According to a report from The Daily Mail, Paul Pelosi Jr., son of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, has avoided serious federal charges after being linked to a money laundering and mail fraud scheme involving a San Francisco flop house.
Federal prosecutors have charged fraudsters Bill Garlock and Gina Rodriguez for conducting shady dealings that included the Pelosi-owned flop house. Garlock and Rodriguez cut a plea deal and will be sentenced in March. But what about Pelosi Jr.?
From The Daily Mail:
The latest law enforcement bust on the real estate dealers linked to Pelosi Jr. has led financial crime experts to question why Nancy’s son avoided indictment himself – even after he was identified by documents reviewed by DailyMail.com as paying bribes to get building permits on his Mission District flop house.
Garlock and Rodriguez duped investors into fronting well over $1million for supposed real estate ventures, but instead used the cash for their own rent, loan repayments, credit card bills, and even ‘horse-related expenses’, San Francisco federal prosecutors say.
A 2022 indictment of the two says they got money from investors ‘by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, and by means of concealment of material facts, including through the use of half-truths’.
Among the property investments they pitched was the renovation of a dilapidated mixed-use building in the Mission District of San Francisco – with a troubled past of code violations and squalid conditions for its hapless tenants.
A previous investigation by DailyMail.com revealed Pelosi Jr. had deep ties to the building, on the corner of Utah Street and 24th Street.
Acclaimed investigative journalist and Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute Seamus Bruner spoke with The Daily Mail.
“The US Justice Department has a history of sheltering and protecting the family members of powerful political elites,” Bruner said.
“We’ve seen it time and again with the Clintons and the Bidens. There can be no question that a last name like Pelosi is going to carry weight among California-based prosecutors who want to advance their careers at the federal level.”
This is Pelosi Jr.’s seventh time dodging federal charges. Does this guarantee there will be an eighth? It seems likely.
