Official in fraud probe quits
Restaurateur: Man tied to Nuru wellknown at City Hall, called ‘too generous’
For close to two decades, Lefty O’Doul’s restaurateur Nick Bovis cultivated the image of “St. Nick,” a bornagain Christian who led Christmas toy drives, took hundreds of lowincome children to Giants games and hosted community events ranging from police retirement parties to a 1906 earthquake commemorative breakfast.
He was close to the late Mayor Ed Lee, socialized with police and fire brass and regularly drew city officials to his eating establishments. He donated generously to nonprofits, sponsored softball leagues and was establishing a reputation as a politically connected, civicminded busi
nessman.
On Tuesday that image was shattered when the FBI arrested Bovis on fraud charges, alleging the restaurant owner — along with Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru — attempted to bribe an airport commissioner in order to win approvals to open one or more eating places at San Francisco International Airport.
The federal government alleges that Nuru and Bovis plotted to give the commissioner $5,000 cash, along with a free trip to China, in exchange for voting for an SFO lease. The airport commissioner, though, turned down the cash, authorities said.
Both men face up to 20 years in prison on the fraud charge. They were arraigned Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco.
On Wednesday, an attorney for Airport Commissioner Linda Crayton confirmed she met with Nuru and Bovis and rejected the bribe. He said she planned to step down by the end of the day, citing health reasons. And she did step down.
Friends say that Bovis in recent years was under increasing financial pressure and had suffered a number of professional setbacks that had left him scrambling to raise cash to stay in business. Bovis had a criminal record — he served time in jail for a 1993 armed robbery — that few of his highprofile San Francisco backers knew about.
During the five years leading up to his arrest, Bovis was increasingly desperate. First his Powell Street piano bar, the Gold Dust Lounge, was forced to close after a dispute with his landlord, who leased the space to a chain clothing store. Next, Lefty O’Doul’s, the historic hofbrau and baseballthemed piano bar on Geary Street, was also given the boot after he was unable to come to terms with the property owner, the same landlord who owned the Gold Dust building.
With rents in Union Square astronomical — one space he looked at went from $18,000 a month to $40,000 a month while he was in negotiations — Bovis decided to move both businesses to Fisherman’s Wharf. The new spaces would get plenty of tourist foot traffic but lacked local patronage and oldschool charm that had made his Union Square piano bars successful.
The new Fisherman’s Wharf incarnation of Lefty’s closed temporarily in December when a pipe burst, and has not reopened. Around the same time, Bovis also closed the new Gold Dust Lounge.
“He is not doing that great down there,” said Ron Ross, a veteran San Francisco waiter who for years organized the annual 1906 earthquake breakfast at Lefty O’Doul’s. “That was a bad move. I think this is the end. Lefty O’Doul’s is finished. Another one bites the dust.”
With his restaurants struggling, Bovis hoped an expansion to SFO could salvage his entire restaurant portfolio, he told The Chronicle at the time. In addition to Lefty’s, Broadway Grill and the Gold Dust, that portfolio included a 50% stake in the rotisserie chicken place Spinnerie on Polk Street in San Francisco.
Bovis was excited about establishing a minichain of Lefty’s. In addition to the wharf and airport he was hoping to open a place in the new Transbay transit center, he told The Chronicle in November 2018. He showed a reporter architectural plans for what he hoped would be Lefty’s at the Airport. He said he thought Fisherman’s Wharf would be attractive to families turned off by the heavydrinking crowd at the Geary Street Lefty’s.
“Fisherman’s Wharf is more clean and familyfriendly,” Bovis said. “You can’t tie your kids up outside while you do your drinking.”
But, despite his political connections, Bovis struck out in his efforts to secure a lease at the airport — twice his proposals were passed over for other bidders.
“I thought I did everything right, but I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I thought the mayor was the best I could do but obviously it wasn’t. See, the problem, in San Francisco too, the politics are just crooked, you know what I mean? And they can go sideways. They even undermine the people in charge.”
During one of the meetings in which Bovis discussed the airport commissioner bribe, he said, “I’ve failed twice so I want this one,” according to the federal complaint.
Bovis said Nuru could “determine how to guarantee the concessions opportunity at SFO.”
“This guy here, he’s head of DPW, he’s come through.” He added: “He’s never failed me.”
James Spingola, executive director of Collective Impact, a Fillmore District nonprofit that works with lowincome children, said the Bovis he knows is a role model, not a criminal. Spingola worked with Bovis on the annual toy drive for which he and a team of volunteers collected and distributed more than 150,000 toys over 18 years.
“He wasn’t bad, man, he was good,” said Spingola. “He would be out there for 24 hours before Christmas, loading the vans with toys, supplying everyone with coffee, helping us drop toys.
“You could not ask for anyone who was more generous,” he said. “He was too generous. That was his problem.”
In 2010, Bovis received international attention when he hired a Santa Claus who had been fired from Macy’s for cracking mildly bawdy jokes to an adult couple while waiting for the next load of children. The publicity led to Lefty’s best toy drive ever — “12,000 presents for kids who would otherwise have had none,” Bovis said at the time.