At a press conference aimed at sending a message to public sector employees that “corruption won’t be tolerated,” San Francisco’s district attorney announced Wednesday that two former restaurant inspectors will be prosecuted for allegedly taking bribes in exchange for falsifying food-handling certificates.
Documents obtained by Mission Loc@l show that in 2007, one of the inspectors was allowed to continue working for the Department of Public Health despite previous transgressions.
Ajamu Stewart and Clifton Sanders are accused of soliciting cash payments for falsifying documents to show that a food safety manager had taken and passed the certification test when in fact no examination was taken. Restaurants and other establishments that serve food are required by the state to have at least one person on staff who has a food safety manager’s certificate.
Stewart and Sanders are being charged with a laundry list of felonies that could result in sentences of up to nine years for Stewart and eight years for Sanders. Both pleaded not guilty last week.
Sanders was hired by the Department of Public Health on June 19, 2006, despite having been terminated from his job as a Los Angeles County health inspector for “alleged expense report improprieties,” according to a confidential memo obtained through the Civil Service Commission.
The health department received several sexual harassment complaints about Sanders in April of 2007. He was fired and then rehired under a “last chance agreement” in October 2007. It was during this period that Sanders allegedly participated in the bribery scheme.
Sanders quit on June 10, 2009, shortly after the city attorney’s investigation concluded. Last year he tried to appeal his ineligibility to work for the city again. The Civil Service Commission denied the appeal.
No restaurateurs are being charged. When the health department made the case public, it downplayed the involvement of other restaurants.
“Nothing implies that the conditions in these restaurants are more dangerous,” Rajiv Bhatia, the city’s director of occupational and environmental health, told the Chronicle in 2009. “I don’t think this necessarily implicates the restaurants.”
In one instance, Stewart allegedly provided food safety certificates in bulk to a San Francisco restaurant owner “who then distributed them to other restaurants in the East Bay–without Stewart administrating an exam to or even meeting the ultimate recipient of the FSM,” according to the city attorney’s investigation.
Sanders and Stewart were not the only ones involved. Sources within the department have told Mission Loc@l that at least five inspectors were investigated, though only three were terminated and one senior inspector was quietly allowed to retire.
District Attorney George Gascon said that criminal charges were brought against only the two inspectors because theirs were the strongest cases, and they were most culpable.
The third inspector fired was Oscar Quevedo, who worked mostly in the Mission.
The city attorney’s investigation concluded that in at least 14 instances Quevedo had allegedly “engaged in exam cheating by taking some or all of the food safety exams on behalf of his private business clients in exchange of a fee between $150 and $200.”
The cases come exactly three years after the city attorney began investigating the bribery scheme. The hundreds of restaurant employees who took the test, including 48 from Mission District restaurants, were told to retake it.
The Department is truly downplaying the extremely illegal acts of these inspectors. If there are more inspectors that have taken bribes they need to be exposed and face the charges. When the department was asked if more Inspectors were involved they stated,”No Comment.” This Department is not to be trusted.