The strange and terrible saga of Bernie Curran: Sentencing time

Every Friday, former senior building inspector Bernie Curran could be relied upon to don a Hawaiian shirt and regale his Department of Building Inspection colleagues with the greeting, “Living the dream, my friends! Living the dream! Another day in paradise!” 

That won’t happen today. Curran, in all likelihood, will neither behave in a jocular manner nor wear floral prints into the federal courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston, where he is facing sentencing after pleading guilty to a pair of federal crimes: Participation in a bribery scheme with permit expediter Rodrigo Santos, and receiving $30,000 in “illegal gratuities” from a figure described in the documents as “DEVELOPER-1.” 

Both the feds and Bernie’s attorneys agree that Curran is a “loving and supportive father, brother and son” and a dedicated volunteer in support of youth sports. But the agreement, by and large, ends there. The portraits of the disgraced former inspector presented by the U.S. Department of Justice and his defense team, and their interpretation of the evidence at hand, differ to the point of presenting a “Rashomon” situation. As such, the punishments they seek also differ to a fair degree. 

The defense is asking for a year and a day of home detention, to allow Curran to continue caring for his family, his ailing mother and counseling those in search of sobriety. The feds, however, are seeking an 18-month prison term — and the eye-popping restitution of $1 million to remunerate Curran’s successors at the Department of Building Inspection for an ongoing audit of sites where Santos and/or Curran performed work. 

It will be interesting to see how Judge Illston handles the divergent wishes of Curran’s prosecutors and defenders. It will also be interesting to see what the judge makes of attempts by Curran’s lawyers to explain away his actions via actions that also seem suspicious — if not incriminating. 

Team Curran’s explanation of the hundreds of thousands of dollars he received from “DEVELOPER-1” is astounding; it harks to the Johnny Cash ditty about how Joe Bean couldn’t have been guilty of a shooting, because he was “hard working, robbing the Santa Fe.” 

This was not a loan nor a bribe meant to induce a quid-pro-quo, according to the defense. Instead — in a written document submitted to a federal judge, no less — Curran’s lawyers describe a scheme that seems to resemble money laundering. 

“DEVELOPER-1,” incidentally, goes unnamed throughout all the documents. The feds, however, note that he’s the same person who gave Curran hundreds of thousands of dollars that, the City Attorney discovered in 2021, Curran did not record on his Statement of Economic Interest forms.

While Curran belatedly listed Freydoon Ghassemzadeh as the source of his loan, the feds characterized this as untruthful; an intent to “deceive.” The feds also noted that “DEVELOPER-1” employs Curran’s daughter. And, in a letter of support submitted to the court, Siofra Curran notes she has long worked for developer Sia Tahbazof.

“DEVELOPER-1” is described in Curran’s defense brief as a friend of Curran, who gave him “cash payments” when Curran was suffering from cancer in 2004. It was a dark time for Curran: His wife purportedly wanted a divorce and a chunk of his estate, and he was unable to work as a contractor. And this relationship with the developer, both personal and financial, continued after Curran was hired by the building department in 2005 and promoted to senior inspector in 2009. 

Fast-forwarding to late 2016, Team Curran claims the senior inspector was attempting to shave $260,000 off his home loan balance so he could refinance at a more favorable interest rate. At this point, the defense brief notes that “after years of working as a contractor where receipts were often collected in cash, [Curran] had a large sum of currency in his safe that he was wary of depositing in his bank account. This was the genesis of his poorly considered attempt to trade cash for a check from DEVELOPER-1.” 

This is a jarring detail. Curran was hired by DBI in 2005 and no outside income is denoted in any of the forms thus far obtained by Mission Local, which go back several years. There are no documents on file in which Curran requested that he be allowed to work “additional employment.” If this money was left from his days as a full-time contractor, then hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash was apparently sitting in Curran’s safe for more than a decade that he was “wary” of putting into a bank. 

Curran’s lawyers, incidentally, claim he was “not a man motivated by money.” But he also, apparently, had vast amounts of cash in his home safe. 

This all makes for an odd admission to a federal judge, but it gets odder. 

Curran claims he and “DEVELOPER-1” hatched a scheme for Curran to pay the developer cash in return for checks that the inspector would apply to lowering the principal on his mortgage.

