The strange and terrible saga of ‘RoDBIgo’ Santos and the $1.4M settlement

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Rodrigo Santos is, in a way, San Francisco’s own Walter White. 

The protagonist of “Breaking Bad” morphed from being a beloved high school chemistry teacher into a drug kingpin. Santos, a charming Stanford University engineer and former track star, became this city’s premier corrupt engineer, fraudster and permit hustler. 

This analogy would work better, however, if White had been permitted to retain his teaching job while building a burgeoning meth empire, and was shielded by the school district from the ramifications of his lucrative criminal enterprise. Because that’s how it went down here.

The City Attorney’s Office announced a $1.425 million settlement with Santos today, some seven years after first suing him for a fantastic litany of disturbing and mind-boggling behaviors.

In 2023, Santos was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison — he served fewer than 20 — after being found guilty of pillaging his clients and business partner of some $1.6 million, failing to report this taxable income and engaging in a bribery scheme with ex-senior building inspector Bernie Curran. 

Among many strange and terrible details, yes, Santos did alter clients’ checks to “DBI” to read “RoDBIgo Santos” and deposited them in his own bank account. Yes, the city did explicitly change its policies because of Santos all the way back in 2019, and now insists upon checks being made out not to “DBI” but “CCSF-DBI.”

Why $1.425 million? That’s less than the price of a modest Sunset District home, likely a sliver of the cost the city has invested pursuing Santos since 2018 and a potential mere downpayment on the city’s possible exposure following Santos’ prolific run of bad engineering.

We are told this is simply the most the city thought it could claw back; if the Ecuadorian-born Santos has stashed money overseas or in Al Capone’s vaults, that remains for him to know and for others to find out.

Some have been charged, others have been found guilty. Others have had no charges brought. See how they are connected.

You can find a fullscreen version of the chart here.

When asked if, in Santos’ case, crime paid, city officials were split. Some said yes. Some said hell yes. 

It certainly paid off for plenty of people who enabled Santos. Due to his mastery of “serial permitting” — taking out permits for minor work and, instead, undertaking sprawling operations — decades’ worth of clients are now living in homes with extensive under-the-table additions and commensurate inflated property values.

If “RoDBIgo” made out a couple thousand dollars worth of checks to himself on these clients’ dimes, it would be a mere cost of doing business compared to the value of, say, adding another story to a home. 

Santos was, for years, coddled and enabled by the Department of Building Inspection. And a number of his enablers are still there (though not ousted former boss Tom Hui, who has been subjected to the indignity of earning a $16,400-a-month pension after being shown the door in March 2020 for overt corruption — in writing). 

The engineer was a made man, and everyone knew it. Building inspectors were well aware that to call Santos out for deviations from his plans or cavalier and even reckless work would not undo him. But it could undo them.  

“DBI made what he did possible,” says a veteran inspector. Any scrutiny of his sites in the field would result in “a talking-to from your senior. And, more than likely, you wouldn’t be coming back to that project. … Anytime something didn’t get signed off, they’d say ‘just get an engineer to sign it off.’” 

Guess what engineer? 

Did an (accused) federal criminal work on your home? Check our map.

Map by Will Jarrett. Data from the Department of Building Inspection.

Pilfering money from clients, engaging in bribery schemes and altering checks to read “RoDBIgo” — these aren’t good things. These are bad things. 

But, truth be told, the aforementioned federal charges that led to Santos becoming inmate No. 26262-111 were never as disturbing as the accusations leveled by the city attorney.

Yes, the city attorney was the first to catch the check fraud. Shout out to investigator Carol Stuart; let’s hope her colleagues print T-shirts for her emblazoned with this image. But the more chilling accusations within the city’s suit involved dangerous and wholly unpermitted excavations, a life-safety issue for workers that purportedly undermined both clients’ homes and neighboring properties. 

What’s more, the permits for these risky and destructive excavations were allegedly out-and-out forgeries, assembled by a Santos associate who is accused of stealing engineers’ professional stamps and other such materials from the many outfits he’d passed through.

These are extraordinarily disturbing matters. Whatever character flaws Santos — and, for that matter, Curran — possessed, neither was lazy. Santos was prolific and did (extremely questionable) work all over town. And it’s very hard to say this work was properly inspected — or, in some cases, inspected at all (“Just get an engineer to sign it off.”). 

San Francisco is located between two major earthquake faults. As the Wicked Witch of the East could tell you, it sucks to have a house fall on you.

The city attorney has accused Santos of undermining not only his clients’ homes via his reckless excavations, but those of their neighbors as well. The quality of many of his other jobs, meanwhile, remains elusive. Surely, Santos’ own engineering letters paint a glowing portrait. Let us pray. 

In 2012, Rodrigo Santos claimed he could retain 90 percent of the existing walls and foundations of a home owned by Mel Murphy, while goosing its size from 854 square feet to 5,139 square feet — a project that was, parodically, characterized as a “remodel.” Instead, it collapsed one year later and tumbled down the side of Twin Peaks.

This home crumbled on a pristine day. There were no inclement conditions. You’d think that would be a black mark for an engineer. But, if anything, Santos only grew busier; his laws-of-physics-denying engineering plan, after all, had been accepted by DBI, and Murphy ended up getting a de-facto demolition out of it.

That says a lot about San Francisco. As does the fact that both Santos and Murphy were former presidents of the Building Inspection Commission. 

It also says a lot about San Francisco that, even after he was accused of stealing en masse from his clients, Santos was still very much in demand. 

The true ramifications of his years of cheating the system, with the tacit approval of the system’s powers that be, remain buried within and beneath his many projects. Until they aren’t. 

One last amazing RoDBIgo story, for old time’s sake: A veteran building inspector once approached him while his crew was digging into the pavement, perilously near to a large, green sign of the sort you’d see announcing a freeway exit.

When the inspector told Santos he was digging awfully close to the sign, Santos — who, again, has been accused of undermining both his clients’ properties and those of their neighbors — gave him a big smile.

“Hey,” Santos purportedly replied, “I put up most of those signs.” 

So, nothing was done. Nothing happened. Not yet.