Andy Duong

David Duong is the CEO of California Waste Solutions, which is Oakland's current curbside recycling provider.

And his son, Andy Duong, is also charged in the case.

They're facing a combination of bribery, conspiracy and fraud charges, honest services, mail fraud, honest services, wire fraud.

Andy Duong is also charged with an additional count of making false statements to a government agency.

But certainly in some wide collar cases, it's quite common for several defendants to be charged together.

It's pretty much the choice of the prosecutor.

As long as the charges against each are reasonably interlinked and so long as no one defendant convinced the judge that it is utterly prejudicial for that person to be in the same trial.

So it's really not unusual.

Although once again, there's no emails or text messages to what the scope of work was or anything like that.

And as you can see from exhaustive communications between Andy Duong and other people, he's very descriptive about the things that he wants to do.

Where's the communication between him and Andre about whatever this alleged consultancy work that they're making up is? I don't think his jury is going to buy it, and I'm surprised they didn't take a deal.

Not sure what's going on here, but I'm having a ball being vindicated.

I love this.

Okay, so the funding contradiction.

On January 19th, we were talking about that phone call between Kevin Jenkins and Andy Duong, correct?

Yes, the one where he said, we're going to get a private yacht, just the two of us.

we did a good job.

A business partner of David and Andy Duong, Mario Juarez, ordered the mailer and reportedly made statements that he expected things in return for his efforts.

according to Special Agent Barclay.

The FBI ordered a secret search warrant for Mario Juarez's iCloud account and found this WhatsApp exchange with Andy Duong that appears to lay out a much larger pay-to-play deal.

Seriously, they need to reboot the wire because the wire was in the age of like early cell phones.

Literally, one of the earliest seasons was about, you know, like pay per minute phones and disposable phones.

Land

deal at Army base done from mayor staff with Duong's picks appointed to various city positions.

What can you tell our listeners about the opening arguments, both by the prosecution and the defense?

People are probably sort of familiar with this by now, but the prosecution basically claims that former Mayor Sheng Tao, her partner Andre Jones, and David and Andy Duong conspired to get Tao elected in 2022 with the Duongs agreeing to fund a negative mailer against Tao's top opponent at the time, Warren Taylor.

and also to funnel bribes to Andre Jones in the form of payments for a no-show job at this housing company that the Duongs had created called Evolutionary Homes.

In exchange for that, Tao was alleged to have promised the Duongs a bunch of favors around contracts with their company, California Waste Solutions.

So the opening statement from the prosecution was really kind of building a picture of the relationship that Tao had built with these guys.

They talked about dinners that they allegedly all had together.

We have photos of some of their meetings because Andy Duong is a guy who really likes to take photographs of things and people, including when they're not watching.

That's what the focus of the prosecution was.

What can you tell our listeners about the opening arguments, both by the prosecution and the defense?

People are probably sort of familiar with this by now, but the prosecution basically claims that former Mayor Sheng Tao, her partner Andre Jones, and David and Andy Duong conspired to get Tao elected in 2022 with the Duongs agreeing to fund a negative mailer against Tao's top opponent at the time, Warren Taylor.

and also to funnel bribes to Andre Jones in the form of payments for a no-show job at this housing company that the Duongs had created called Evolutionary Homes.

In exchange for that, Hau was alleged to have promised the Duongs a bunch of favors around contracts for their company, California Waste Solutions, and to help them get a contract for this company, Evolutionary Homes, which they had created with a guy named Mario Juarez.

So the opening statement from the prosecution was really kind of building a picture of the relationship that Tao had built with these guys.

They talked about dinners that they allegedly all had together.

We have photos of some of their meetings because Andy Duong is a guy who really likes to take photographs of things and people, including when they're not watching.

and so that's what the focus of the prosecution was the defense each of and bear in mind there were four defendants in this case they each have their own attorneys so they all kind of had variations of the defenses that they were raising but all of them coalesced around the idea that the prosecution's case rests on one man basically mario juarez who is a colorful character who has been accused of defrauding people who has done a lot in his life to make enemies and who the defendants claimed is not credible.

The federal government's case against Tsingtao.

former mayor andre jones her what we've learned here and what many speculated her ex her ex partner andre jones david and andy duong father and son who were from uh i guess you'd call them the co founders california waste solution which is a recycling company for oakland and uh What we learned or what we know is that prosecutors believe that this started before Sheng Tao took office in the 22 election.

The prosecutors allege that an outside political operation financed through interests associated with the Duongs helped Tao's campaign by targeting her opponent, Mr. Taylor here.

In return, prosecutors contend the defendants anticipated favorable treatment on city business, including the purchase of modular homes, which we know as evolutionary homes, and an extension of a lucrative recycling contract for California waste solutions.

No one can ever use the word evolutionary in the city of Oakland.

But I was like, no, lady, no.

So she doesn't believe anything she sees in the newspapers or on TV because there's two sides to every story.

The other side of the story is, Defense attorneys describe very different story, right? Very different, or else they wouldn't be defense attorney, right? So they say a politically ambitious fixer, known as Mario Juarez, we all know him, exaggerated his influence, misappropriated money, and created the appearance of agreements that never existed, and also Shang Tao and others, the defense for them say, listen, a lot of this stuff, David Duong's, Lawyers, a lot of this stuff here, this is just business as usual.