Yee Indicted in Major FBI Sweep

Update: The dollar speaks!  This is about as big, and ugly, as it gets.

Yee, a Democrat who represents half of San Francisco and most of San Mateo County, was one of 26 people ensnared in a five-year federal investigation that targeted Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, a notorious Chinatown gangster who had claimed to have gone straight, officials said.

An outspoken advocate of gun control and open government, Yee is charged with conspiring to traffic in firearms as well as six counts of scheming to defraud citizens of honest services. He has not commented on the allegations.

SF Gate (With many more links)

I am always suspicious about entrapment cases but what is surely true here is that Lee was entrapped by the need not for personal wealth, at least in the beginning, but for campaign money.  The stories about hours spent, arms twisted, promises made in order to make the daily take are enough to fill the Library of Congress — and ought to be doing so.

*

Wow!  For a moderately interested observer of San Francisco politics this comes as a surprise.

State Sen. Leland Yee has been indicted for public corruption as part of a major FBI operation Wednesday morning spanning the Bay Area, law-enforcement sources said, casting yet another cloud of corruption over the Democratic establishment in the state Legislature and torpedoing Yee’s aspirations for statewide office in California.

Mercury News