True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 230: Big Trouble in Little China
Aired: 2022-06-03
Duration: 01:33:25


=== Hello, Everybody (04:24) ===

[00:00:04]  Breaker, this is Jack Burton on the Pork Chop Express, and I'm talking to whoever's listening out there.
[00:00:10]  Like I told my last wife, I says, honey, if a diminutive little halfling type gnomish fellow comes out of the incense-laden markets of the Far East and offers you some kind of deal involving shoulder-fired missiles from an ISIS affiliate on a Pacific island in exchange for possible money to pay back debts you accrued during your mayoral campaign, I says, honey, you might be in Chinatown.
[00:00:59]  Hello, everybody.
[00:01:01]  Hello.
[00:01:02]  Hello, Brace.
[00:01:03]  Hello, Liz.
[00:01:04]  How you doing, sweetheart?
[00:01:05]  I'm good.
[00:01:06]  And just like Brace said, I'm Liz.
[00:01:08]  And my name is Brace.
[00:01:10]  And of course, our producer here is Young Chomsky.
[00:01:14]  And the podcast is called Truanon.
[00:01:16]  And Young Chomsky, play the sound.
[00:01:20]  I am so excited to do this episode.
[00:01:26]  We have been talking about doing this for a really long time.
[00:01:28]  And then because even though Young Chomsky tries to get us to do this, we refuse to do that, which is create a master document that we refer back to with episode ideas.
[00:01:38]  We just don't do it.
[00:01:39]  We do it for like a week and then we just never come back to it and we lose it in the soup of Google Docs, which is just impenetrable, impossible to find anything in there.
[00:01:49]  I could penetrate it.
[00:01:50]  And anyway, we've been trying to do this for a long time.
[00:01:54]  We forgot about it.
[00:01:55]  We recently remembered.
[00:01:56]  And now we are here and we're doing this episode.
[00:01:59]  This is the long-awaited by ourselves.
[00:02:02]  And now you, the listener, the shrimp boy episode.
[00:02:06]  Now, you might be wondering, why are these guys so navel-gazing that they're actually doing a full episode about Brace's penis?
[00:02:15]  That thing is a nest of barbs and thorns that resembles barely anything that you would recognize as human or even really organic in the first place.
[00:02:24]  Oh my God.
[00:02:25]  It's like a shrimp cage, not a shrimp.
[00:02:28]  It is a rare grotesquery.
[00:02:32]  But no, this is, we love doing our San Francisco episodes here.
[00:02:36]  Yes.
[00:02:37]  You know, it's fun.
[00:02:38]  Yeah, I forgot when I was like doing some research for this.
[00:02:44]  I forgot how it really made me nostalgic for San Francisco.
[00:02:48]  Both of us are no longer in San Francisco.
[00:02:49]  Actually, all three of us are no longer in San Francisco.
[00:02:52]  And There was a lot of landmarks that came up during this episode, like all during the research I was doing for it that just made me.
[00:03:02]  It was like my own little Madeline.
[00:03:05]  You know what I mean?
[00:03:06]  Some flavored Madeline.
[00:03:08]  Something I remembered because Ed Lee, the former mayor of San Francisco, who died.
[00:03:15]  Can you play the song?
[00:03:16]  We can't even slow down.
[00:03:18]  Oh, my heart hurts.
[00:03:20]  Yeah, maybe because you're in the ice cream, aisle asshole.
[00:03:23]  But our horrible bullshit mayor Ed Lee.
[00:03:28]  This actually, when reading about this, I remembered during his final inauguration.
[00:03:32]  I can't remember what year it was.
[00:03:34]  2011.
[00:03:35]  No, it was.
[00:03:35]  No, he ran for re-election.
[00:03:36]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:37]  His real, because he died.
[00:03:38]  2014?
[00:03:39]  Yeah, I think it was 2014.
[00:03:42]  I was at City Hall.
[00:03:44]  I went to City Hall for his swearing end ceremony.
[00:03:47]  Yeah, well, you had to pick up your check.
[00:03:48]  Yes, of course.
[00:03:49]  But there was a big tussle on the second floor, kind of overlooking, like on the balcony, between a bunch of people and police.
[00:03:56]  I was trying to get up there, but I was like, you know what?
[00:03:59]  Yeah, you never miss a tussle.
[00:04:01]  I'm just going to stay down here.
[00:04:02]  Ed Lee walks by me on his way to the podium, and I lean over.
[00:04:08]  And this sounds fake, but no shit.
[00:04:10]  I wrote it down in my diary.
[00:04:12]  I remember it vividly.
[00:04:12]  I whispered to him, said, Hey, Ed, you're doing a terrible job.
[00:04:17]  And he looked at me and looked really hurt.
[00:04:20]  And I think that's what killed him.
[00:04:21]  Yeah.
[00:04:22]  Oh, my God.
[00:04:22]  Fuck that guy.
[00:04:23]  He was a real guy.
[00:04:25]  Wait, I have a question for you.
[00:04:26]  How tall is Ed Lee?
[00:04:27]  Was Ed Lee?

