State Democratic Senator Leland Yee has been charged with public corruption, after a series of raids this morning by the FBI and gang task force officials. Yee’s Senate office in Sacramento was searched, and he was arrested at his Sunset district home in San Francisco.
Yee and political consultant Keith Jackson allegedly conspired to illegally import and traffic firearms. A 137-page affidavit alleges Yee and Jackson were also “involved in a scheme to defraud the citizens of California of rights to honest services.”
As part of today’s actions involving hundreds of officers, the FBI searched a steel factory in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, and a lodge owned by Chinese Free Masons in Chinatown. They also arrested Raymond "Shrimp Boy"Chow, a former gang member who has been under supervision since being released from prison over a decade ago.
Altogether, people wereindicted. Charges include money laundering, drug distribution, and murder-for-hire.
The 65-year-old Leland Yee has been a State Senator since 2006, representing residents of San Francisco and San Mateo County. He unsuccessfully ran for mayor of San Francisco in 2011, and previously served as a state assemblyman, a city supervisor, and president of the San Francisco Unified School Board. Yee is campaigning for the office of California’s secretary of state this November. He appeared before a US magistrate in San Francisco this afternoon.
