City Officials, Husband & Wife Team, create ‘appearance of impropriety’

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is pursuing criminal cases against several San Francisco Police Department officers. Currently, SFPD Officer Terrance Stangel is on trial, and Officer Kenneth Cha will be the subject of a forthcoming trial.

A combination of recent court testimony, two DA-prepared warrants, and a lawsuit against the SF DA’s office, corroborate that Boudin’s office is intentionally withholding exculpatory facts to skew cases against SFPD officers.  And it also appears that a high-ranking Boudin appointee was positioned to benefit financially because of poorly monitored conflicts of interest within the “city family.” The optics are hard to ignore and create the appearance of impropriety.

DA BOUDIN’S PATTERN OF WITHHOLDING EXCULPATORY EVIDENCE

The current trial of Stangel is based on Boudin’s allegation that an excessive use of force was employed when a noncompliant Dacari Spiers was arrested for domestic violence. I wrote how, under oath, Investigator Megan Hayashi from Boudin’s Independent Investigative Bureau (IIB) testified that she withheld exculpatory information from SFPD’s domestic violence investigation of Spiers. Hayashi testified there was a culture in Boudin’s office of not sharing evidence with SFPD and under the threat of being fired, she withheld the willingness of witnesses to cooperate with SFPD’s investigators. Boudin’s apparent motivation was for Spiers to be viewed more credible in his testimony against Stangel. This past week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors rushed a $700,000 civil settlement to Spiers before all the evidence in the criminal case surfaced.

Boudin also has an upcoming trial against SFPD Officer Kenneth Cha for shooting Sean Moore after he physically attacked Cha and his partner. Moore passed away in San Quentin over three years after the shooting from a multitude of causes.

During IIB’s investigation of Cha, IIB Lieutenant Jeffrey Pailet voiced opposition to the legality of Boudin’s office preparing a search warrant on Cha and other SFPD officers’ personal cellphones. Pailet argued that probable cause did not exist, there was a staleness to searching multiple officers personal cellphones nearly 4 years after the shooting, and that Boudin’s attorneys omitted from the cellphone search warrant material exculpatory evidence that Moore had attacked the officers. Pailet was subsequently fired and has filed a wrongful termination against, Boudin, former Chief of Staff David Campos, and two assistant district attorneys, Dana Drusinsky and Stephanie Lacambra.

In November 2021, a year after Pailet was fired, IIB investigator Andrew Koltuniak wrote the arrest warrant on Cha. As I disclosed in my previous article, Koltuniak had no experience in law enforcement, but his resume fit that of many Boudin hires —prior work for the SF Public Defender’s Office. In the Cha arrest warrant, sworn to a judge that it was the “whole truth,” Koltuniak withheld the exculpatory evidence that Sean Moore had physically attacked Cha and his partner, and that the coroner had determined Sean Moore’s death was attributable to a multitude of causes besides the 3-year-old shooting.  Koltuniak circumvented the intent of California Penal Code section 194, which states that if a person dies more than three-years after an event, like Sean Moore did, it is presumed the person did not die from the event.

CONFLICT ONE: LATEEF GRAY, HIS WIFE, AND THE LAWSUIT AGAINST SFPD

Lateef Gray was a San Francisco public defender before leaving to work at John Burris’ law firm where he represented Sean Moore’s family in their suit against Cha and SFPD.

In 2018, Gray married Cindy Elias, who is also a former San Francisco public defender. On May 23, 2018, Elias was nominated to the San Francisco Police Commission by the Rules Committee of the SF Board of Supervisors. Elias’s position on the commission provided her with access to closed sessions about legally confidential statements made by SFPD officers, lawsuit strategies, settlement negotiations, and reviews of officer-involved-shooting incidents.  During Covid, Gray and Elias would have been both working from home, side-by-side.

In a San Francisco Chronicle article, Dominic Fracassa pointed out the obvious appearance of impropriety in Gray’s wife sitting on a commission with jurisdiction over SFPD while Gray and the firm he worked for stood to benefit economically from a civil suit against SFPD. Burris promised that Gray wouldn’t “work on San Francisco cases period, nor will he be consulted on San Francisco cases.”   Court documents show Gray was still representing the Moore family after Burris’ comments.

GRAY GETS POLITICAL

As soon as San Francisco public defender Chesa Boudin announced his candidacy for SFDA, Gray donated to his campaign. Gray listed his current employer as the San Francisco Public Defender’s office, though Transparent California shows he had departed that position five years earlier. Mislabeling your occupation is a serious San Francisco campaign violation.

Ironically, in an only-in-San Francisco political move, just four months after filing misrepresentative election documents with the Ethics Commission, Gray was sworn in as a commissioner on the San Francisco Ethics Commission. Gray went on to endorse Mano Raju in his unopposed campaign for San Francisco Public Defender. Per Fracassa’s article in the Chronicle, Raju’s campaign website quoted Gray saying “Mano is a legend. I have witnessed him win cases that every other attorney in the world would have lost.” Ethics Commission bylaws are clear that commissioners are forbidden from publicly endorsing or urging endorsement of a candidate or ballot measure.