=== Yolo Exactly (03:27) ===

[00:04:28]  Let me just say that.
[00:04:30]  Shrimp Boy would have been towering over this motherfucker.
[00:04:33]  Edley, I mean, Edley was pretty.
[00:04:34]  He was like 5'2, which, like, we're going global average.
[00:04:38]  So you were looking him straight in the eye.
[00:04:40]  I would, no, this was, I was, well, yes, I was wearing, you know, I was wearing pumps that day.
[00:04:45]  Sure.
[00:04:45]  And so I was wearing your fancy shoes.
[00:04:47]  I was wearing the inauguration.
[00:04:48]  Exactly.
[00:04:50]  And so, yeah, I was, I was, I was looking, I was looking a little bit up.
[00:04:53]  I could see into his nostrils.
[00:04:56]  But, but yeah, he, he looked, he looked hurt.
[00:04:58]  And frankly, he really fucked up San Francisco.
[00:05:01]  And so he can, well, I guess he's dead.
[00:05:04]  So R.I.P. So the other thing about this episode is that, you know, some of the research I did was about San Francisco and, you know, and some of the various cast of characters that we're going to get into surrounding this very bizarre story.
[00:05:21]  The other more significant part of my research, and really most of all of today was spent listening to 2010's era party rap.
[00:05:31]  Yeah.
[00:05:31]  To really put me in the mood.
[00:05:33]  Now, the bulk of our story really takes place between, let's say, really like 2008 to 2014.
[00:05:48]  Right.
[00:05:49]  So, I mean, I thought that kind of to get us into the mood here, I wanted to, before we really introduce the story that we're about to get into, I want to just kind of quote one of the poets of the era of that time, a man by the name of Wiz Khalifa, who the Wiz stands for wisdom.
[00:06:10]  Yes.
[00:06:11]  He said, rapped, really, saying, the bigger the bill, the harder you ball.
[00:06:20]  Work hard, play hard.
[00:06:25]  Work hard, play hard.
[00:06:27]  From your chest.
[00:06:29]  And I want to say that kind of thinking back on this, the 2010s were a time, you know, I think there's like a little bit of a dialectical relationship here.
[00:06:38]  Is that, you know, this is a time on the one hand of the girl boss, which I think for our purposes, we can consider gender neutral, right?
[00:06:44]  Yes.
[00:06:44]  Oh, absolutely.
[00:06:45]  And so, you know, you've got the girl boss on one hand, and then on the other, it's really the time of the YOLO.
[00:06:51]  And so this is really the work hard, play hard time.
[00:06:55]  And this is the era that really, that really, you know, births Shrimp Boy.
[00:07:02]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:07:03]  I mean, 2008 to 20, I mean, there was quite a few of those years where I was kind of out of commission.
[00:07:12]  But really 2008 to like, I don't know, 2011.
[00:07:16]  I mean, that was the height of sex night.
[00:07:20]  My DJ night.
[00:07:21]  That was, I was at the beauty bar.
[00:07:23]  I was working at a flower shop.
[00:07:24]  I mean, San Francisco was really, that was like the last gasp of when you had anything cool to do there.
[00:07:30]  Yeah.
[00:07:30]  It was a real, this was, you know, YOLO.
[00:07:33]  Cue the song.
[00:07:34]  Welcome to the world.
[00:07:36]  YOLO, exactly.
[00:07:38]  So what are we talking about today?
[00:07:40]  We are talking about a guy, a massive giant of a man named Raymond Shrimp Boy Chow, who, well, that also goes by some other names too, who was a, let's say, less than reformed,

