A former San Francisco plan checker who admitted to accepting $40,000 in bribes to rubber-stamp building plans was sentenced Friday to a year and a day in prison.
Rodolfo Pada, 70, pleaded guilty in December 2023 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He was among a slew of businessmen, developers and city bureaucrats swept up in a federal anti-corruption probe that began in 2020.
After prosecutors honed in on the former plan checker, Pada told investigators about dozens of people “who were or may have been participating in construction permit related improprieties, including inappropriate gifts/meals and outright bribes,” according to a memo Pada’s attorney filed on his behalf before his sentencing. His assistance led to charges against three San Francisco developers and a contractor in Millbrae, court records show.
Pada’s attorney, James Reilly, had argued that a prison sentence might prove fatal because of Pada’s poor health and instead asked for a noncustodial sentence or home detention.
Assistant U.S. Attorney David Ward, however, argued that Pada deserved a sentence of a year in prison because he committed a “fundamental betrayal of his obligations” to the residents of San Francisco and Millbrae.
Pada’s conduct “put at risk the safety and soundness of buildings, and put residents and others at risk of grave harm,” Ward wrote, arguing that the plan checker also harmed the “honest builders and companies who did not receive favored treatment, and were therefore disadvantaged” by his corruption.
Though Pada began working at the Department of Building Inspection in 1984, the anti-corruption case that investigators built against him looked at illegal acts he committed in the last 14 years of his tenure in San Francisco, from 2004 until his resignation – though at least one San Francisco couple accused Pada of extorting them for money in 2000 by telling them they would have to make out a check “to cash” for work by a draftsman and engineer before he could approve their permit. At the time, a high-ranking DBI employee brushed off the allegation of wrongdoing by arguing the couple had not been harmed because the check Pada instructed them to write out was never cashed. That year, Pada was transferred from his field job as a housing inspector to a desk position checking plans for code compliance.
Weeks after prosecutors in November 2023 charged Pada and another plan checker, Cyril Yu, with accepting bribes, they also unveiled charges against the three construction executives they said bribed him – SIA Consulting founder Siavash Tahbazof, his business partner, Reza Khoshnevisan, and Tahbazof’s nephew, Bahman Ghassemzadeh. All three developers later pleaded guilty and were sentenced to probation.
A prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice said the former plan checker committed a “fundamental betrayal of his obligations” to the residents of San Francisco and Millbrae. (Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press)
Court records show that Pada continued accepting bribes after leaving DBI in 2017 when he took a job at a Foster City consulting firm, CSG Consultants, which handled building inspections for smaller municipalities. Over an 18-month period, he took $6,800 from Millbrae construction builder Alvin Yang to approve inspections on four of Yang’s properties.
During that time, Yang paid for 16 meals for Pada at steakhouses and sushi restaurants, along with tee times at an exclusive country club, a treadmill worth $700 and $900 in car repairs.
Yang ultimately pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud and was sentenced to three years probation.
U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian said the sentence wraps up the office’s investigation into corruption in San Francisco municipal government. “Public corruption erodes faith in government and victimizes entire communities,” he said in an emailed statement. “We have zero tolerance for public officials who allow greed and self-interest to override their duty to the people they serve.”
The federal corruption probe into San Francisco local government surfaced in early 2020 with the arrest of former San Francisco Public Works chief Mohammed Nuru. He was later sentenced to seven years in prison on corruption charges.
Besides Nuru, the probe has led to indictments, guilty pleas and convictions of more than a dozen city officials, contractors and prominent local business executives. Harlan Kelly, former general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, was convicted on fraud charges. Former building inspector Bernard Curran was sentenced in July to a year and a day in prison, structural engineer Rodrigo Santos received a 30-month sentence, and a former Recology executive was sentenced to six months of home confinement. Authorities also charged Chinese billionaire Zhang Li with bribing Nuru. That case ended with Li agreeing to a deferred prosecution agreement and his company paying a $1 million fine.
This article originally published at ‘Fundamental betrayal’: Former S.F. plan checker sentenced for taking $40,000 in bribes.