Leonard Lacayo calls himself many things: A tax notary, a former CIA agent, a personal advisor to the White House, a behind-the-scenes political agitator and a friend of the rich and powerful.
But one thing he isn’t is a lawyer.
Lacayo has been sued three times by City Attorney David Chiu for allegedly collecting money from immigrants in exchange for legal advice, despite not having the licenses nor the qualifications to do so.
Last month, Lacayo was charged $600,000 by the San Francisco Superior Court for purportedly continuing to do this, despite a 2017 court injunction explicitly prohibiting him from doing so.
Lacayo takes the allegations in stride.
“If I see someone drowning in a pool, am I not supposed to reach out a hand to help?” asked Lacayo, 73, lounging in his office at 3330 Mission St. on a recent September morning. Newsmax softly hummed on a screen behind him.
Lies and Satanic conspiracies
Lacayo and Associates is sandwiched between a taqueria and a cannabis dispensary on the outskirts of the Mission District.
If you aren’t familiar with the name “Lacayo” plastered in large, bold green letters above the door, it would be hard to guess what was inside. Signs on the face of the building advertising “immigration” and “taxes” have since been removed.
Lacayo refers to his headquarters as the “Ronald Reagan Building.” Indeed, a portrait of the former Republican president wearing a cowboy hat hangs in the hallway.
Inside, Lacayo’s office is plastered wall-to-wall with Trump paraphernalia: Bobbleheads, various iterations of MAGA hats, and large campaign posters.
A T-shirt of Trump triumphantly throwing up a fist hangs on his shelf. A glass cabinet in the corner of his office is filled to the brim with Jesus figurines and a framed gun holster.
Many of the figurines, he says, were given to him by friends and neighbors once they heard of the city’s myriad lawsuits against him. “They ask to pray over me,” said Lacayo, of his friends’ concern.
It has been this way since 2016. Lacayo was an early supporter of the president and, since Trump’s first campaign, has claimed City Hall’s lawsuits against him are political.
“The only reason they’re after me is I support Donald Trump,” he told Mission Local at the time.
Today, Lacayo dismisses the accusations by the city attorney’s office as “lies,” inferring a conspiracy across the “Satanic” San Francisco Democratic Party to silence him.
As for the $600,000 penalty, Lacayo isn’t planning on paying a dime. “I’m just going to file for bankruptcy,” he said, making a dismissive gesture, and returning to his computer. Lacayo said that he only had $1,200 in his bank account.
Three ostensible former clients, including an undercover investigator from the city attorney’s office, see things differently. They allege that Lacayo attempted to charge them for legal services related to immigration in 2022, long after a court injunction forbade him from doing this in 2017.
Katherine Sican sought out Lacayo’s help in December 2022, after he was recommended to her by a friend.
Sican says Lacayo reviewed her paperwork and referred her to a lawyer in the building, Julio Ramos. Lacayo is barred from recommending a lawyer to clients seeking his help. Sican was subsequently deported.
Another former client, Soledad Manrique, was allegedly referred to Lacayo’s employee, immigration consultant Uriel Leon Rodriguez, who charged her $1,500 to prepare her asylum application.
Manrique believed that both Rodriguez and Lacayo were lawyers.
As for the city attorney’s investigator, Angela Davis, she says she was charged upwards of $5,000 by Lacayo for legal services for her purported fiancé. Davis says he never gave her the required notice in writing that he was, in fact, not a lawyer.
Numerous others have likely been charged by Lacayo and Associates for immigration-related services between 2022 and 2024, the city attorney’s office found. Lacayo and Associates’ business account was used to pay for 21 immigration form fees after the injunction was enforced in 2022.
A friend to immigrants — and to establishment Republicans
Lacayo, whose mother is a Salvadoran immigrant, has a mysteriously loyal clientele. Despite the years of accusations and piles of evidence leveled against him, many in the city’s largely immigrant, working-class Latino community trust him, and come to him for advice. And lawyers are in short supply these days.
