Kyra Worthy, the former head of the police-adjacent nonprofit SF SAFE — which dissolved this year after revelations of lavish spending and unpaid bills and wages — was today arrested and charged with 34 felony counts.
Charges include: Misappropriation of public money; submitting fraudulent invoices to a city department, theft from her nonprofit, SF SAFE; wage theft of some $80,000 from employees and failing to pay their withheld employee taxes; and writing checks with insufficient funds to defraud a bank.
Worthy is accused of illegally misusing more than $700,000 during her tenure with SF SAFE. Worthy was fired in January by the SF SAFE board; she was hired on at the nonprofit in late 2017.
Worthy’s firing came on the heels of a January controller’s audit that found SF SAFE misspent some $80,000 in San Francisco Police Department grant funds in 2022 and 2023. The organization’s board subsequently discovered its “bank accounts were essentially empty,” as noted in an affidavit released today by the district attorney’s office.
That revelation led to police department command staff requesting that the DA investigate the matter of “SF SAFE’s ‘missing money,’” which led to today’s arrest and charges.
“Our investigation revealed evidence showing that Worthy embezzled more than $100,000 of SF SAFE funds, with most of the money taken in her first few years at SF SAFE,” reads today’s affidavit.
“Our investigation also revealed that, over time, as Worthy continuously spent SF SAFE’s money in extravagant ways, she put the organization deeply in debt and she ultimately committed a series of crimes to try to postpone the inevitable discovery that she had run SF SAFE into the ground.”
The DA lists those crimes as:
- More than $80,000 in wage theft
- The spending of more than $500,000 of public funds to cover SF SAFE’s debts rather than that money’s intended use
- Submitting fraudulent invoices to the city
- Writing bad checks to pump up bank account balances and allow for a wire transfer SF SAFE did not, in reality, have the money to cover
Trouble began brewing for Worthy in September 2023, when a company called Applied Video Solutions told the DA’s Special Prosecutions Unit that some $600,000 in surveillance cameras that was supposed to be underwritten by the nonprofit was late in coming. The DA was informed at this time that an “individual donor” — in fact, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen — was concerned, as a grant had been paid to SF SAFE to cover the camera installations.
Then, in January, the dam broke with the controller’s report, which revealed some $80,000 in improper spending on items such as limo service and luxury gift boxes.
Today’s affidavit notes reporting by both the San Francisco Standard and Mission Local in which aggrieved contractors complained that they had not been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for work already completed, including $625,000 not paid to the Latino Task Force.
During subsequent inquiries by DA investigators, it was discovered that Worthy had bypassed SF SAFE policies requiring multiple signatures on any check exceeding $5,000. On one check for more than $112,000, Worthy is accused of forging other SF SAFE officials’ signatures; she allegedly had a stamp of her treasurer’s signature produced without his knowledge.
Employees told investigators, and the media, that they had begun receiving their wages via Venmo or CashApp payments from SF SAFE’s attorney.
With a warrant, the DA’s office determined that Worthy had drained SF SAFE’s bank accounts of some $250,000 in 2019 and $5,000 in the spring of 2023. Today’s affidavit states that many of these were “personal” charges for Worthy. Those would include hundreds of dollars in monthly Lyft rides, meal purchases, out-of-city parking, airline tickets and out-of-state charges. She spent more than $24,000 at Marshall’s.
Receipts reveal she took a Lyft from her home in Richmond to SF SAFE’s Mission District office and back every day.
While SF SAFE’s board president told investigators he was unaware of Worthy’s alleged financial misdeeds, the DA doubts this. Reports from three different outside accounting companies going back to 2019 urged that controls be placed on Worthy’s spending, that she should be subjected to greater oversight and that her purchases should be reviewed. Her expenses, the DA reports, were listed in SF SAFE’s general ledger, and Worthy kept “meticulous records” of her own activity.
These “thick binders” are now evidence for the DA. They reveal “more than $130,000” in bounced checks and nullified electronic payments due to insufficient funds in the latter half of 2023. Her gift box expenditures alone in 2022 and 2023 exceeded $350,000.
In addition to spending lavishly on SF SAFE-related items such as gift boxes, and allegedly spending heavily on herself — expenses today’s affidavit makes pains to note that SF SAFE’s board was aware of and neglected to do anything about — the DA also notes instances of falsified invoices. These have led to charges of theft and fraud.
Today’s affidavit meticulously notes instances of Worthy diverting hundreds or thousands of dollars from SF SAFE funds to her own. These include payments to her landlord she categorized in the nonprofit’s general ledger as covering “community meetings.”
As detailed in Mission Local, Worthy’s alleged crimes left Mission businesses jilted and pulled the rug out from beneath longtime employees. Florist Diosa Blooms told Mission Local in February that Worthy, a big spender with a taste for lavish arrangements, had stiffed their family business $17,000. The nonprofit’s landlord also alleged that SF SAFE owed about $445,000 in unpaid rent for a sprawling and luxuriant office at 22nd and Mission streets.