=== Chinese Tongs and Mass Killers (09:50) ===

[00:07:55]  but publicly reformed Chinatown crook who, in a large FBI sting that was arrayed against him and some of his allies, took down little bits and pieces of the San Francisco political establishment in a pretty wild case.
[00:08:11]  Yes.
[00:08:12]  Real widespread FBI investigation took down a state senator, a couple other campaign affiliates, and definitely 100% the feds had evidence implicating former mayor Ed Lee, but they chose not to prosecute him.
[00:08:30]  And we're going to talk about that.
[00:08:31]  Yes.
[00:08:32]  And I mean, this is, if you're from San Francisco, you might remember the recent bust of former Department of Public Works, head Muhammad Nuru, who I was with you when that broke.
[00:08:43]  Yeah, one of my greatest enemies, Who was a real gangster sort of piece of shit?
[00:08:50]  And San Francisco has a, I would say, Chicago-like political machine.
[00:08:56]  And it does, you know, from the busts of Nuru and some of the other people that happened, including Keith Jackson later, he also gets busted for something else.
[00:09:06]  You know, a lot of the busts of the political establishment that have taken place from the FBI, from sort of the shrimp boy era to now, it shows that they are watching definitely certain members of the city.
[00:09:16]  But of course, San Francisco is a very strong and important part of the Democratic Party network.
[00:09:21]  And so can't put the elbow grease too much into there.
[00:09:26]  Yeah.
[00:09:27]  So, I mean, to establish a little bit of history before we really get into this, because we're going to be talking about a little thing called tongs quite a lot.
[00:09:35]  And no, I'm not talking about the things that I use to pinch the butts of my fellow line cooks here at my restaurant with.
[00:09:45]  Okay, so a tong is kind of a, well, I mean, it is a Chinese fraternal organization, oftentimes a secret society.
[00:09:53]  They're thought to, and you know, I'm by no means an expert on this stuff, but from what I understand, they are thought to first have first come into existence by supporters of the overthrown Ming dynasty in order to themselves overthrow the Qing dynasty in the mid-1600s.
[00:10:11]  Of course, the mid-1600s was dozens of years ago.
[00:10:15]  And so these Tongs, obviously having failed not only in their mission, but really in the mission of having a monarchy at all, got into some other kind of weirder stuff.
[00:10:24]  I mean, the Qing lasted several hundred years to about 1911.
[00:10:28]  And so these secret societies had a lot of time to mutate and to, let's say, get into some extra-legal activities.
[00:10:36]  Yeah, this is the Chinese mafia.
[00:10:38]  This is part of the Chinese mafia is what we're saying.
[00:10:40]  Exactly.
[00:10:41]  Yeah.
[00:10:41]  So these organizations thrived in Hong Kong in particular.
[00:10:46]  And when the Chinese came to California, in particular, San Francisco, they actually brought along pretty well-established societies with them.
[00:10:54]  And, you know, to be a Chinese immigrant in California for most of the time that there was California until fairly recent history sucked ass.
[00:11:03]  Yeah, really dangerous, bad stuff.
[00:11:05]  Exactly.
[00:11:06]  I mean, California and San Francisco in particular had a super nasty history of anti-Chinese racism.
[00:11:11]  There actually was a large political party called the Working Men's Party of California, which was not part of the Working Men's Party of the U.S., which I believe was a first socialist party.
[00:11:21]  Yes.
[00:11:22]  Not affiliated.
[00:11:23]  Well, it was, it's like they say it wasn't now, but they took all of the California chapters from it.
[00:11:29]  Interesting.
[00:11:29]  And, you know, it started being like pro-worker for like the first month, and then it devolved entirely into like, we got to get all these Chinese people out of here.
[00:11:38]  And, you know, it was just, yeah, Chinese, there was pogroms against them.
[00:11:42]  You know, there was a plague in Chinatown in 1900.
[00:11:45]  I did know that, actually.
[00:11:47]  I did not know that.
[00:11:49]  There was an outbreak of plague in Chinatown, which of course increased a lot of the racism.
[00:11:53]  There was about 10% of the San Francisco population in, I believe, 1890 was Chinese.
[00:12:00]  And so, of course, because of stuff like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892, a lot of the Chinese people that came over were just bachelors, or if not bachelors, unaccompanied by balls and chains, if you know what I mean.
[00:12:13]  So a lot of these tongs, you know, these societies that were beneficial in some ways to the immigrants also started getting into some things like prostitution and, of course, gambling.
[00:12:24]  And now, Chinese people.
[00:12:25]  Pasico industries.
[00:12:27]  Absolutely.
[00:12:27]  And Chinese, me and the Chinese get along very well in terms of gambling.
[00:12:32]  Because Chinese people love to gamble.
[00:12:36]  And you know that, I mean, baby, what more can be said about me?
[00:12:40]  You know, I love to gamble.
[00:12:42]  Gambling needs to be made illegal.
[00:12:44]  It is worse than fentanyl.
[00:12:46]  And you know, I always gamble to win, baby.
[00:12:49]  And so, you know, the Chinese love of gambling.
[00:12:51]  And of course, at the time, in a lot of Chinese communities in the United States, there was also a love of opium.
[00:12:58]  And so a lot of these tongs kind of became the facilities in which this happened.
[00:13:04]  And the big tong was called the CKT, the Qi Kong Tong, which is actually now a political party in China under the People's Consultative Conference, which means it's one of, I believe, the eight legal political parties in China under the CPC.
[00:13:21]  What?
[00:13:22]  So I want to pause for a second and just ask a couple questions because I think that we are kind of like talking around a little bit.
[00:13:28]  I mean, you want to be nice and call them like societies, organizations, fraternal organizations.
[00:13:33]  I do understand that there's this sort of more legit face of them, this party in China, right?
[00:13:39]  So, and some of that is just that they have, they're kind of trading on the old name, right?
[00:13:44]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:45]  But like, they are really like gangsters, like the tongs in these, I mean, they're running like, they're like local mafias, right?
[00:13:53]  Kind of mobs.
[00:13:55]  Yeah.
[00:13:56]  And, and just, just, you know, they do public works projects, but they also might, you know, like how Tony Soprano would run the garbage trucks.
[00:14:06]  Never seen a single episode of the Sopranos in my entire life, but I assume that you're not lying to me.
[00:14:14]  There was actually a huge Chinatown war in the early 20th century in San Francisco.
[00:14:19]  I think it lasted for almost like, I mean, over a decade throughout the 20s.
[00:14:24]  And, you know, a lot of bloodletting, sort of a lot of very salacious, you know, newspaper headlines.
[00:14:31]  I was actually one of the first mass killers in San Francisco history, or excuse me, in California history.
[00:14:37]  Was actually been a lot of mass killers in California history, but one of the first ones that was reported on as such was a fellow belonging to one of these Tongs who went amok on a farm and killed a bunch of other Chinese people.
[00:14:51]  But, anyways, by the 1960s, baby, things have calmed down.
[00:14:54]  It's the 60s in fucking San Francisco.
[00:14:56]  We're all everyone's chill.
[00:14:58]  Everyone's chill.
[00:15:00]  Oh, yeah, just take this asset.
[00:15:01]  No, just listen to what I tell you.
[00:15:03]  You must kill.
[00:15:05]  You must kill.
[00:15:06]  I mean, Chinatown is still pretty rough.
[00:15:09]  All right.
[00:15:09]  Yes.
[00:15:09]  It's really not until, let's say, the late 90s, early 2000s that Chinatown becomes a place that you kind of go to.
[00:15:17]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:18]  And to be fair, too, like, you know, Chinatown is still pretty rough.
[00:15:22]  It's just not rough in this same way.
[00:15:24]  Right, totally.
[00:15:25]  Anyways, by the 1960s, you know, things have kind of chilled out.
[00:15:28]  People have started smoking grass.
[00:15:30]  People have started injecting heroin.
[00:15:32]  You know, things have become a lot calmer.
[00:15:35]  And the Tongs are still doing their business, but a lot of the more gangster ones have kind of calmed down a little bit.
[00:15:41]  And frankly, the big problem at this time is they actually don't have enough muscle.
[00:15:45]  They don't have enough soldiers.
[00:15:46]  They don't have people willing to go shoot somebody for them.
[00:15:50]  But by the 1965, or because rather, of the 1965 Immigration Act, which made it so that Western Europeans no longer got like, you know, preferred basically immigration status.
[00:16:01]  Exactly.
[00:16:03]  A lot of new immigrants came over all the way from China.
[00:16:08]  And Liz, have you, are you familiar with the fob versus ABC dynamic?
[00:16:13]  Yes.
[00:16:14]  So fresh off the boat versus American-born Chinese, right?
[00:16:17]  Yeah.
[00:16:18]  What's funny is like, I feel like I remember this getting explained to me by girls in my class when I was like very young.
[00:16:26]  Yes.
[00:16:29]  But it's funny to know that, which I didn't know that this kind of came out of the 60s.
[00:16:35]  I always thought it was like a, it's like every successive generation uses, used it to refer to the previous generation.
[00:16:41]  Yes, yeah, exactly.
[00:16:42]  I know.
[00:16:42]  I remember this being like, I remember specifically being taught this in middle school.
[00:16:47]  I was like, I don't, I mean, fresh off the boat.
[00:16:50]  There's no more people coming over from Poland.
[00:16:52]  So it's like, oh my God.
[00:16:54]  Why?
[00:16:54]  I mean, that's no, everyone who is there wants to be there at this point.
[00:16:59]  A lot of the FOBs had been in, well, not a lot of them, but a lot of the ones who are germane to our story had been in some, let's say, organizations over there in China.
[00:17:11]  And there were some conflicts with the ABCs and a little bit of bloodletting, some ass kicking.
[00:17:18]  And at this point, there are three big main gangs in Chinatown.
[00:17:24]  Now, Liz.
[00:17:25]  I'm sorry, but these sound like I'm just like used to like, you know, look, California girl grew up in the 90s.
[00:17:34]  I'm used to Bloods in the Crypts.
[00:17:36]  You know, this is what I know.
[00:17:39]  So when you tell me that the three big gangs are named the Hop Sing Boys, The Watching, which, okay.