On February 23, 2020, Gray resigned from the Ethics Commission to join the San Francisco DA’s office.

CONFLICT TWO: ESPIONAGE, BOUDIN ASSIGNS THE FOX TO MANAGE THE IIB HENHOUSE

On June 5, 2020, Boudin promoted Gray to Managing Attorney in charge of the District Attorney’s IIB unit.

Of importance:

1)    Boudin hired Gray to manage the IIB unit’s investigators, despite the fact he had no experience in either investigations or prosecutions.

2)    The lawsuit where Gray represented Moore’s family was still an open case, creating another appearance of impropriety as Gray now had potential access to Boudin’s criminal files, in addition to access to confidential information from his wife as a police commissioner.

3)    Gray became a coworker of John Burris’ daughter, one of Boudin’s assistant district attorneys, Courtney Burris.

Yet the most egregious conflict for Gray was that he would now have access to the law enforcement criminal database CLETS. Since, as a civilian attorney, Gray had represented Moore’s family against SFPD and potentially retained a residual financial benefit in the settlement, any information he gained about Cha from CLETS could be tainted as personal and thus criminal.  A CLETS violation could have occurred whether Gray accessed CLETS directly himself, instructed subordinates to access CLETS, or peeked at computer CLETS printouts when no one was around.

Despite a resume absent prosecutorial experience, Gray is now acting as one of the prosecutors in the Stengal case.  Unfortunately for Stengal, he is in a position where Gray and his wife could share confidential information on him, and no one would know.  This could affect Stengal’s employment even if he is found not guilty.

Also egregious are the conflicts of interest affecting Cha. Former DA George Gascón never filed charges against Cha for the January 2017 shooting. In January 2020 during Boudin’s first month in office, after Moore died while in San Quentin on another crime, Boudin immediately charged Cha.

BOUDIN HIRES SF PUBLIC DEFENDERS DRUSINSKY & LACAMBRA

Boudin took office in January 2020, and immediately hired Dana Drusinsky, a career San Francisco public defender. Drusinsky had no experience in either investigations or prosecutions but had served as Boudin’s “senior campaign advisor.”

The same month Gray took over IIB, Boudin moved Drusinsky and newly hired former SF public defender Stephanie Lacambra to work in the IIB unit. Lacambra also had no experience in investigations or prosecutions. Drusinsky and Lacambra were never officially assigned to IIB; however, in Pailet’s lawsuit he alleges their substantial involvement while acting as direct conduits to Boudin.

LIEUTENANT JEFFREY PAILET

Lieutenant Jeffrey Pailet began working in IIB under Gascón in July 2017 and rose to the rank of lieutenant within the unit. Previously, Pailet had been a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Police Department and was assigned to the Force Investigation Division specializing in officers’ application of use-of-force and officer-involved shootings. It is not a stretch to say that Pailet’s experience dwarfed Drusinsky’s, Lacambra’s, and future DA investigative hire, Andrew Koltuniak’s.

DRUSINSKY AND LACAMBRA VIOLATED THE DA MANUAL

Per Pailet’s lawsuit, Drusinsky’s and Lacambra’s first act in IIB under Gray was to fire the current investigator on the Moore incident. Their second act was to prevent Pailet from sharing a transfer memorandum prepared by the outgoing investigator to the incoming investigator. In other words, Drusinsky and Lacambra wanted to kill the continuity and change the direction of the Cha investigation.

Item #33 of the Pailet lawsuit refers to an investigator assigned to him as a female investigator. A check of the IIB roster from October 2020 listed only one female investigator, Megan Hayashi. This is critically important because we now can match Hayashi’s court testimony about events and her fear of reprisal to the Pailet’s wrongful termination claims.  

Per the Pailet suit, Drusinsky and Lacambra tasked Hayashi to prepare a search warrant on Cha’s and his partner’s personal cellphones, and directed her to use the following specific language:

In my training and experience, officers will often communicate about the facts and circumstances of their actions via both their police department cellphones and devices as their personal phones.

Drusinsky and Lacambra continued to provide Hayashi with updated, heavily edited, and evolving versions of the cellphone search warrant. Hayashi brought her growing` concerns to Lieutenant Pailet. Per Pailet’s lawsuit, the newer versions still lacked probable cause and continued to omit material exculpatory facts such as Moore’s physical attacks on SFPD officers.

To ensure an illegal search warrant was not issued, Pailet attended a meeting between Hayashi, Drusinsky and Lacambra. After the meeting, Pailet’s lawsuit claims Drusinsky and Lacambra accused Pailet and Hayashi of not cooperating, refusing to follow their instructions, and not fulfilling their job duties.

Drusinsky and Lacambra threatened Pailet and Hayashi that they were going to report their behavior to Boudin and, “there will be repercussions.” After the meeting, Drusinsky and Lacambra restricted Pailet’s access to the Cha file — the only file in IIB that he was restricted from seeing. It is hard to imagine that Gray, who supervised the entire IIB unit, and whose former employer still had an open civil suit against Cha, would have been completely out-of-loop with the move to freeze out Pailet.