SF SAFE’s dozens of former workers have complained to the city; one, Furlishous Wyatt, had worked at the nonprofit since 1982.
The workers are out a collective $80,000. Today’s affidavit notes that, in October 2023, Worthy spent $98,000 on an event called “Candy Explosion.” That included $20,000 for desserts and $19,000 for a petting zoo.
Worthy was booked into San Francisco County Jail at 12:42 p.m. As DA Brooke Jenkins is familiar with one of the alleged victims, she has personally recused herself from this case.
At some point this city really needs to hire auditors of non profits, contractors, and city employees. Between the Recology stuff, DBI stuff, I think this is the third non profit in a year, and of course the DPW case..we are bleeding money we shouldn’t have to. And now the City wants to lower oversight by dumping Commissions.
The Board of Directors should be held financially responsible given that they recieved warnings and clearly did not do their due diligence for years otherwise audits would have nipped this extortion in the bud. I wonder if this person even knew what her job was.
Even worse than dumping some commissions… under the Farrell/TogetherSF mayoral power measure, the commissions that remain would be 2/3 controlled by the mayor with removal at will, so they would be a puppet show, play-acting independent oversight that wouldn’t really exist.
Just were was the accountability during while all this was taking place ?
Obviously none. Nonprofits just go off willy nilly as they please. Not good. Very sloppy.
I never ever give to Nonprofits for this reason, no accountability. SAD. License to just steal.
Dissapointing.
.
Some on the city’s Left, including Aaron Peskin, have suggested we give low interest loans to nonprofits in order to build affordable housing. In principle, the idea makes sense. Remove some of the middlemen and lower the costs for everyday SFers.
Then I read stories like this, and of all the other nonprofit abuse occurring locally/statewide, and come back down to Earth. Until local politicos confront this gross lack of transparency and abuse, they’ll have a very hard time selling more nonprofit services. Especially housing.
Maybe it would be better for the City to simply build housing directly with its own money and employees. I don’t think it’s healthy for governments to outsource such important functions. First they lose the ability to do the work, then the ability to oversee the work.
The DBI and Recology scandals pale in comparison to the theft and graft that has been going on for years in the city’s so called nonprofits. Hundreds of millions of dollars are handed out to political cronies and their pet projects. No oversight and minuscule coverage from their friends in the media. God help anyone who questions a million dollars given to these grifters
Public confidence in any “non-profit” organization is at an all time low.
We should ask our elected leaders to audit every non-profit at the end of every year based on these multiple & horrific felonies involving the public’s money.
her LinkedIn page:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyraworthy?trk=universal-search-cluster
She was recommended by George Gascón as well.
No oversight = rampant abuse of power.
Even after all this theft and deception and lies, I bet she gets less than 3 years jail time, if any. No repercussions = incentive to do it again.
We should really just have public employees do the work rather than all these non-profits. Union jobs with proper pensions. We end up cleaning up all their messes anyway.
Hopefully investigators will pull on the thread connecting SF Safe to Latino Task Force to find out exactly what’s going on there.
Investigations should seriously extend to the board of directors, and/or whoever hires managers, because how incompetent can you be to let someone under your charge get away with so much for so long?! They either unbelievably incompetent or just as corrupt as the people they hire.
We have a new poster child for corruption at City Hall. It happens over and over again. I feel bad for all the decent and honest people who work for the city. San Francisco is a wealthy city, but these kinds of things keep happening. The amount of money wasted is beyond belief. At this point I’m in favor of getting rid of all the non-profits and useless commisssions and other feel good programs, which seem so vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse, and devote the budget to a stripped down model of city government, but one that works really well. Things like police, fire department, taking care of the parks, MUNI, the water supply and other infrastructure, do whatever has to be done to add housing, and a few other things. Ditch the rest. Government cannot be trusted when it gets too big. Finally, people like Kyra Worthy (!) should spend years and years behind bars. Enough!
Excellent reporting Joe. Any knowledge of what the Latino Task Force did that warranted a $625,000 contract?
Corruption runs to the core. So laughable that a career politician like puppeteer Peskin and his long track record of dubious amendments to city charters is being touted my many as the man who saves San Francisco. “We need Aaron”… what a joke. The others from the corrupt city hall syndicate no better. I’ll take my chances with Daniel Lurie.
Kyra Worthy will soon join fellow-felon Mohammed Nuru and others in the ongoing cavalcade of corrupt San Francisco officials and non-profits. To have committed so many felonies makes you truly wonder how oblivious someone in Worthy’s position could be to think they could get away with such blatant and numerous crimes. But an even more serious question is “how could such a person have been hired in the first place.” San Francisco: Clean House!
This is greed. I guess she thought she was invisible.