=== Sparklers and Gangs (04:12) ===

[00:17:46]  I like that.
[00:17:47]  And the Joe Boys.
[00:17:48]  Joe Boys is rough.
[00:17:50]  I'm like, all it sounds to me, what I am immediately my head goes to, it's like, this is a Broadway show.
[00:18:00]  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:18:02]  It doesn't, I gotta say, like, if you have a gang, you gotta, I mean, Joe Boys is kind of a perfect name because if I had a gang, I would just name it the gay pussies.
[00:18:11]  Right.
[00:18:13]  Because then people would be like, well, I mean, come on.
[00:18:15]  I don't think he needs to explain it.
[00:18:17]  Yeah, of course.
[00:18:17]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:18:18]  Really, it's, I think the name really explains itself.
[00:18:21]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:22]  Or just the innocent guys is a good one, too.
[00:18:25]  Yeah.
[00:18:25]  With a Z.
[00:18:27]  Oh, yeah.
[00:18:27]  You know what's funny is, is, Liz, you know, a little bit with your rap thing here.
[00:18:34]  Actually, you know what?
[00:18:34]  Cue this on.
[00:18:35]  Welcome to fire.
[00:18:37]  Baby, take control now.
[00:18:40]  There's, I noticed that when you read a lot about these gangs in the 90s, a lot of people, there are a lot of Zs make a big, bigger, there was a gang in the 90s called Asian Boys with a Z.
[00:18:51]  Okay, that, that sounds fake.
[00:18:53]  I know, which is kind of cool.
[00:18:56]  So, all right, you've got all these, you know, these kind of gangs and you know what their big source of income here is?
[00:19:03]  I mean, there's running drugs and there's racketeering and all this stuff, but you know what the real big one is?
[00:19:08]  They're not making enough with the fireworks, baby.
[00:19:12]  Oh, my God.
[00:19:13]  Illegal fireworks out of Chinatown, huge, huge.
[00:19:16]  Even when I was a kid.
[00:19:18]  Oh, and an adult.
[00:19:19]  And a young adult and an older adult.
[00:19:21]  It still is there.
[00:19:23]  Yeah.
[00:19:23]  Like, and it's not like you have to go down some crazy CD alley to find it.
[00:19:27]  There will just be people selling it from the side of a van.
[00:19:29]  Yeah, real easy.
[00:19:31]  My question is, how much money is that really bringing in?
[00:19:34]  I don't know.
[00:19:34]  Enough, I guess.
[00:19:36]  I guess enough to like kill people over.
[00:19:38]  I mean, fireworks are fucking cool.
[00:19:41]  Yeah, that's what they call you.
[00:19:43]  Honestly, sometimes it's crazy when you look.
[00:19:44]  Mr. Fireworks.
[00:19:45]  How could you do that?
[00:19:46]  You always forget your own nicknames.
[00:19:47]  I know, but like, it's like crazy because sometimes when we like look at each other, it feels like there's fireworks.
[00:19:52]  Oh, my God.
[00:19:55]  But like the really shitty ones.
[00:19:57]  Hey.
[00:19:58]  But then at first, then they explode into something specific.
[00:20:01]  Yeah, then it turns into it's the kind that then is a smiley face.
[00:20:05]  Is that your favorite kind when they do the smiley face one?
[00:20:07]  Yeah.
[00:20:08]  The shapes.
[00:20:08]  You know, personally, I actually don't like those kinds because I feel like they're a bit like, that's a bit too modern for my taste.
[00:20:16]  It feels a bit garish.
[00:20:18]  So I, you know, I go classico style and I like the big, you know, big, expressive, like, you know, like a large fireworks.
[00:20:28]  Massive.
[00:20:29]  Yeah.
[00:20:30]  Yeah.
[00:20:30]  And I just like the simple colors.
[00:20:32]  Yes.
[00:20:33]  White, blue, red.
[00:20:37]  Red?
[00:20:37]  I don't know if I like red so much.
[00:20:39]  Okay, well, 4th of July, not your favorite holiday then.
[00:20:41]  You know what's crazy?
[00:20:42]  I was thinking about it.
[00:20:44]  Sparkler, women love sparklers in a way that I don't think I've ever.
[00:20:49]  A certain type of woman likes a sparkler.
[00:20:52]  Okay, let's not generalize here.
[00:20:55]  Oh, well.
[00:20:55]  Let's not generalize.
[00:20:56]  Let's generalize for a second.
[00:20:57]  A woman who appreciates classico-style fireworks.
[00:21:01]  Uh-huh.
[00:21:02]  Not impressed by the old sparkler.
[00:21:04]  I gotta tell you, fellas, you're out there.
[00:21:06]  You're going to a party.
[00:21:07]  The ratio is good.
[00:21:09]  There's 90% females in one man.
[00:21:12]  It's you.
[00:21:14]  Just bring yourself a little box of sparklers there, and I'll tell you.
[00:21:18]  Yeah, you're going to find yourself suddenly married.
[00:21:21]  That's more than one shrimp boy that's going to have a Wikipedia page, if you know what I mean.
[00:21:27]  I don't know what that means.
[00:21:28]  That you'll be such a prodigious coxman, despite your, you know, what's wrong with you, that people will write articles, and those articles will be cited on Wikipedia.
[00:21:55]  Anyways, so you might be like, all right, that's cool.

