Ex-Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao Is Going on Trial for Bribery: Here’s What You Need to Know

As former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao prepares to go to trial next week — accused of participating in an alleged bribery scheme with the owners of Oakland’s recycling contractor — a key debate is expected to loom over the proceedings: whether the prosecution’s star witness is telling the truth or if the government built its case on the claims of an unreliable informant. 

Thao, 41, her longtime partner, Andre Jones, 55, California Waste Solutions CEO David Duong, 68, and his son, Andy Duong, 37, face charges of bribery, conspiracy, and fraud. Andy Duong has also been charged with lying to the FBI. 

Prosecutors allege Thao pledged favorable treatment to the Duongs’ businesses in exchange for a promise of $300,000 paid to Jones and negative political mailers in the lead-up to the 2022 Oakland mayoral election.

Each defendant has pleaded not guilty. 

Prosecutors say they have copious evidence to prove the alleged scheme, including text messages, emails, Apple notes, taped phone calls and video recordings. But they’ll also be relying on the testimony of a key cooperating witness whose checkered past has become a primary focus of the defense. 

The witness, Oakland businessman and political operative Mario Juarez, co-founded a housing company with the Duongs that’s at the center of the alleged conspiracy. He became an informant in the FBI’s investigation after a falling out with the family and has pleaded guilty to participating in the alleged scheme. He’s expected to testify about his relationships with the defendants, as well as his role in the housing company. 

Defense attorneys have raised questions about Juarez’s credibility and what they’ve described as his “decadeslong history of fraud” — including instances where they say he falsely accused business partners of illegal activity in an effort to escape liability for his own actions.

While primarily focused on the Duongs and their relationship with Thao, the prosecution has also exposed behind-the-scenes interactions between the family and other elected officials. 

A list of high-profile politicians has been named as potential witnesses who could testify in the trial — including Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, Oakland City Councilmember Kevin Jenkins and former Oakland City Administrator Jestin Johnson.

Another elected official, former San Leandro City Councilmember Bryan Azevedo, has pleaded guilty to accepting bribes in a related case and is expected to take the stand as a government witness.

Jury selection begins Oct. 13 with opening statements planned immediately after. The trial is estimated to last around six weeks, wrapping up around Thanksgiving. 

Prosecutors allege that in the lead-up to the 2022 Oakland mayoral election, Thao, Jones and the Duongs began discussing a deal that would help get Thao elected and benefit the Duongs’ companies. 

In the fall of 2022, the Duongs had recently gone into business with Juarez on Evolutionary Homes, a company that aimed to convert shipping containers into housing for people experiencing homelessness. The plan was to market the container units to local Bay Area governments. 

Thao at the time was an Oakland City Council member running for mayor.

Prosecutors allege the Duongs agreed to finance campaign mailers that negatively portrayed Thao’s opponents in the race, Loren Taylor and Ignacio de la Fuente, and pay her longtime partner Jones $300,000 through a no-show job at Evolutionary Homes. 

In exchange, they say, Thao committed the city of Oakland to purchasing housing units from Evolutionary Homes and agreed to help appoint people hand-picked by the Duongs and Juarez to director-level city positions if she won the election. 

The Duongs’ recycling company, California Waste Solutions, already had a contract with Oakland to provide curbside recycling services, and Thao allegedly agreed that as mayor, she would also extend it. 

When it became evident that Thao was going to win, prosecutors say Juarez texted Andy Duong, “So we may go to jail … But we are $100 million richer.”

Andy Duong allegedly replied, “Money buys everything.” 

In the months that followed, prosecutors say Juarez began paying Jones, together with money from David and Andy Duong. And they say the defendants began discussing how to expand their deal, with Jones being paid as much as $3 million if the city purchased 300 housing units from Evolutionary Homes.

At one meeting, Thao allegedly proposed using Oakland’s emergency powers to make it easier for the city to buy the container houses outside of a typical competitive bidding process. 

