Campaign bribery, arms trafficking, and a gangster named “Shrimp Boy”—Today on Follow the Money, a story that’s got it all.
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Just how desperate have our politicians become for cash to fund their campaigns? Pretty darn desperate. Desperate enough to do some outrageously corrupt things. Case in point?
Meet Democratic California State Senator Leland Yee. He’s got a rap sheet this long.
Yee is facing up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to racketeering—including money laundering, trading campaign contributions for specific actions in the state legislature, and some shady involvement in running guns from the Phillipines.
But hey, he did it all for the American People! After all, Yee was just trying to raise money to stay afloat in his political career.
Yee struck a deal with the Chinese Mafia leader “Shrimp Boy” in exchange for a $6,800 campaign contribution.
Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow is a career criminal, a known leader of Triad gang activity, and was a linchpin in the 1970s and 80s gang warfare that terrorized San Francisco’s chinatown community.
In exchange for a campaign contribution, Yee sought an official state Senate proclamation praising Shrimp Boy’s Chinese-American Freeman lodge—which, it turns out, was a front for laundering $2.6 million from an illegal bookmaking operation.
But that’s not all.
The FBI caught Yee—a long-time gun control advocate—offering to smuggle heavy weapons from the Philippines in return for political contributions.
In a truly appalling move, Yee offered to help an undercover FBI agent posing as a New Jersey mob boss get his hands on machine guns and rocket launchers in return for political contributions.
Throughout his career as a state senator, Yee was a vocal advocate for gun control, condemned violence in video games, and talked a big game about “keeping the streets safe.” But that all went out the window once campaign cash was on the line.
Why did he do it? Just follow the money.
At the time of his arrest, Yee was smack in the middle of mounting a run for California Secretary of State. Running for statewide office is extremely expensive, and the cost has only gone up as more money continues to pour into our elections.
It is very expensive to conduct even a legislative race, much less a statewide election, which is what Leland Yee was engaged in. It requires millions of dollars, and that means that these people have to be raising money every single day without fail in order to be competitive.”—
Josh Richman, Bay Area News Group Political Reporter
As more and more money floods our political system, politicians are going to increasingly desperate (and corrupt) lengths just to keep up. If our politicians are striking deals with gangsters and smuggling guns just to fund their campaigns, you know something is wrong.
You’d think a scandal like this would be a catalyst for reform. But no.
Out of a huge stack of reform bills introduced in the wake of the scandal, only a measly, piddling few ended up being passed.
Despite a lot of talk from state lawmakers about restoring public faith in government, no meaningful reforms have been signed into law as a result of the scandal. There are numerous steps state lawmakers could have taken to address a political system that’s openly creating flagrant corruption, but none of them happened.
It’s pretty clear that most legislators are only interested in political reform in months when one of their colleagues is being arrested.— Dan Schnur, director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California
Now, how could that be? Both houses of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion are controlled by Democrats, and Democrats are supposed to be the ones fighting to get money out of politics, right?
As is so often the case in American politics, it’s not about what people say — it’s about what they actually do.
Following the scandal, California Democrats have systematically blocked reform bills proposing tougher ethics and campaign finance restrictions.
Several reform bills aimed at cutting down on the amount of money pouring into California state politics were either blocked by Democrats in the state legislature or flat out vetoed by California Governor Jerry Brown.
[Graphic: “Brown Vetoes Ethics Bill” headline]
Despite the media narrative of Democrats being pro-reform and Republicans blocking reform, the story powerfully demonstrates that corruption is not a partisan issue — It’s an American issue.
It also shows we can’t leave it up to politicians to fix this problem — We, the People, are going to have to do it ourselves.
Corruption is out of control. But it doesn’t have to be.
We’re already building a movement to pass Anti-Corruption Acts at the local, state, and federal level to fix the broken system that brought us Yee. However, we can’t do that unless we educate millions of Americans on our nation’s corruption problem — and the plan to fix it. Please, help us spread the word:
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