The feds already sentenced ex-DBI inspector Bernie Curran to a year and a day in prison back in July for taking bribes to grant permits, and now DA Brooke Jenkins has won another guilty plea on him, and got two more years added to his prison term.
One of the many criminal subplots of the wide-ranging Mohammed Nuru public corruption scandal in SF was that of Department of Building Inspection (DBI) employee Bernard Curran, arrested in February 2022 for taking a secretive, unreported $180,000 loan from a developer and then approving shady and unsafe permits for that developer’s company. On those federal bribery and wire fraud charges, Curran pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison this past summer.
But that was not the end of Bernard “Bernie” Curran’s troubles. Shortly after the Nuru scandal broke in early 2020, then-City Attorney Dennis Herrera vowed to investigate and prosecute the various city officials accused of crimes, potentially adding state charges to their federal charges. And District Attorney Brooke Jenkins put out a statement Monday afternoon saying Curran had “pleaded guilty to and was convicted of crimes in connection with his intentional concealment of monetary payments and his violation of local conflict of interest laws.” Per Jenkins’s office, Curran was hit with an additional two-year prison sentence.
And this joke may be getting old, but SFist will always, always include in our Bernie Curran coverage the above April 2020 tweet from the SF Department of Building Inspection, declaring, “Congratulations to our Employee of the Quarter Senior Building Inspector Bernie Curran!”
But back to these charges. DA Jenkins said in a Monday press release that “The residents of San Francisco must be able to trust that the City’s public officials act with integrity and in accordance with the law.” The release added, “Public officials, such as Mr. Curran, who violate laws designed to ensure such integrity will be held accountable for their improper actions.”
Curran has not started either of the two prison sentences, which Jenkins’s office says he will serve concurrently, so that does theoretically get Curran out of prison a little bit earlier. The release from DA Jenkins’s office says Curran will surrender himself to authorities and start serving his sentence on October 12.
Image: @sfdbi via Twitter
