Phone calls of 3 accused in bribery case played in court

A series of recorded calls from wiretapped phones was played in Superior Court on Tuesday in the case against three former San Francisco officials accused of soliciting bribes for political favor and access to Mayor Ed Lee.

“You pay to play here. We know that. We’re the best at the game,” former Human Rights Commission staffer Zula Jones said to an undercover FBI agent in one call, played on the second day of the preliminary hearing for Jones, former Human Rights Commissioner Nazly Mohajer, and political consultant and former San Francisco school board President Keith Jackson.

The phone calls were picked up during an FBI investigation in the Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow racketeering case. Last year, Chow was convicted of conspiring to operate his Chinatown organization as a racketeering enterprise, ordering the murder of the organization’s previous leader and conspiring to try to murder another rival.

The recorded calls paint a colorful and questionable portrait of the tit-for-tat underbelly of political dealings in City Hall.

Jones and Mohajer are accused of taking $20,000 in contributions from the FBI agent, whom they knew as Mike King and who was

posing as a real estate developer looking to further his business interests in a meeting with Lee.

Jones, Mohajer and Jackson were charged with four counts of bribery and one count of money laundering. Jackson, who was sentenced to nine years in state prison in connection to the federal racketeering case involving Chow, was also charged with grand theft of public money and campaign finance fraud.

In the recorded calls, Jones discussed accepting $10,000 from King and breaking it into $500 checks to pay off debts from Lee’s 2011 election campaign while complying with San Francisco’s limits on individual contributions.

“He’s not the type to have a debt,” Jones said in one call. “He’s not a real politician. He’s a bureaucrat. He’s a professional.”

She instructed King to get in touch with Mohajer, who told him to overnight the money to her office on the Embarcadero. Mohajer indicated in another recorded call that King would send another $10,000, which King agreed to “as soon as I sit down with the mayor.”

Mohajer told him they could break up the payment to bypass the city’s political contribution limits, “but the problem is you know you can’t talk to anybody about this,” she said.

After this exchange, Jackson told King in another call that he would make sure “you are in the right place at the right time and you make the right connections.”

The mayor has turned over $1,500 in questionable contributions to the

“You pay to play here. We know that. We’re the best at the game.” Zula Jones, former Human Rights Commission staffer, as heard in a wiretapped phone call

city’s general fund.

In a statement Tuesday, spokeswoman Deirdre Hussey said the federal judge in the Chow case “thoroughly vindicated Mayor Lee and said there ‘was no evidence whatsoever’ of wrongdoing.

“The mayor and his campaign fully complied with the law and his thousands of campaign contributions were thoroughly vetted,” she said. “The Ethics Commission even conducted a comprehensive audit of the campaign’s finances and determined there was full compliance.”

In between working out payments and scheduling meetings, the recorded calls also captured Jones talking about how Lee was a return to the old ways of political wheeling and dealing that flourished under former Mayor Willie Brown.

“We’re getting our ducks back in a row,” Jones said in one call. “For eight years, we’ve been sort of lost after Willie Brown left. But I told them this isn’t reinventing the wheel. It’s just getting it all back together.”

She bragged that she was trained in these ways by Brown, as was Lee.

“Willie Brown was just the best mayor . ... He’d just let you loose,” Jones said. “I’m just excited that Ed Lee, who also worked under the Willie Brown administration, is the mayor and knows what to do.”

The preliminary hearing, which will determine if the case goes to trial, is expected to continue Thursday.