According to Curran’s own legal defense team, this “involved several transactions and the use of relatives to conceal the movement of funds. Mr. Curran made deliveries of cash from his safe to DEVELOPER-1’s office in San Francisco in $30,000-$40,000 installments … DEVELOPER-1 — to conceal his own involvement — wrote a $300,000 check to a relative, who then deposited a $260,000 check to Mr. Curran’s mother’s bank account.” This “tortured chain was complete” when Curran’s mother wrote a check to her son.

This, again, is a curious tale to spin to a federal judge — especially as a mitigating argument. 

Crucially, “DEVELOPER-1” opted to forgive $30,000 of the funds involved in this “tortured chain,” telling Curran, “make sure I don’t get any jackasses.” 

Even Curran’s attorneys admit this is clearly a statement intended to ensure strict inspectors were kept away from the developer’s sites — and, in combination with the loan forgiveness, has the overwhelming appearance of a quid-pro-quo. 

Curran’s defense is that, while he took the money, he didn’t send lenient inspectors to these sites and “never issued a building permit that was not warranted” under city codes. But this appears to be a bit of semantic sleight-of-hand, as “issuing” a permit is not what building inspectors do. And, not infrequently, the inspector on the developer’s sites would be Curran himself. 

There are, incidentally, plenty of amazing things a motivated inspector can do on a site other than “issuing” an undeserved permit. He could, for example, simply overlook work that may or may not have been done. But the notion that Curran never signed off on a dodgy permit on a SIA-tied project simply strains credulity. Mission Local has written extensively about the debacle at 2867 San Bruno Ave., in which five amalgamated buildings had 19 unwarranted units shoehorned into them, while the Department of Building Inspection undertook almost no inspections on-site — and no recorded inspections at all in some of the buildings. 

Curran issued the Certificate of Final Completion on this structure. It’s challenging to argue that this was “warranted” under city codes. 

You’re not going to believe this, but the feds have a different read of the financial relationship between Curran and his benefactor. They see it as simply a loan — a loan that both sides took extreme pains to conceal. And the feds do not think it is coincidental that Curran had $30,000 of his loan forgiven only months before he granted an undeserved “Temporary Certificate of Occupancy” to one of the developer’s sites. What’s more, Curran admits that he falsified documents stating his “loan” was at six percent interest from a relative of “DEVELOPER-1” and not, apparently, at no interest from “DEVELOPER-1” — with $30,000 the feds claim essentially functioned as a bribe. 

This chain is far less tortured. Similarly, Team Curran goes to great and complex lengths to explain how Curran is blameless in the interactions in which Santos told clients to write checks to “Bernie’s nonprofit,” and then Curran signed the permits on sites in which necessary work was not done. 

The feds make a simpler case: Curran was aware of the money being sent to his preferred nonprofit and the walls that were supposed to be taken down at a site he was inspecting were still there years later, despite Curran signing off on paperwork that indicated they were gone. 

Team Curran takes things to a strange place by submitting letters vouching for Curran’s good character and work ethic from Ed Sweeney and Dan Lowrey — two of the top officials at the building department during an era that has been revealed to be rife with corruption. Their letters in support of Curran hark to Tony Soprano and Paulie Walnuts touting the work ethic of Christopher Moltisanti. 

Finally, regarding that work ethic, Curran is described as the glue that held the department together, as he conducted some 20 inspections a day “with a smile on his face” and “without customer or client complaint.” The notion of an inspector conducting 20 inspections in a day, however, does not make the point Curran’s defense attorneys hope to make. 

Curran, his erstwhile colleagues say, would overtly boast about doing up to 24 inspections a day — and laugh that he didn’t even have to go out to the building sites to actually inspect them. He’d just punch them into the computer. DBI inspectors’ city cars, incidentally, are equipped with GPS tracking devices, as the feds surely know. 

Regarding “customer or client complaints,” Curran had a reputation for keeping the customer satisfied. He was, after all, no “jackass.” 

His defense attorneys, however, make a compelling case when they note that, throughout Curran’s supposed years of nefariousness, he received stellar reviews from his supervisors. That includes good marks from present-day DBI director Patrick O’Riordan. 

This, of course, puts into question O’Riordan’s claim that it’s fitting for Curran to disgorge $1 million to fund an audit of his questionable work. Curran’s attorneys requested time sheets for the 13 inspectors who supposedly worked on this audit, full time. 

But, more to the point, O’Riordan was signing Curran’s timesheets throughout his supposed reign of terror. This certainly seems relevant. 

Barring unforeseen lunacy, Judge Illston will settle these matters on Friday. It remains to be seen if anyone will emerge with notions of dreams or paradise.