A blast from the past - former California Assemblyman pleads guilty to BART coffee shops fraud charges
https://www.elkgrovenews.net/2019/12/a-blast-from-past-former-california.html
By Dan Walters | CalMatters Columnist |
A brief
procedure in a San Francisco courtroom this month was a blast from California’s
political past.
Terry
Goggin, a former Democratic state assemblyman, pleaded guilty to
federal charges that he had misused money that investors gave him to expand
Goggin’s coffee shop chain.
Prosecutors
said Goggin, 78, admitted deceiving investors in a company he founded,
Metropolitan Coffee & Concessions, which operated four Peet’s Coffee &
Tea shops in BART stations in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Between
2007 and 2014, the court was told, Goggin solicited investments to expand the
coffee shop chain but lied to investors about his plans and misled them about
the finances of his company, which later went bankrupt.
Goggin
raised $685,000 from investors, prosecutors said, but shifted virtually all of
the money into other ventures. He will repay at least $685,000 in restitution
as part of his sentence, which will be imposed on April 1.
None of
this surprises those who were in and around the Capitol during Goggin’s
decade-long legislative career, which ended in 1984 with his defeat by a fellow
Democrat. He was an enigmatic figure, known both for creative lawmaking and
intertwining his personal financial interests with official duties.
Vic
Pollard, a reporter for Goggin’s hometown newspaper, the San Bernardino Sun,
relentlessly uncovered and wrote about Goggin’s seemingly countless financial
schemes, including hunting for treasure on sunken ships in the Caribbean Sea,
attempts to buy a casino in Nevada and a machine to turn coal into gold.
However,
Pollard concentrated mostly on those connected to legislation, such as his
measure — enacted and still operative — that adds a few pennies to
Californian’s monthly telephone bills to pay for teletype devices allowing the
deaf to communicate on telephone lines.
That seemingly
benign proposal, Pollard discovered, had a personal angle for Goggin. It
benefited his long-time friend and sometime business partner, Dennis Krieger,
who was underwriting a stock sale for a company that made the only devices
Goggin’s legislation would finance. After Pollard reported on that connection,
the state Fair Political Practices Commission fined Goggin.
Yours
truly delved into another Goggin bill, introduced as the state was experiencing
one of its periodic gasoline shortages, that would have prohibited oil
companies from owning service stations. After I reported that the bill
contained an exemption for one oil company that had employed both Goggin’s
father and Krieger’s father as top executives, the bill was quickly dropped.
So why did
Goggin play so fast and loose? Pollard, in an email, offers an explanation, to
wit: “In one of my confrontations with Goggin, he said, ‘Somebody is going to
make money off of everything we do up here, and it might as well be our
friends.’ He also tried once to hire me to get me off his back.”
Pollard
stayed on Goggin’s back and his reportage had an effect. In 1984, Goggin lost
his seat to Jerry Eaves, who later became a San Bernardino County supervisor,
only to be forced out of office himself after indictment on federal corruption
charges.
During his
legislative career, Goggin had been very close to Willie Brown, who was speaker
of the Assembly during the 1980s and 1990s before becoming mayor of San
Francisco in 1996.
After
Brown became mayor, Goggin moved to San Francisco to practice law and lobby
city government. In 2004, Goggin and ex-Mayor Brown teamed up to propose a
multi-million-dollar lobbying campaign for the state’s bullet train project.
They
didn’t get the money they sought from potential project builders, and Goggin
went into the coffee shop business instead.
Elk Grove News is a media partner of CalMatters, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how
California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan
Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary
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