=== Imperial Palace Intrigue (03:35) ===

[00:21:58]  There's these three cute little gangs that are selling fireworks.
[00:22:01]  But unfortunately, they also start blowing the shit out of each other.
[00:22:05]  So in May 1977, a man named Kin Chen Lui was assassinated, likely by the Joe Boys.
[00:22:13]  He was actually found by a well-known beat poet named Michael McClure, who wrote this.
[00:22:17]  This is actually part of a longer poem about finding this guy's body.
[00:22:22]  Liz, could you read this?
[00:22:25]  I'm not doing beat voice, though.
[00:22:27]  Come on, come on.
[00:22:33]  No?
[00:22:34]  Now, on the day before my daughter's 21st birthday, on the afternoon of her party, cool.
[00:22:45]  I revisit the scene of the death of Kin Chun Lui.
[00:22:51]  He, too, was between 20 and 21.
[00:22:56]  The newspapers called him a small-time extortionist.
[00:23:00]  But what are we all but small-time extortionists in the proportionless universe?
[00:23:08]  I'm in awe of the thought of the coolness and sureness of his assassin.
[00:23:15]  All right, I gotta say, that poem sucks.
[00:23:17]  That fucking sucks, ass.
[00:23:18]  I don't, I hate this shit, man.
[00:23:20]  I hate beat.
[00:23:21]  I mean, besides all the creepy shit that they got up to, like, I got to say, if you're, if your era of guy, if one of the like lower ranking, annoying things they did was like basically spearhead the Nambla movement, then your movement sucks.
[00:23:36]  Yeah, totally.
[00:23:38]  You got a lot of splaining to do.
[00:23:39]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:23:40]  He got a lot of splaining to do.
[00:23:41]  I got to say, Jack Kerouac being like 700 pounds and just like an alcoholic Republican living in his mom's basement.
[00:23:48]  It's, I feel like that's an archetype for many a podcast fan.
[00:23:55]  Anyways, so this killing actually sparked a number of revenge killings, culminating in the famous Golden Dragon Massacre on Labor Day weekend of 1990.
[00:24:05]  I gotta say, as far as massacre names go, fucking sick ass name.
[00:24:10]  Yeah.
[00:24:10]  Oh, it's incredible.
[00:24:11]  The Golden Dragon's still around, too.
[00:24:14]  You just go eat it.
[00:24:14]  It's called like, yeah, no, but it has a different name, which now I'm forgetting.
[00:24:18]  Maybe it's like Imperial Palace.
[00:24:20]  It might be.
[00:24:21]  Is Imperial Palace?
[00:24:23]  It's like the big, right?
[00:24:27]  Yeah.
[00:24:27]  Well, that might be.
[00:24:29]  This is great podcasting.
[00:24:31]  Let me see.
[00:24:32]  Because I've been to the damn Golden Dragon before.
[00:24:34]  But it's not.
[00:24:35]  Oh, yeah, no, it is the Imperial Palace now.
[00:24:37]  It is the Imperial Palace.
[00:24:38]  You're right.
[00:24:38]  You're right.
[00:24:40]  Well, they kept my.
[00:24:40]  I didn't say you were wrong.
[00:24:42]  Oh, I could see the way you were looking at it.
[00:24:44]  Okay, I was looking to try to prove you wrong, but I have been there for the, I believe the Chinese Progressive Association's like Gala was Chinese food, sat at a table.
[00:24:55]  It was nice.
[00:24:55]  Yeah.
[00:24:56]  Good.
[00:24:57]  But I sat there the whole time.
[00:24:59]  Hairs in the back of my neck, standing up straight like a shrimp boy's shrimp.
[00:25:02]  My hand on my piece.
[00:25:07]  He's making, just in case everyone was, in case anyone was confused, he's motioning to a gun, not the and not because I'm afraid of Chinese assassins, but because I'm afraid of ancient ghosts.
[00:25:19]  So what happens at the fucking at the Golden Dragon Massacre is insane because three Joeboys bust into the door and they immediately start shooting up the place.
[00:25:29]  They like go up to people and like put guns at them and like movie style.

=== Prawn and Psycho Gunfight (05:56) ===

[00:25:33]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:34]  Movie style like exactly.
[00:25:36]  It's like psycho, psycho mode, psycho.
[00:25:39]  3 a.m.
[00:25:40]  They kill zero rival gangsters.
[00:25:43]  They kill five people.
[00:25:45]  They don't kill anybody else who is in a gang.
[00:25:48]  Yeah.
[00:25:48]  Seems like a misstep.
[00:25:50]  They also injure 11 other people.
[00:25:52]  It's like a pretty notorious, I mean, I think it's technically our worst massacre.
[00:25:55]  It's a huge, huge, I mean, yeah, it's called a massacre.
[00:25:58]  Also, it was on Labor Day weekend, so it's like a big, you know, big weekend.
[00:26:03]  The killers were eventually arrested after another spade of shootings with the help of a snitch, which we're going to get into snitching a little later, but people be snitching.
[00:26:15]  People be snitching and people be snitching quick.
[00:26:18]  Yeah, like immediately.
[00:26:20]  And they were actually at Rawling Shaw.
[00:26:21]  All of Joe's boys snitching.
[00:26:25]  In fact, the fucked up part is the Joe Boy that snitch was a student at Galileo High School.
[00:26:30]  Oh my God.
[00:26:32]  Then that snitch himself was actually killed in an LA jewelry store robbery in 84.
[00:26:37]  Not a coincidence.
[00:26:39]  All the killers have been released at this point, but most of them, I believe, now are in Hong Kong.
[00:26:43]  So, anyways, those convictions destroy the Joe Boys completely.
[00:26:47]  And now the Wa Ching, that gang, reigns supreme.
[00:26:53]  Now, there was someone present at the Golden Dragon Massacre that we forgot to mention at the time, 1977, a little boy who had just arrived in California like a year prior, I think.
[00:27:12]  He'd only been a year.
[00:27:13]  He was fresh off the boat.
[00:27:15]  Oh my God.
[00:27:16]  A little boy, and emphasis on little named Raymond Chow, aka shrimp boy.
[00:27:25]  So he is from Hong Kong, the bald son of a bar.
[00:27:29]  You know what?
[00:27:30]  Any kind of baldness surrounding a barber's life, that's a bad sign.
[00:27:36]  Or is it perhaps that the bald barber is the best barber because of the care that he would take for the thing he doesn't have?
[00:27:45]  Like he's chasing, you know, the, you know, he, I don't know.
[00:27:51]  This is my idea about the barber.
[00:27:52]  Wouldn't you worry that in a fit of Sweeney Toddy and jealousy that he would slash your throat Johnny Depp style?
[00:28:00]  Now, famously, of course, Sweeney Todd, a man of hair.
[00:28:04]  Oh my God.
[00:28:09]  I know we're not talking about it.
[00:28:10]  I got a lot to say about Johnny Depp and hair.
[00:28:12]  I was looking after we were talking earlier about Johnny Depp.
[00:28:14]  I looked at pictures of that motherfucker.
[00:28:17]  I stand by what I said.
[00:28:18]  You're right.
[00:28:19]  Okay.
[00:28:20]  And I will say this again.
[00:28:21]  I've said it on the podcast before.
[00:28:22]  I'll say it again.
[00:28:23]  And you know what?
[00:28:23]  I'm going to say it next week when we discuss this.
[00:28:26]  However, Johnny Depp is a hair actor.
[00:28:29]  Yes.
[00:28:29]  What that means is he just puts on different kinds of hair and acts like the hair.
[00:28:36]  Absolutely.
[00:28:37]  Show me Johnny Depp acting without a wig on, and I will show you a liar.
[00:28:44]  Like, Johnny Depp isn't capable of just act, like, being not wearing any crazy prosthesis or hair or anything and just acting like a normal guy.
[00:28:53]  The man is wigged.
[00:28:55]  Bring me that horizon.
[00:28:58]  I don't have anything good to say about him right now.
[00:29:01]  Okay, let's talk.
[00:29:02]  Rise of the shrimp.
[00:29:03]  Let's go.
[00:29:04]  So his father was a gambler and lost the house.
[00:29:08]  Cue the song.
[00:29:11]  And the business due to his gambling debts.
[00:29:14]  And so the family in Hong Kong moves to a one-room shanty, all six of them, and they struggle to survive.
[00:29:19]  At this point, Raymond Chow's grandmother, this is the most fucked up thing.
[00:29:24]  His own grandmother names him Ha Jai, which means shrimp boy.
[00:29:29]  Why is that fucked up?
[00:29:32]  Liz, you're joking.
[00:29:34]  I think shrimp boy's cute.
[00:29:36]  Let me ask you this, Liz.
[00:29:38]  Two guys come up to you.
[00:29:40]  They both want your hand in betrothal type marriage.
[00:29:44]  You have they look the same.
[00:29:46]  They act the same.
[00:29:47]  They're identical twins, actually, but they're not weird about it.
[00:29:49]  Well, I guess they are weird about it in this instance because they're both asking to marry you.
[00:29:52]  One is named Franklin Roosevelt, like a normal name.
[00:29:58]  Imagine I said another last name there.
[00:30:01]  And the other guy is like, I'm Shrimp Boy.
[00:30:05]  You're just yeah.
[00:30:07]  But it's a nickname.
[00:30:09]  It's a nickname.
[00:30:10]  That's even worse than it's a nickname, Liz.
[00:30:13]  I don't know.
[00:30:13]  I think it's endearing.
[00:30:15]  Okay, well.
[00:30:16]  Also, I do really like shrimp.
[00:30:18]  Yeah.
[00:30:19]  Yeah.
[00:30:20]  I mean, me too.
[00:30:21]  I guess I also do.
[00:30:22]  Delicious.
[00:30:23]  I don't like it when you got to tear those little legs off.
[00:30:25]  It feels weird to do.
[00:30:26]  You should be able to eat the legs.
[00:30:28]  Oh, yeah.
[00:30:28]  Like with the big, the prawns.
[00:30:30]  That's why I see.
[00:30:31]  I call that a prawn, not a shrimp.
[00:30:34]  I know it's the same, but really the prawn signifies the larger sort of.
[00:30:40]  I would say.
[00:30:42]  Yeah.
[00:30:42]  I mean, I guess the difference between a prawn and a shrimp is a prawn has legs and so it can walk on land.
[00:30:47]  All right.
[00:30:48]  Well, I don't think that's correct.
[00:30:50]  So Shrimp Boy's family is not doing well.
[00:30:52]  They're living in this shanty, and he joins a gang at the age of eight here in Hong Kong.
[00:30:55]  And by the age of nine, after having spent a while running heroin as a courier, stabs a guy in the head with a watermelon knife.
[00:31:03]  Okay, so he's running heroin before he turns 10 years old.
[00:31:08]  Yeah.
[00:31:08]  Oh, you think it's cool to do when you're 10?
[00:31:11]  I'm just saying he's tiny.
[00:31:13]  He's not even of a not just of shrimp size.
[00:31:16]  I mean, of age size.
[00:31:18]  Yeah.
[00:31:18]  He's tiny boy.
[00:31:19]  Agreed, which is perfect courier.
[00:31:21]  But yeah, no, he is that's, I mean, he is, he is on the streets from an early age here.
[00:31:25]  No.
[00:31:26]  Well, he does move to San Francisco, like I said, in 1976.

