Former SF Utilities Chief Harlan Kelly Is Appealing His 2023 Corruption Case

The appeal case of one of the central figures in a sprawling San Francisco City Hall corruption scandal will be submitted Monday.

Harlan Kelly, the former chief of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, is seeking to overturn his 2023 conviction for various federal fraud and conspiracy crimes, which earned him four years in prison.

Kelly was charged as part of a bombshell FBI investigation that shook San Francisco politics in 2020. The federal probe became public after former Public Works director Mohammed Nuru was indicted on charges that he accepted bribes in exchange for advantages in winning city contracts.

In the following years, more than a dozen other city officials and contractors were implicated in the scheme, including Sandra Zuniga, who previously led the Mayor’s Office Fix-It Team, and Tom Hui, the former director of the Department of Building Inspection.

Naomi Kelly, Harlan’s wife, also stepped down from her role as city administrator as a result of the scandal, though she did not face indictment.

Also at the center of the probe was political insider and construction contractor Walter Wong, who owned multiple companies that vied for city contracts over decades.

While many of the central figures in the scheme — including Wong and Nuru — pleaded guilty to charges brought by the federal government, Kelly has maintained his innocence.

During a three-week trial in 2023, federal prosecutors alleged that Wong began bribing Kelly as early as 2013 by doing heavily discounted home repairs for him, such as fixing water damage and installing wine cellar shelving in his house.

They also alleged Wong treated Kelly’s family to five-star hotel stays and a $600 meal on a lavish trip to China in 2016.

Prosecutors showed a message Kelly sent to Wong saying, “I owe you big time!!!” after the wine cellar work, and alleged that Kelly repaid Wong by helping his companies secure roles in city projects.

Kelly urged his staff to buy lights from one of Wong’s companies for downtown San Francisco’s holiday display one year and gave Wong insider information to give him a leg up on a proposal for a contract to swap city streetlights to LED bulbs.

During his testimony, Walter’s son, Washington Wong, admitted that his father’s company used information Kelly provided to tweak its proposals and give it better chances at winning contracts.

Separately, prosecutors accused Kelly of conspiring with real estate investor Victor Makras to make false statements to obtain a $1.3 million loan.

Kelly was ultimately found guilty of six charges: one count of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud, one count of honest services wire fraud, and four counts related to bank fraud. He was acquitted of two other honest services wire fraud charges.

In March 2024, he was sentenced to four years in federal prison.

Days later, Kelly appealed the conviction, and on Monday, the case will be submitted to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals based on briefs from federal prosecutors and his attorney.

The court was initially slated to hear oral arguments on Monday but announced in July that it would rule based on the briefs and existing record alone.

“The court is of the unanimous opinion that the facts and legal arguments are adequately presented in the briefs and record and the decisional process would not be significantly aided by oral argument,” the document said.

It’s unclear what Kelly’s appeal strategy is. He is now represented by litigator Steven Kalar, who the court appointed in June 2024, after Kelly testified that he could no longer afford criminal defense attorney Brian Getz, who represented him in his original trial and submitted his appeal.

Kalar declined KQED’s request for comment on the appeal on Friday.

During Kelly’s original trial, Getz and his other attorney, Jonathan Baum, largely based their defense on discrediting Wong, whose testimony should therefore be treated with “greater caution” than other witnesses’ since he agreed to cooperate with the government in exchange for a lighter sentence.

They argued that Wong and Kelly had a friendship — hence the gifts and dinners — and cast Wong as a calculated businessman looking for city officials to bribe.

The attorneys also pointed out that Wong’s bribes to Kelly were different from those he gave to other city officials, like Nuru, which included envelopes of thousands of dollars in cash.