal—prompt a perfectly timed raid, leaked to the press, that would ensure the recall succeeded?
Could a man who got his investors to put $2 billion into coal also get enough political pressure to time an FBI raid on a sitting mayor’s home?
It appears the goal was not to put a mayor in prison, or even a recycling Trump donor from Vietnam. The goal was coal!
The Trump donor’s punishment was just gravy, sweet and tasty, since after all, Duong got his recycling contracts from Democratic councils in San Jose and Oakland, and then he supports Trump?
If you can indict a ham sandwich, you can raid a house on a bounced check.
In this case, the FBI built its case on one man’s word — Mario Roberto Juarez, partner of the Duong family on the modular-housing-for-the-homeless venture.
THE MAN WHO MADE THE CASE: MARIO ROBERTO JUAREZ
The total bribe alleged was $170,000, not enough for a starter home in the Bay Area.
Juarez was having serious troubles when he partnered with the FBI. The feds call it a cooperation agreement.
Alameda County had charged him with felony check fraud after writing a $53,000 check to an Oakland print shop, Butterfly Direct Marketing, that had printed and mailed the political ads that served as the basis for the bribe charges against Duong and Thao.
Juarez’s check bounced.
This may be the only bribe in history ever prosecuted where the bribe check bounced.
Mario Roberto Juarez, the government’s key witness, whose $53,000 check to a printer bounced, whose fraud lawsuits number over 30, and whose pending felony charge disappeared after he began cooperating with federal investigators.
BOUNCED CHECK, BAD LOANS, AND THE MAKING OF A COOPERATOR
The printer, Samari Johnson, who needed the money for most of it was the cost of mailing and card stock, and ink, begged the court not to drop the case, saying the loss could sink his business. The threat of prison for Juarez was so great that he even paid Johnson $15,000 after the indictment. He still owed $38,000.
Now, a man like Dreyfuss with billions under his control would probably never consider that such a paltry sum could make a difference in the future of a company.
Maybe he’d laugh, or maybe he’d snicker like the Roman officers in Caesar’s retinue did when coming upon a small Gallic province as compared to great Rome, but to Samari Johnson, his printing company was just as important to him as Rome or Caesar or Philip Dreyfuss or Farallon Capital or whether a billion dollars of coal went in or out of Oakland harbor.
Johnson wanted his money back. But in early 2025, after federal prosecutors asked for priority on Juarez’s cooperation, the county dismissed the charge. Johnson got nothing.
At the same time that he turned cooperator, Juarez was also under investigation for mortgage fraud in connection with two loans totaling $3.2 million.
Juarez had secured a $230,000 loan from Stewart Chen, president of the Oakland Chinatown Improvement Council, using properties as collateral that were later found to be double-pledged. They were double-pledged because Juarez had already secured a $3 million loan from Jack Cohen of Balboa LLC, using the same properties as collateral. Chen could not foreclose because Balboa had already done so.
Court filings show that Juarez fraudulently represented to Balboa that he had over $400,000 in bank assets to induce the company to make the loan, which he later defaulted on.
When Juarez began cooperating on the $170,000 (minus his $53,000 bad-check) bribery scheme, he was facing more than a decade in prison on bank fraud charges for an amount about 20 times that.
But happy days came for Juarez. The value of a cooperator whose story can prompt a raid on a sitting mayor’s home – an event that ordinarily required Biden’s Integrity Division of the DOJ to sign off – was far more than Johnson’s pusillanimous $53,000, or Chen’s paltry $230,000, or even Balboa’s comparatively insignificant $3 million loan.
It could be worth billions for Dreyfuss. A raid would allow mega tons of black carbonaceous rock that had been waiting 300 million years underground to come out and make men rich. It came from the ancient swampy forests that covered the Earth long ago and emerges in a different kind of swamp: the US justice system and its political counterparts, as practiced in Oakland and elsewhere with great vigor.
WHY A RAID MATTERED MORE THAN A VERDICT
And so for the sake of freeing coal from its hibernation of an era it appears that a raid was fashioned and an indictment was required – and Juarez who, according to the indictment conceived the bribe scheme, arranged the political mailers, which he attempted to pay for with a check that later bounced, and handled the initial payments to the mayor’s partner, got a get out of jail card free from the DOJ.
The FBI raided Mayor Seng Thao’s home.
FBI raids June 20 2024
Time between certification and raids 6 DAYS
The FBI also raided Duong’s home.The indictment itself quotes a series of text messages from Juarez to Andy Duong. In these messages, Juarez repeatedly asserts that Mayor Sheng Thao had agreed to take specific governmental actions. In an October 7, 2022, message to Andy Duong, he claimed: “Met with Sheng. She will buy 100 units if mayor.”
The indictment cites no text from Thao, no email; nothing to show she said anything of the sort.
There are similar texts where Juarez reveals he is bribing a mayor, but the Duongs do not consent, assent, or, in most cases, even understand what the hell he is talking about. After all, who texts people confessing a crime – unless of course you are trying to entrap them.
The indictment alleges that $95,000 was paid to Jones for a job they call a no-show, but offers no evidence that Thao requested, approved, or even knew that these funds were connected to any inducement.
The indictment states only that Jones used the money for shared household expenses. It boiled down to that Jones lived with her, and he paid half the rent and even paid more utilities; hence, Mayor Thao got the benefits, hence she was bribed.