=== Shrimp Boy's Gambit (05:02) ===

[00:31:29]  He's about 16 at this time.
[00:31:32]  And he moves to San Francisco.
[00:31:34]  He basically gets introduced to the local, as we've called them, tongs, but really it's the local chapter of all the same kind of mafioso shit that he was already well versed in in Hong Kong.
[00:31:48]  He starts going to Galileo High School.
[00:31:53]  Notorious.
[00:31:54]  Every single gangster that we talk about in this episode, whether we mention this fact or not, everyone went to Galileo.
[00:32:00]  Everyone went to Galileo.
[00:32:02]  If you are from listening and you are from San Francisco or grew up in San Francisco, then you know what we're all talking about when we went to Galileo.
[00:32:10]  With a sly little smirk.
[00:32:12]  I used to kind of live near Galileo High School for a brief spell.
[00:32:17]  I couldn't go near it, but live near it.
[00:32:19]  So he was actually, so if you actually see pictures of Raymond Chow, Shrimp Boy from this time, he is fucking cut.
[00:32:26]  Yeah.
[00:32:27]  He is a beefy little dude.
[00:32:29]  He's a little roly-poly.
[00:32:30]  Exactly.
[00:32:31]  And that's so roly, more like strongman poly.
[00:32:34]  I'm of, I'm of kind of two minds about when short guys get really fit.
[00:32:38]  Because I feel like it's like, it's cool that you did that, but it's also like, I notice more that you're shorter now.
[00:32:44]  Oh, you think?
[00:32:45]  Because of the proportion thing?
[00:32:46]  Yeah.
[00:32:46]  And just like, I can tell that like you, you know, it's actually, I feel like more confident to me to be short and just let your body kind of go to shit than it is to be short and like in shape.
[00:32:57]  Right.
[00:32:58]  Well, you have the kind of, yeah, you end up kind of looking like a little bulldog.
[00:33:01]  Yeah.
[00:33:01]  Yeah.
[00:33:02]  I'm, it's scary to me.
[00:33:03]  Yeah.
[00:33:04]  Um, you know, it's like, it's, yeah.
[00:33:08]  So, but he is, I mean, he is, he is a fucking, he's a bruiser and a cruiser.
[00:33:14]  And so, Liz, this is, you and I talked about this for a while yesterday.
[00:33:18]  He actually gets paid to go on like a beatdown hit by a tongue.
[00:33:23]  Yeah.
[00:33:24]  So he gets hired by the Hop Sing Tong, right?
[00:33:32]  And this is like basically what Shrimp Boy, he tells the New York Times this much later, much later in our story in a quite fantastic spread that he did for the New York Times back in like 2015, I think.
[00:33:46]  But the Hop Sing Tong was hired by La Cosa Nostra, the infamous, I think, East Coast mafia from, but they're Sicilian, I think, right?
[00:33:58]  But, you know, based, really based on the East Coast, really more of an East Coast thing.
[00:34:02]  But so, okay, Cosa Nostra, they contract the Hop Sing Tong who hire Shrimp Boy as Muscle to go beat up a guy in Hillsborough, which shout out to our Bay Area listeners because that's a Bay Area thing, Hillsborough.
[00:34:17]  And they, he beats him so badly that the dude is like hospitalized, which is what he was hired to do.
[00:34:22]  And he got paid like $3,000, which by the way, this is 1977, which is an insane amount of money to get paid in 1977.
[00:34:30]  Do you know how many fucking sex pistols records you could buy with that?
[00:34:36]  I mean, yeah, that's a crazy ass amount.
[00:34:38]  Dude, getting paid $3,000 now to beat a guy's ass is an insane amount of money.
[00:34:42]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:34:43]  That's like more money than boxers that used to box out of my gym would make for a professional fight.
[00:34:48]  I mean, especially in Brandon's America.
[00:34:50]  Exactly.
[00:34:51]  I know $3,000.
[00:34:52]  You can barely buy a can of fucking beans with that.
[00:34:55]  Wait, that didn't make sense in the context of what we were talking about, but that was an inflation joke.
[00:35:02]  Anyways, This is the same year as the Golden Dragon Massacre and the Hop Sing Tong really like cementing their place as the main, I guess, criminal, criminal enterprise in Chinatown.
[00:35:16]  And their two little gangs, the Hop Sing Boys and the Watching underneath them.
[00:35:20]  Which is also to say that by the late 70s, Chinatown is hot, hot, hot.
[00:35:25]  Oh, yeah, baby.
[00:35:26]  I mean, it is a, it is, let's say people are doing the, when was disco invented?
[00:35:30]  People were doing disco there, but with firearms.
[00:35:34]  Actually, Shrimp Boy literally was doing that.
[00:35:36]  There's stories where he talks about running around Montgomery Street with a machine gun, just threatening people.
[00:35:44]  It's crazy, too, because San Francisco in 77 was very, that was like one of its like, San Francisco has had many peaks and valleys of cool times.
[00:35:54]  And from the 70s to the 80s, when it got really shitty, it was, I think, a lot of fun to actually be there.
[00:36:01]  It was in Babuhai Gardens on Broadway.
[00:36:05]  There was a friend of mine's dad actually opened up a little punk club in a deaf bar that was just for deaf people because they were like, we don't care if you guys play music because we can't the deaf club.
[00:36:17]  Yeah, it was, it was kind of a, it was, it was a cool time.
[00:36:21]  Not for Shrimp Boy, though, because in 78, when he'd been in the country for two years, 18 years old at this point, he robs one of Chinatown's many gambling joints.

