Former state Sen. Leland Yee pleads guilty in corruption case

Former State Senator Leland YeeLeland Yee rushed to get into a waiting car as he left the Federal building in San Francisco. Yee pleaded guilty Wednesday July 1, 2015 to charges of racketeering and admitting he accepted bribes. less Former State Senator Leland YeeLeland Yee rushed to get into a waiting car as he left the Federal building in San Francisco. Yee pleaded guilty Wednesday July 1, 2015 to charges of racketeering and admitting he ... more Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 68 Caption Close Former state Sen. Leland Yee pleads guilty in corruption case 1 / 68 Back to Gallery

Former state Sen. Leland Yee faces years in federal prison after admitting Wednesday that he took bribes from undercover FBI agents in exchange for promises to vote on legislation, arrange meetings for his purported donors, and illegally smuggle guns from the Philippines.

The longtime public official — who only last year was a candidate for California secretary of state — pleaded guilty to a felony charge of using that short-lived campaign as a “racketeering enterprise” to solicit funds from agents who posed as contributors.

In his plea agreement, filed in federal court in San Francisco, Yee, 67, said he had agreed to “conduct ... the affairs of the campaign through a pattern of racketeering activity.” He said his transactions with the agents took place between October 2012 and March 2014 and netted him $34,600.

The charge is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Yee’s plea agreement did not recommend a specific sentence. But a plea agreement signed by his former consultant and fundraiser, Keith Jackson, who admitted to the same charge, called for a prison term of between six and 10 years. Jackson, 50, is a former San Francisco school board president.

Convicted racketeers must also forfeit all ill-gotten gains. Yee agreed to relinquish $33,466 that the government seized during its investigation. He will also lose his right to vote during any time he spends in prison or on supervised release, the federal equivalent of parole.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer will have the final word on sentencing at a hearing scheduled Oct. 21. Also pleading guilty Wednesday, to a separate racketeering charge, were Jackson’s son Brandon and sports agent Marlon Sullivan.

All four had been scheduled to go to trial Aug. 10 in the first of several trials stemming from a five-year undercover investigation that led to a wide-ranging corruption indictment by a federal grand jury. Two dozen defendants are awaiting trial, including Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, a former gang leader in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Chow’s camp vows to fight

Chow is accused of running an established Chinese American community organization, the Ghee Kung Tong, as a racketeering enterprise that trafficked in drugs, weapons and stolen goods. Chow’s lawyers have vowed to fight the charges, which they say were manufactured by the FBI.

Prosecutors bolstered their accusations against Chow’s organization Wednesday in the plea agreements signed by Brandon Jackson and Sullivan, both of whom pleaded guilty to taking part in a racketeering conspiracy with the Ghee Kung Tong.

While some members of the organization were “strictly involved ... in legal functions,” both men said, others were involved in such activities as drug dealing, robbery, extortion, illegal gun possession and murder for hire.

Neither Brandon Jackson nor Sullivan is likely to repeat those allegations at Chow’s trial, however. None of the four plea agreements requires the defendants to testify or cooperate with the prosecutors, an unusual omission in a case with multiple defendants.

Yee was not accused of taking part in any crimes with Chow. But the former senator admitted accepting a $6,800 bribe from a purported campaign contributor to sponsor a Senate resolution honoring the Ghee Kung Tong, which one of Yee’s staffers presented at an event in March 2013. Prosecutors said undercover agents encountered Yee through Keith Jackson, who was also an associate of Chow’s.

Yee, who remains free on bail, had no comment after leaving court Wednesday. Two defense lawyers spoke up, however, saying the FBI was at least partly responsible for their clients’ actions.

“The FBI started by hiring Mr. Jackson and paying him money to do perfectly lawful things,” said Keith Jackson’s lawyer, James Brosnahan. “They also promised great wealth. After they had done that, they began to embroil him in the matter that brings him to his plea.

“What authorized them to come into the Bay Area and do what they did? Is this government doing what we want them to do? My answer is no.”

Brandon Jackson’s lawyer, Tony Tamburello, said federal agents went about “ensnaring this young man.”

Yee’s guilty plea marked the downfall of a veteran politician who spent 26 years in elected office. After his arrest March 26, 2014, he suspended his campaign for secretary of state, but nevertheless finished third in the June primary, with more than 9 percent of the vote. He was also suspended by his state Senate colleagues for the remainder of his legislative term, which ended in January.

Yee ran unsuccessfully for mayor of San Francisco in 2011. Prosecutors said Yee was trying to pay off the debt from his mayoral campaign with the money he solicited from undercover agents.

A child psychologist by training, Yee was first elected to the San Francisco Board of Education in 1988 and was the board’s president during the second of his two terms. He won election to the Board of Supervisors from the Sunset District in 1996 and left in the middle of his second term to run successfully for the Assembly, where he was part of the Democratic leadership team. He won the first of his two Senate terms in 2006.

Yee’s record as a legislator included sponsorship of legislation banning the sale of violent video games to minors, a law that was later ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. He was also known as an advocate of open government and of gun control.

But one of the allegations he admitted Wednesday was agreeing to illegally import weapons, including automatic firearms, from the Philippines in a March 2014 meeting with Jackson, an undercover agent and another defendant, the now-deceased Wilson Lim. The agent paid him $6,800 in cash, Yee said.

He also acknowledged that, in exchange for purported contributions, he arranged a meeting between a donor and another senator to discuss marijuana legislation; agreed to recommend another donor’s software company for a state contract; and promised to vote for legislation restricting California workers’ compensation payments to injured National Football League players.

Some charges tossed

As part of Wednesday’s plea agreements, prosecutors dismissed additional charges against the defendants, including money-laundering charges against Yee and Keith Jackson and an allegation that Jackson agreed to commit a murder for hire against a fictitious victim concocted by the FBI. The alleged murder plot resurfaced in Brandon Jackson’s plea agreement, which said an agent posing as a drug dealer told the younger Jackson, his father and Sullivan in December 2013 that he needed to have an associate killed.

Two months later, Brandon Jackson said, the agent met with him and Sullivan at a San Francisco restaurant and asked them not to kill the victim in the agent’s presence. The two “assured (the agent) that would not happen,” Jackson said.

Bob Egelko and Evan Sernoffsky are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. E-mail: begelko@sfchronicle.com and esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko and @evansernoffsky