Before the indictment- the real document that sealed the fate of this case, came FBI Special Agent Duncan Haunold’s affidavit for a search warrant to raid Thao’s and Duong’s homes in June 2024.
A WARRANT BUILT ON OMISSIONS AND FICTION
Few people understand that a case is not set in stone by the trial, or even the indictment, but by the FBI affidavit for a search warrant, where the lowest standard of evidence can be offered. It is at the time of the raid that the die is cast. “Probable cause” is lowest at the warrant stage, but media impact is highest.
The raid occurs. The publicity follows, the indictment is a forgone conclusion – what else can they do but indict, after raiding the house? Tell the world they found nothing after coming with 20 men in SWAT gear.
According to court filings, Special Agent Haunold’s affidavit (which is still hidden from the public) relies on the statements of cooperator Juarez.
Defense attorneys for Duong note that the affidavit cites no documents, recordings, emails, text messages, or municipal actions showing that David Duong agreed to, discussed, or participated in any bribery arrangement with Juarez.
The affidavit also failed to disclose a few tidbits about Juarez – things that a magistrate maybe shoud have known before authorizing the invasion of a mayor and an honest businessman’s home and taking their possession by force.
The FBI might have mentioned that fraud was Juarez’s whole life. He had been sued more than 30 times for fraud, had repeatedly been found liable for deceptive conduct, had surrendered his California real estate license after disciplinary action, and had previously surfaced in an FBI money laundering probe.
When he ran for City Council in 2008, local reporters uncovered a history of financial mismanagement, lawsuits, and allegations that he diverted funds and paid creditors only after being sued.
His own bankruptcy filings offer shifting explanations — bookkeeping problems, real-estate downturns, and other excuses.
How could the FBI tell the magistrate the whole truth about Juarez? Without him, the government’s case was nothing. All theory had was Juarez’s good word, his confessional texts and ambiguous text messages in reply, and the agent’s interpretations of Apple Notes written by Juarez.
Even Special Agent Haunold knew his affidavit was the equivalent of a very thin slice of baloney, so he fattened it up with something really nice: a hit job.
HOW A CAR BURGLARY BECAME AN ‘ASSASSINATION PLOT’
Agent Haunold’s warrant affidavit suggested members of the Duong family may have orchestrated a June 9, 2024, shooting outside Juarez’s home to retaliate for Juarez’s cooperation with investigators.
The weakness in this exciting fiction, as the defense pointed out, is that the affidavit omitted police reports, ShotSpotter data, witness statements, and surveillance footage, which show unequivocally that the shooting was not an ordered hit on Juarez but a botched car burglary.
The video captured two men breaking into cars on the block moments before the gunfire. Police officers later found a smashed window and a red brick — but nothing tying the incident to any alleged “hit man” linked to the Duongs or anyone else.
Defense attorneys argue that, overall, the affidavit provided no basis for searching David Duong’s home.
That’s an issue now headed toward a Franks hearing in February 2026, where the defense can question Agent Haunold. If the court finds that Haunold materially misled the magistrate, all evidence from the searches could be suppressed—and without that evidence, the government’s case collapses.
If it goes to trial, a jury will be asked to convict Duong and Thao based on Juarez’s good word. Their sentences could exceed 20 years.
For what?
WHAT THE CASE PRODUCED: NOTHING FOR OAKLAND, EVERYTHING FOR JUAREZ
Here is what the case actually produced:
The city got nothing.
No modular homes.
No land deal.
No contract extension.
No zoning change.
No appointment.
No policy.
Nothing moved.
The mayor got nothing.
No cash.
No favor.
No promise kept.
No gain she could touch.
The Duongs got nothing.
No contract.
No change in their position.
And Juarez — the government’s witness — got everything.
Immunity.
His felony case gone.
The $3.3 million mortgage-fraud inquiry stopped.
FBI money for relocation. (Yes after he claimed that Duong tried to kill him, the FBI gave him money to move.)
And a starring place in a federal indictment built on his word.
And lest we forget, there was another beneficiary, though he never appeared in the indictment.
THE REAL WINNER: COAL
Philip Dreyfuss, the financier behind the recall movement, succeeded in removing one mayor who opposed the coal-export plans tied to his firm’s multibillion-dollar investments.
He didn’t need anyone in prison. He simply needed Sheng Thao out of the way — and the federal raids ensured that.
And a lot of coal will be headed out of the Port of Oakland.
In our next story, we follow the coal—tracing the money and influence behind a $2 billion investment that made one mayor expendable and one cooperating witness invaluable. We will try to answer why anyone would build a case on Mario Juarez’s word, and why conviction may never have been the point. The goal was not justice but coal.
Oakland’s mayor opposed coal exports. Duong, a Trump supporter who’d enriched Democratic cities for decades, was acceptable collateral damage.
The case may be dismissed. Perhaps that never mattered. Coal will out.
When we trace the money, with clear connecting dots to various players in the Bay Area and DC, readers will discover how wealth weaponizes justice—transforming innocents into criminals and criminals into cooperating witnesses—all for one of the oldest currencies on earth: profit.
Though I can think of one older: Coal.
But He Don’t Look Black: Philip Dreyfuss of Farallon Capital, whose recent ventures include: investing $2 billion in coal, spending $500,000 to remove Oakland’s anti-coal mayor, and establishing the ‘Black Action Alliance’—bringing the authentic voice of Piedmont hedge fund management to Black community activism.