Factoring in that Moore’s Family’s civil case was still open, it is plausible that Drusinsky’s and Lacambra’s zeal to access information on the officers’ personal cellphones may have been to provide their findings to Gray as a conduit.  We will never know, but it feeds the appearance of impropriety.

Meanwhile Hayashi forwarded to Pailet even newer edits of the SFPD cellphone search warrants where Drusinsky and Lacambra still lacked factual support and edited out the same exculpatory evidence of Moore’s physical attacks on officers. On November 2, 2020, Pailet prepared an email to Drusinsky and Lacambra documenting the illegality of their search warrant, while knowing that Campos and Boudin would be the ultimate recipients. Sensing the obvious ethical issues, Pailet contacted Gray, as the head of IIB, for guidance. Gray never responded and on November 6, 2020, Pailet was fired. Pailet’s lawsuit does not address whether the cellphone search warrant on the personal phones of SFPD officers was ever executed.

MEGAN HAYAHSI’S CONCERNS ABOUT CHA INVESTIGATION

Two-weeks ago in the current Stangel case, Haysahi testified that she felt pressure not to assist SFPD because IIB had threatened to fire her on another case that ended in the termination of her lieutenant, Jeff Pailet:

There was another case I was working on where I was threatened by attorneys three different times that if I didn’t agree with their warrant, they would report me to the D.A. (Boudin) and that we were looking at termination possibilities. My lieutenant (Pailet) assisted me with this because it was such a severe problem, and he was fired. (January 28, 2020, Department 27)

Thus, Hayashi’s testimony under oath is referring to the same search warrant Pailet’s lawsuit addresses and corroborates his claims of withholding of exculpatory evidence and threats of termination. And Pailet’s lawsuit’s discussion of withholding Sean Moore’s physical attacks on SFPD officers is consistent with Koltuniak’s November 2021 arrest warrant that withheld the same material exculpatory facts about Moore’s physical attacks.

It is difficult to believe that Gray, as a prosecutor on the Officer Stangel case, listened to Hayashi discuss DA misconduct within his unit, and he never prepped himself on the authenticity of Hayashi’s accusations.  Was Hayashi’s testimony all fresh information to him?  If Gray had prepped or reviewed the merits of Hayashi’s testimony, that would mean he had access to the Cha case files—and thus prohibited CLETS information.  We will never know, but it reinforces the appearance of Impropriety.

A BOUDIN-GRAY CULTURE OF SUSPICIOUS CONDUCT

It is pretty evident from Hayashi’s testimony, Pailet’s lawsuit, and Koltuniak’s arrest warrant that Boudin maintained a culture, supervised by Lateef Gray, of:

1)    Placing a political finger-on-the scale by withholding exculpatory evidence only when it applies to police officers,

2)    Placing loyalty above experience by hiring DA attorneys and investigators with absolutely no experience in prosecution or investigations, and

3)    Threatening employees with termination if they did not subscribe to Boudin’s political causes and conduct illegal activities.

CONFLICT THREE: GRAY, ELIAS, AND THE POLICE COMMISSION

BURRIS’ BIG PAYDAY. GRAY’S TOO?

In late June 2021, while Gray had been working for Boudin’s office for approximately 16-months, the Board of Supervisors authorized a $3.25 million payment to Moore’s family. Like the Spiers’ $700,000 settlement, the SF Board of Supervisors raced to get the money to the alleged victims and attorneys before negative and mitigating facts on the alleged victims surfaced in the criminal trials of SFPD officers Cha and Stangel.

Moore’s family probably did not have the funds to pay for Burris’ expensive services on an hourly basis.  More than likely, Burris would have collected a percentage of the civil settlement. And thus, because for the two-years Gray civilly represented Moore’s family, he should have been entitled to a portion of the $3.25 million payday as compensation for his work.

Gray’s sequential positions described here are extremely similar to the People vs. Rhodes case.  But to the extent the City was compromised, we will never know.

QUESTIONING THE GRAY-ELIAS CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

In the February 9, 2022, Police Commission meeting, the first public question to Elias was about the conflict of interest she had with her husband’s former and current roles.  That question evidences the public’s concerns about an appearance of impropriety.  Elias responded that she had the approval of the City Attorney, and that she was impartial. But when the City Attorney ruled on the Gray-Elias conflict of interests, did Gray misrepresent that he was still a public defender like he did on his donation to Boudin?   Did he disclose his involvement and potential compensation in the Moore’s family $3.25 million settlement?

Commissioner Hamasaki, another former San Francisco Public Defender, immediately and nonsensically attacked the female caller of acting sexist towards another female-- Elias.

It’s bad enough that 2021 total crime was up 11% from Boudin’s first year, but these appearances of impropriety are sending assistant district attorneys, embarrassed by the improprieties, rushing for the exits.

John Burris accompanies Moore’s family at a preliminary trial of Officer Cha, months after the $3.25 civil suit settled. Photo taken by and permission for publication granted by Eleni Balakrishnan, Mission Local.