In March 2023, Juarez and Andy Duong began discussing Larry Gallegos as a potential candidate to serve in the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development — a position prosecutors say they believed would help further the Duongs’ businesses.

At their behest, prosecutors say Thao pressured the interim city administrator to appoint Gallegos. Despite the city administrator believing Gallegos didn’t have enough experience for the job, prosecutors say he appointed him interim deputy director of the department the following day. 

But prosecutors say Thao’s relationship with the Duongs began taking a turn after she went on a trade delegation to Vietnam in late July and early August 2023 that was sponsored by a business association chaired by David Duong, and a reporter began asking questions about Azevedo’s suspected drug use and activity involving prostitutes on the trip. Thao’s staffers are expected to testify they heard her telling David Duong that if a story came out about inappropriate conduct on the trip, she could no longer work with him. 

Several weeks later, prosecutors allege, David Duong, Andy Duong and Juarez met with an associate of the reporter at a restaurant in Livermore and gave the associate a check for $10,000, drawn from California Waste Solutions’ bank account, to kill the story. 

By late November 2023, David Duong told his son and Juarez that Thao wasn’t ready to purchase the container homes and was waiting for another city or county government to order them first, prosecutors say. 

Then, in May 2024, the relationship between Juarez and the Duongs imploded. 

In Juarez’s version of events, he told police that a group of ten men at California Waste Solutions’ offices beat him up in an attack ordered by the Duongs. In the Duongs’ version, Juarez had failed to deliver on his end of the deal and had shown up at the office, demanding more money and “holding them for hours.” 

A little more than a month later, Juarez sat down for an interview with the FBI. Agents executed search warrants at Thao’s, David Duong’s and Andy Duong’s homes two weeks later. 

Defense attorneys are expected to work to undermine Juarez’s credibility as a witness by pointing to what they have described as “a steady pattern of dishonesty and fraud.” 

In motions filed last year, defense attorneys argued that the FBI had relied heavily on Juarez’s claims to secure search warrants of their client’s property, without providing the full details of Juarez’s background to the judges who signed off on them. Evidence seized should be suppressed, they argued. 

The attorneys wrote that Juarez had been sued approximately 33 times between 1992 and 2022, including numerous fraud cases involving former business partners.

They also described a documented “counter-attack history” — instances where Juarez alleged misconduct by others in response to accusations or lawsuits lodged against him. 

Juarez, they said, “has repeatedly falsely accused business partners of crimes and other wrongdoing in efforts to escape liability for his own actions — just as he did here.” 

In one example cited by attorneys, Juarez filed a restraining order against a man who sued him in August 2011, claiming Juarez shorted him and his wife out of $220,000 they loaned him. A year earlier, Juarez filed a different restraining order against an attorney following an altercation inside a property in Oakland’s Fruitvale district. The attorney was representing Juarez’s landlord, who was trying to evict him and others from the property.

Chief District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied the motions. But in a hearing several months later, she cautioned prosecutors that questions about Juarez’s credibility could pose a major issue for their case. 

“You could have as your main witness someone who himself is a liar. That is the problem,” she said at the hearing in September. “What I can tell you is it is a huge mess, and if in fact there is fire where there’s so much smoke, then the jury gets to hear about the credibility of this individual.”

While only one other elected official has been charged with participating in a related Evolutionary Homes bribery scheme to date, prosecutors have listed several high-profile East Bay politicians as potential witnesses in Thao’s case. 

Prosecutors say they plan to introduce evidence at trial showing that Juarez and Andy Duong also bribed former San Leandro City Councilmember Bryan Azevedo. In February, Azevedo pleaded guilty in a related case that involved promises of kickback payments in exchange for ensuring the city of San Leandro purchased container home units from Evolutionary Homes.

Government attorneys say they intend to show documents, recordings and witness testimony demonstrating that Andy Duong and Juarez had discussions with Oakland City Councilmembers Kevin Jenkins, Rebecca Kaplan, and Nikki Fortunato Bas — now an Alameda County supervisor — as well as Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley, in furtherance of the charged conspiracy. 