San Francisco Republicans respect him — and have, Mission Local found, used his office as a meeting place until January of this year. So have numerous other conservative and religious organizations. Lacayo was the vice chairman for communications of the San Francisco Republican Party for decades.
When asked if those who visit Lacayo’s office are ever uncomfortable with the Trump paraphernalia covering his walls, he says he has only ever gotten one complaint.
A former client of Lacayo’s told Mission Local that Lacayo is often recommended to others by word of mouth. Trust in community members, he says, sometimes supersedes trust in institutions.
“I am not saying that Lacayo is an honest man, by no stretch of my imagination,” said the former client. “But he is a complex man who finds himself filling a void.”
“While in his office, I did see the Trump signs and heard his rants about Trump, but what I did also see is a man who offers a service to members of the Latino community who often find lack of trust with government agencies,” he wrote in an email to Mission Local.
Lacayo says that his relationships with his neighbors or his clientele have not changed since he was sued in 2016, 2022, and again in 2025, though some who have worked in the building, including a lawyer who worked across the hall, have testified against him.
During Mission Local’s Sept. 25 interview, Lacayo handed over a flyer for Viva Nicaragua, a large, popular cultural festival held in Newark, California, that he is attending. “Every one of those 20,000 people are going to kiss my ass,” he said, smiling.
Lacayo, for his part, finds little wrong with the mass arrests and deportation of Latino immigrants.
Mission Local’s interview with Lacayo was interrupted several times by calls to his cell. His ringtone is set to the theme of “Law and Order.” Lacayo answered every time, dispensing legal advice on family matters, and on what he referred to as a phone scam.
When not on the phone, he scrolled through Facebook and pointed to posts accusing Democrats of far-fetched crimes, played DVD recordings of his appearances on Fox News, and veered into stories of his past that bordered on the absurd.
He claimed that he was Trump’s personal advisor and that, before becoming a tax notary, he was recruited by American intelligence to be a go-between between the Feds and the Sandinistas.
He boasted of personal relationships with numerous celebrities, including Bianca Jagger, whom he says invited him to a midnight rendezvous before he was apprehended by six Sandinista hitmen.
His stories abound: He claimed that he personally discovered Gavin Newsom when he was a young man working in a San Francisco bar, and alleged he was a key part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, Reagan’s, Bob Dole’s and John McCain’s campaigns.
After Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, Lacayo continued, Yolanda Benson, Schwarzenegger’s then-aide, handed Lacayo a long list of jobs in the administration, asking him to take his pick.
Contacted to confirm this story, Benson spoke highly of Lacayo, despite his recent legal troubles, but said she had no memory of such an event taking place.
Lacayo’s faith in Trump, he says, has not faltered, despite Trump’s widespread crackdown on immigration. The mass deportations of Latino immigrants, insists Lacayo, are necessary to rid the city of crime.
Those who are deported, Lacayo says, are mostly criminals. But that is not true: More than 70 percent of those currently in ICE detention do not have a criminal record.
When asked how he would react if one of his employees, or a member of the community he says that he cares for, were deported, Lacayo simply shrugged.
“Mistakes happen,” he said. “I’d recommend getting a lawyer.”
“If I see someone drowning in a pool, am I not supposed to reach out a hand to help?” asked Lacayo
Please do reach out……but don’t go to the pool administrator expecting a paycheck if you’re not hired as lifeguard.
Griftocracy.
I’m surprised to learn he has no known connections to London Breed.
Lacayo’s connections are to the small Republican establishment here, and their related cops like former Chief Ribera. That’s why Lacayo at his previous location used to park his Cadillac and a rental stretch limo illegally in the very narrow Kingston alley, yet the SFPD sergeant then on the beat protected them from ever getting a ticket. I still remember that sergeant telling locals they had to move along when stopped to unload groceries. SOB.
Well he sounds like a complete fabulist, almost as bad as George Santos. And I’m sure he has more than $1,200 to his name, given the fees he was charging. Hope they take him for all he’s worth.