=== Shrimp Boy's Lucky Escape (03:11) ===

[00:36:32]  And so he says it was a gambling joint.
[00:36:34]  The affidavits claim it was the Chinese Institute of Engineers, although it was definitely a bunch of guys gambling and was sentenced to 11 years in San Quentin.
[00:36:46]  That is a long time.
[00:36:48]  And he learns, you know, or he doesn't learn, excuse me.
[00:36:51]  He's trying to learn.
[00:36:52]  So he says deep sea welding there, which I don't really know how they're teaching you in a prison.
[00:36:59]  Yeah, there was like something too where he's like, oh, I was just about to get my certificate for deep sea.
[00:37:04]  It's like, how do you get a certificate in prison?
[00:37:06]  How do you practice?
[00:37:07]  You're getting your, like, because don't you need like a diversity?
[00:37:09]  You need to go through like a course before you're allowed to even dive in the first place, let alone start welding.
[00:37:14]  Anyways, he gets out in about seven years.
[00:37:17]  He's, by the way, when that, his welding thing falls through, he starts selling heroin in there.
[00:37:21]  And upon his release from prison, according to him, on the bus ride home, he meets a few ladies of the night outside a Vietnamese noodle joint and convinces them to work for him.
[00:37:32]  Which is just an incredible image in my head, by the way.
[00:37:35]  You have to say, like, the guy gets right out of prison, goes to get some noodles, looks out the window, and is like, all right, I got an idea.
[00:37:42]  I mean, I'm just impressed because this is, this is, this is a rise and grind kind of mindset because I'm getting out of prison.
[00:37:49]  I haven't had any nookie in seven years.
[00:37:51]  And I'm at the Vietnamese noodle shop and I see some ladies outside.
[00:37:55]  I'm not asking them to work.
[00:37:56]  I'm asking, please give me a kiss.
[00:37:58]  Work hard, play hard, man.
[00:38:00]  This is short guy bravado, though, too.
[00:38:03]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:38:04]  This is.
[00:38:04]  Just like, this is some real short king.
[00:38:08]  I mean, not real short king, because he does become a pimp, which is bad.
[00:38:11]  Yeah, that is bad.
[00:38:12]  Um, but he does become a pimp, which is bad.
[00:38:15]  And also, so he says, sort of folds his money, reinvests his money elsewhere in the crime trade, selling heroin, weapons, etc.
[00:38:24]  Um, I kind of think he's bullshitting because his story gets really weird here because he says he just like kind of stopped doing that and got a job at the lucky in daily city.
[00:38:35]  Yeah, he's well, I think he tries to get clean and tries to get out of the business, or maybe the business is getting too hot, possibly.
[00:38:42]  So, he tries to go work at the lucky in daily city, which, if you're familiar with the lucky in daily city, not a good situation.
[00:38:48]  If you don't know what a lucky is, it's kind of like a right-aid or a Walgreens, except they have ice cream there, right?
[00:38:53]  Yeah, but it's like actually, it was, I thought it was more of a grocery store, yeah.
[00:38:59]  Yes, it is.
[00:39:00]  It's it's yeah, you're right, you're right.
[00:39:02]  I think I might be thinking of something else, but no, it's more it's more than like a pharmacy kind of thing.
[00:39:06]  You're right, but it's like a you know, like a bagger or something, yeah.
[00:39:10]  But that didn't work out too well for him because uh, one of the gang squad members at the Daily City PD, or maybe it was the SFP, I think it was Daily City PD, uh, called his boss at Lucky's and got fired.
[00:39:23]  Yeah, which is fucked up.
[00:39:25]  That's not just let him be like a, you know, putting them, putting them Joe Biden beans that cost $10,000 up on the damn shelves.
[00:39:31]  Yeah, we should say that Shrimp Boy is dealing with the local PD and the feds.
[00:39:37]  I mean, this stuff goes way back.
[00:39:39]  So, these guys have been watching Shrimp Boy basically since 77.

