Josh Boswell – Two fraudsters linked to Nancy Pelosi’s son are set to be sentenced over a money laundering and mail fraud scheme, DailyMail.com can reveal.
It is the seventh federal case that Paul Pelosi Jr., the 55-year-old son of the former House Speaker, has been embroiled in, documented in an extensive investigation by DailyMail.com.
The charges leveled by federal prosecutors against fraudsters Bill Garlock and Gina Rodriguez, include shady dealings over a San Francisco flop house that Pelosi Jr. claimed to own.
Garlock and Rodriguez have cut a plea deal and are scheduled to be sentenced in March.
The latest law enforcement bust on the real estate dealers linked to Pelosi Jr. has led financial crime experts to question why Nancy’s son avoided indictment himself – even after he was identified by documents reviewed by DailyMail.com as paying bribes to get building permits on his Mission District flop house.
Seamus Bruner, vice president of research at the transparency think tank Government Accountability Institute, said Pelosi Jr.’s links to multiple federal cases, without any allegations leveled against him, raises concerns that he was getting preferential treatment due to his last name.
‘The US Justice Department has a history of sheltering and protecting the family members of powerful political elites,’ Bruner said.
‘We’ve seen it time and again with the Clintons and the Bidens. There can be no question that a last name like Pelosi is going to carry weight among California-based prosecutors who want to advance their careers at the federal level.’
Garlock and Rodriguez duped investors into fronting well over $1 million for supposed real estate ventures, but instead used the cash for their own rent, loan repayments, credit card bills, and even ‘horse-related expenses’, San Francisco federal prosecutors say.
A 2022 indictment of the two says they got money from investors ‘by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, and by means of concealment of material facts, including through the use of half-truths’.
Among the property investments they pitched was the renovation of a dilapidated mixed-use building in the Mission District of San Francisco – with a troubled past of code violations and squalid conditions for its hapless tenants.
A previous investigation by DailyMail.com revealed Pelosi Jr. had deep ties to the building, on the corner of Utah Street and 24th Street.
He claimed he owned 20%, and was involved in a 2017 bribery scheme to get permits for the property that led to the imprisonment of a city official and an engineering consultant after an FBI bust.
SF Source Blacklisted News Mar 2024