Sheng Thao, who was ousted as the mayor of Oakland, Calif., just two months ago amid persistent frustrations with crime, has been indicted on federal corruption charges, prosecutors announced on Friday.
Ms. Thao is among four people being charged. The federal indictment also names Ms. Thao’s boyfriend, Andre Jones; the head of a local waste company, David Trung Duong; and Mr. Duong’s son, Andy Hung Duong.
Patrick D. Robbins, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said on Friday that Ms. Thao in October 2022 had agreed to extend a city contract with the waste company, California Waste Solutions, buy housing from the Duongs and use her influence to help them in exchange for a campaign mail effort and side payments that would benefit her and Mr. Jones.
California Waste Solutions then spent $75,000 on an attack mailer that helped Ms. Thao’s campaign in the 2022 mayoral election, prosecutors said. After Ms. Thao took office, the company paid $95,000 to Mr. Jones for a “no-show” job and had promised additional payments to the couple in exchange for Ms. Thao’s influence at City Hall, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors alleged that Ms. Thao followed through by taking steps to help companies owned by the Duongs and by appointing a high-level city official that they had selected.
Ms. Thao faces six charges, including bribery, conspiracy, mail fraud and wire fraud. At her arraignment on Friday, she pleaded not guilty to the charges.
“The public needs to know it can trust those in charge of City Hall to work for the best interests of the people of Oakland,” Mr. Robbins said. “This public trust is broken when elected officials agree to a pay-to-play system to benefit themselves.”
Ms. Thao will be released on a $50,000 bond. The judge at her arraignment, Kandis A. Westmore, barred her from traveling outside the region, and Ms. Thao surrendered her passport. Judge Westmore also said she could not contact the Duong family, though she said she may stay in touch with Mr. Jones.
Lawyers for David Duong said in a statement on Friday that he denied wrongdoing and vowed to “vigorously defend these allegations in court.” Andy Duong’s lawyers said that he also was innocent of the charges and that they had hoped that prosecutors would conclude the accusations were “baseless and being fanned by nothing more than gossip and supposition stitched together by the fabrications and delusions of those who lack all fundamental credibility.”
“Disappointingly, Andy instead is today the most recent in a long line of Asian Americans who unfairly are singled out and forced to pay a price for daring to be active in the political sphere,” said his lawyers, Winston Chan, Doug Sprague and Erik Babcock.
The indictment came two months after Ms. Thao, a Democrat who was elected as Oakland’s top official in 2022, became the first mayor of a large American city to be recalled in more than a decade.
Efforts to remove Ms. Thao from office had begun long before she was publicly linked in June to a federal investigation. Early in her tenure, residents of Oakland, often regarded as a gritty and soulful alternative to San Francisco, had become increasingly frustrated with the city’s high crime rates, a widening budget deficit and the loss of major league sports teams. Ms. Thao’s decision to fire a popular police chief also rankled her critics.
Confidence in Ms. Thao further plummeted last summer after F.B.I. agents raided her home in the Oakland Hills for hours.
As part of the June raid, F.B.I. agents searched three other properties in Oakland that were associated with the Duong family. David Duong and his family have been investigated by Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission for allegations of bypassing campaign limits and giving money to political candidates through “straw donors,” including to Ms. Thao during her campaign for a City Council seat.
Last year, Ms. Thao suggested that the F.B.I. search was timed to hurt her politically, noting that it came just as the recall effort against her was qualifying for the ballot with enough voter signatures. She pleaded for more time to turn the city around, pointing to declining crime numbers across several categories.
“I want to be crystal clear: I have done nothing wrong,” Ms. Thao said in brief remarks at City Hall shortly after the raid last summer. “I am confident that I will not be charged with a crime because I am innocent.”
Ms. Thao had previously overcome immense personal challenges. Raised by Hmong refugees who fled warfare in Laos, she survived domestic violence as an adult and lived out of her car with her son when he was an infant.
After she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, she worked her way up in local politics in Oakland. She served as a member of the City Council for four years before she eked out a narrow victory for mayor with the support of progressive groups and labor unions.
When Ms. Thao was sworn in, she became the most prominent Hmong American officeholder in the United States.
But the efforts by Ms. Thao and labor allies to fight the recall were ultimately unsuccessful. In November, less than two years into her term, more than 60 percent of voters chose to remove Ms. Thao from office. Pamela Price, the district attorney for Alameda County and another progressive Democrat, was also recalled on the same ballot.
Not long after it became clear that the recall had been successful, Ms. Thao thanked the city in a statement, saying that serving as mayor had been “an honor of a lifetime.”
A special election for mayor will be held in April. Among the leading candidates so far are former U.S. Representative Barbara Lee, who did not vie for re-election to the House because she was running for an open Senate seat; Loren Taylor, a Democrat who narrowly lost to Ms. Thao in a ranked-choice vote in 2022; and Renia Webb, a former aide to Ms. Thao. The winner of the special election will complete Ms. Thao’s unfinished term, which ends in January 2027.
Ms. Webb, who resigned as Ms. Thao’s aide after finding out about the corruption accusations in December 2022, said she believed the indictment was “a turning point for Oakland.”
“We did the right thing in recalling our previous mayor. She was only going to make it worse for us,” she said in an interview.
Claire Moses contributed reporting.
