Two Bay Area men on Thursday pleaded guilty in federal court to bribing a Vallejo official to overlook City Code violations in a building that housed their marijuana grow business, a U.S. Attorney said.
Steven Chu, 41, of San Bruno, and Ben Guan, 36, of San Francisco, pleaded to conspiracy to commit federal program bribery, said Phillip A. Talbert, who leads the Department of Justice’s Eastern District of California in Sacramento, in a press statement.
According to court documents, Chu and Guan ran an illegal marijuana cultivation operation in Vallejo. In July 2020, they were notified that the building in which they maintained the grow violated multiple laws, including codes related to illegal drug activity, and that the city would take legal or administrative action if the violations were not corrected.
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Chu and Guan later offered to pay and then paid a Vallejo building inspector to clear the violations and ensure the city would not interfere with their business, Talbert noted in the prepared statement. They paid the building inspector at least six times, payments totaling about $27,000, he added.
Unknown to Chu and Guan, the building inspector was working with law enforcement to record meetings with them.
This case is a product of an FBI investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Thuesen leads the prosecution.
U.S. District Judge Daniel J. Calabretta is scheduled to sentence Chu and Guan on May 2, when they face a sentence of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The actual sentence, however, will be determined at the court’s discretion and federal sentencing guidelines, which take into account a number of variables, said Talbert.
