Frank Parlato
The federal indictment against David Duong describes a curious bribery scheme with two alleged payments.
The first: $75,000 for political mailers supporting Sheng Thao’s 2022 mayoral campaign. The second: $90,000 in payments to Thao’s partner, Andre Jones, through a housing company called Evolutionary Homes.
Both components have problems that the indictment, not inadvertently, fails to mention.
In October 2022, days before the election, a $75,000 check from California Waste Solutions was deposited into Mario Juarez’s company, Ciudad Holdings. Juarez was supposed to pay Butterfly Direct Marketing, the Oakland print shop that produced and mailed the attack flyers targeting Thao’s opponents.
Juarez didn’t pay the printer.
He wrote checks to the printer totaling $52,563.20. Before those checks cleared, he transferred more than $30,000 from his business account into an account he shared with his teenage daughter. After the transfer, $215 remained in his business account.
The checks bounced.
The printer, Samari Johnson, a small business owner who had fronted the printing and postage costs, was never paid. Johnson filed a criminal complaint. In January 2024, the Alameda County DA charged Juarez with felony bad check fraud.
Then Juarez became the government’s cooperating witness. The charges were dismissed. Johnson begged the court not to let Juarez go free. He had, under the threat of an indictment, just begun repaying the small business owner.
The FBI trumps Alameda County. Trophy hunting a mayor and a big business executive is far more glamorous than making a grifter pay back the money he stole from a small printer.
An Alameda Court judge dismissed the charges against Juarez. The printer got nothing. That freed Juarez to be the star (and only) witness against a former mayor and a recycling executive.
The federal indictment states that the $75,000 was deposited into Juarez’s account to pay for the mailers — and stops there. It does not mention that the printer was stiffed. It does not mention that Juarez’s checks bounced. It does not mention that the government’s star witness pocketed the money intended to fund the alleged bribe.
The first installment of the alleged bribe was never delivered. The government’s cooperating witness stole it.
The second component presents a different problem. The government characterizes $90,000 in payments to Andre Jones as a corrupt no-show job. But it wasn’t a job. It was a commission-based independent contractor agreement with written compensation schedules and performance benchmarks.
Evolutionary Homes wasn’t a shell. It was a serious attempt to address Oakland’s homelessness crisis by converting repurposed shipping containers into modular housing. David Duong invested approximately one million dollars in the venture. Juarez, holding a twenty percent stake, was responsible for building 50 units in Mexico and shipping them to California.
Juarez delivered two units. He kept the rest of the money.
Jones, meanwhile, was out pitching the product to municipalities — Santa Clara County, Alameda County. He wasn’t selling to Oakland. He wasn’t selling anything connected to his girlfriend, Mayor Thao.
He did not close on a sale, possibly because there was no product. Juarez never built it.
Bribes do not come with signed contracts, commission schedules, and performance conditions. They do not come with the bribe recipient cold-calling county supervisors in other jurisdictions. They come in envelopes.
To establish that Thao personally benefited from the bribe, the government points to household finances. After Jones began receiving Evolutionary Homes payments, he covered a larger share of the rent and picked up some utility bills, including a shared cell phone plan.
That is the government’s evidence that a sitting mayor received bribe proceeds: her boyfriend paid more of the rent.
No evidence shows Thao received direct payments, opened new accounts, acquired property, or changed her lifestyle in any material way.
Now trace the money and ask who actually profited.
David Duong invested a million dollars and lost it. His recycling contract — which the government clumsily folds into the bribe narrative — was a twenty-year deal that predated Thao’s mayoralty. It was never extended, never modified. He received nothing from the alleged scheme.
Jones received $90,000 for sales work he attempted but couldn’t complete in part because the product didn’t exist. Thao’s documented benefit is that her boyfriend split the bills differently.
The only person who came out ahead was Mario Juarez. He took $75,000 for mailers and kept it. He took a million dollars to build housing and kept most of that too. He avoided felony fraud charges. He walked away clean.
The Franks hearing is today. The question before Judge Gonzalez Rogers is not just whether the FBI knew who it was dealing with — but whether it told the truth to the court that authorized the investigation.
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Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
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