Juarez, prosecutors say, will testify that he and Andy Duong discussed potential bribery deals with other city council members in San Leandro, Berkeley and Alameda.

Juarez is also expected to testify that Andy Duong told him he took photos and recorded videos of politicians so he could later use them as leverage or blackmail. 

In a May 2024 letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Juarez claimed Andy Duong had a recording of Bonta in “a compromising situation.” Court records show the FBI interviewed Bonta in September 2024 as part of the investigation into Thao and the Duongs. Bonta told KQED he spent $468,000 in legal fees so an attorney could guide him through that process.

“Over a year ago, maybe 14 months ago, the federal government reached out to me and said that they thought I may have information that would be relevant to the investigation,” Bonta said. “Having never done this before, I wanted to make sure I had an attorney who could guide me through the process and ensure that I provided everything that could be helpful.”

When asked about the letter, Bonta told KQED he had received it, but said that “the reference to any video is absolutely not true. It’s false, and there is no video.” 

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Bonta has not been listed as a potential witness in the trial. 

Prosecutors have filed transcripts, videos and audio recordings of phone calls with elected officials that FBI agents seized from Andy Duong’s phone, which appear to have been recorded without the politicians’ knowledge.

Two of them capture candid conversations in 2024 between Andy Duong and Jenkins, as well as with Bas, when she was president of the Oakland City Council. 

Both politicians are included on the government’s list of potential witnesses. 

Also on the witness list is former Oakland City Administrator Jestin Johnson, who Thao directed to tour Evolutionary Homes’ showroom in January 2024, according to the indictment. Johnson resigned from his position with the city in May amid a text messaging scandal that prosecutors attempted, unsuccessfully, to bar defense attorneys from asking about during the trial. 

Other high-profile staffers who could be called to testify are Oakland’s current interim city administrator, Betsy Lake; former interim city administrators Harold Duffey and Steven Falk; Thao’s former chiefs of staff, Renia Webb and Leigh Hanson, as well as Brandon Harami, a former mayoral staffer who also worked on Thao’s 2022 campaign for mayor. 

Court filings in the case have described other alleged bribery beyond the specific scheme that prosecutors hope to prove at trial. 

The jury will be permitted to view two October 2022 cell phone videos of what appears to be Juarez toasting the formation of Evolutionary Homes. Sitting in the California Waste Solutions conference room are members of the Duong family. 

In one of the videos, Juarez appears to describe payments the Duongs made in 2014 after winning the company’s recycling contract with the city. 

“The day after you won the city of Oakland contract, you were there, paying everybody,” Juarez can be heard saying in the video. “I was in your office. And — $50,000, $100,000 — whatever it was. And you said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I just want to do business with you.’” 

In the video, members of the Duong family do not correct Juarez when he mentions payments. 

In a July court filing, prosecutors described the video, saying that Juarez is expected to testify that his comments were in reference to bribes. 

“The government expects Juarez to testify that this statement refers to the Duongs giving cash to multiple public officials in exchange for their assistance in helping CWS [California Waste Solutions] secure the Oakland recycling contract in 2014,” the filing reads. 

Defense attorneys either declined or did not respond to KQED’s requests for comment on the video. 

Further allegations Juarez has made to the FBI about the Duongs paying elected officials are summarized in an August motion filed by attorneys representing David Duong. According to the filing, Juarez also told FBI investigators he had seen the Duongs delete evidence from a security system and that the family used vague consultant contracts to launder money to various individuals.

Defense attorneys attempted to have those allegations excluded from the trial. That motion was denied.

According to the filing, Juarez said he saw a “line of people” at California Waste Solutions’ office “waiting to be paid cash” by David Duong.

“[Individual 1] was paid $300,000 in cash in a black gym bag. Juarez knew the amount of cash because Juarez helped count the money,” the filing reads. “The cash to [Individual 1] was definitely for his help in obtaining the CWS contract; D. Duong told [Individual 1] something to the effect of ‘Congratulations, we got the contract, here is your money.’”