=== Gavin's Troubled Past (15:31) ===

[00:39:43]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:39:44]  And so he gets a job.
[00:39:47]  I mean, this, you know, Jesus, he gets a job.
[00:39:50]  It's an unspecified at what card club in Oakland he gets a job at as a bodyguard.
[00:39:55]  I believe it's the only card club in Oakland, the Oaks Card Club, where I used to go to the Hofbrow.
[00:40:00]  And it was also hit with a massive Rico case in 2011 where a bunch of Chinese guys were indicted for drug dealing and racketeering.
[00:40:08]  It's actually a pretty nice spot, but yeah, you go there.
[00:40:11]  I think it's open 24 hours, and it's just all these like hunched over 60-year-old men just like playing cards.
[00:40:19]  I feel like, too, it's like, okay, he gets hired as a bouncer.
[00:40:22]  Shrimp boy, as a bouncer.
[00:40:24]  Yeah.
[00:40:25]  Okay.
[00:40:25]  We know that.
[00:40:26]  What are you going to bounce?
[00:40:27]  A golf ball?
[00:40:28]  Oh, my God.
[00:40:30]  Bouncy ball.
[00:40:31]  I know, but it's, I was going to say bouncy ball, but those are that's how I'm just be using the word bounce twice in a sentence.
[00:40:37]  Well, it feels wrong to do.
[00:40:41]  Anyways, he at some point in the early 90s also kidnaps a guy named Norman Shu, who is a major Democratic Party fundraiser.
[00:40:49]  Now, this is a rabbit hole we actually don't have time for today, but he was a big Norman was a big Ponzi scheme guy who prosecutors said defrauded around 250 people over $50 million during a decade-long scam.
[00:41:02]  He was also a huge heavy in the straw donor business, which we'll get into later with Shrimp Boy.
[00:41:09]  And he basically has people like fronting political, his political donations, which aka bribes.
[00:41:16]  He's like, you know, maxing out through other people.
[00:41:20]  According to an answering machine message, which Hillary Clinton left him, it was played at his trial.
[00:41:26]  Liz, can you read this actually in your Clinton voice?
[00:41:29]  If you have one.
[00:41:30]  Oh, I don't have a Hillary voice, I think.
[00:41:32]  I feel like we need like Felix to do it.
[00:41:35]  I've never seen anybody who has been more loyal and more effective and really just having a greater success supporting someone than you.
[00:41:45]  That's a horrible thing.
[00:41:46]  That doesn't even make sense.
[00:41:48]  If Hillary Clinton left me that message, I would demand a refund.
[00:41:51]  Worst LinkedIn recommendation ever.
[00:41:53]  Horrible.
[00:41:54]  So around this time, which is, again, this is the 1990s, Wohop Toe, one of the four major Hong Kong triads, start aggressively expanding into the U.S.
[00:42:04]  And Wohop Toe's efforts in America were led by a guy named Peter Chong.
[00:42:10]  And they were looking basically to take over every Chinese gang and someplace I've read, every Asian gang in the country.
[00:42:17]  And Shrimp Boy quickly ingratiates himself with Chong and becomes his number two.
[00:42:21]  And along with another guy named Wayne Kwong, Peter and Shrimp Boy talked about forming an umbrella organization called the Whole Earth Association.
[00:42:30]  That's nice sounding whole Earth Association.
[00:42:33]  Well, it's funny because all the like translations of almost most of the groups that we talk about here is just like benevolent society for like FN reunification.
[00:42:42]  But that's like the same thing when we always say they would, that always like the spookiest organizations have have names like the Company Incorporated of Companies.
[00:42:52]  Yes, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:52]  Global Investment Strategies or whatever.
[00:42:55]  So that's the same for Whole Earth Association.
[00:42:59]  Well, long story short, baby doll, all three go down on an incredible array of Ricoh charges, which by the way, Rico, we got to abolish that.
[00:43:08]  Every man for himself, I say.
[00:43:11]  Racketeering, extortion, murder for hire.
[00:43:14]  I think there's 48 charges in total for Shrimp Boy.
[00:43:17]  He's painted as a major Asian gang leader in America.
[00:43:20]  Chong fucking heads back to fucking Hong Kong, extradited almost a decade later because Shrimp Boy rats on him in exchange for a reduced sentence.
[00:43:33]  I can't believe this about Shrimp Boy.
[00:43:35]  I mean, here's the thing, though, is like gangsters are always like, you never talk.
[00:43:39]  Like, I'll never fucking talk.
[00:43:40]  Dude, they always talk.
[00:43:42]  Always talk.
[00:43:43]  Literally, no one talks more than gangsters.
[00:43:45]  It's crazy.
[00:43:46]  Every gangster either writes a memoir or they do an interview or they sell their fucking story to the feds.
[00:43:53]  Or they just talk exactly.
[00:43:55]  Or they just talk to the feds.
[00:43:56]  Nobody, there's like nobody in prison right now who has, who's just like, yeah, I guess I'm just going to do 40 for my guys.
[00:44:03]  Like, no, they all rat.
[00:44:05]  Yeah.
[00:44:06]  There's no honor in this world anymore.
[00:44:09]  Shrimp Boy, I mean, he goes to prison, though, even though he is a rat for 11 years.
[00:44:16]  So, this is his second stint, by the way.
[00:44:18]  Exactly.
[00:44:18]  And so he's already done seven in the pen.
[00:44:21]  He's doing 11 now.
[00:44:23]  And so 18 years total.
[00:44:25]  But after he talks to the feds in the early 2000s, he's released onto the mean streets of Chinatown.
[00:44:38]  So, Liz, 2003.
[00:44:41]  Great year.
[00:44:42]  I'm 47 years old.
[00:44:44]  Sure.
[00:44:45]  In 2003.
[00:44:46]  In 2003.
[00:44:46]  I'm running a successful e-commerce startup.
[00:44:50]  Okay.
[00:44:51]  I meet you.
[00:44:52]  You're at Magellan, a coder.
[00:44:55]  Okay.
[00:44:56]  Working in C.
[00:45:00]  And say you and I head over to a dim sum joint in Chinatown, have a couple of buns.
[00:45:08]  Okay.
[00:45:08]  We're sitting there clicking our chopsticks together, trying to figure out which way is the way you use them.
[00:45:13]  And you look over and you see a bald man covered in tattoos, tiny, like a mouse, eating, sitting back, arrayed with followers, admirers, and well-wishers.
[00:45:27]  That boy, that man, would be Shrimp Boy.
[00:45:31]  You know, I feel like he should have been started calling himself Shrimp Man at some point.
[00:45:34]  I feel like Shrimpman doesn't have the same ring to it.
[00:45:38]  You know what?
[00:45:38]  I gotta say, so Shrimp Boy gets out of prison, released out on the streets, 2003.
[00:45:43]  Great year.
[00:45:44]  Great vibes out there.
[00:45:46]  Oh, my God.
[00:45:46]  Yeah.
[00:45:47]  We've got, it's a good time.
[00:45:48]  Everyone's having a good time.
[00:45:50]  This begins Shrimp Boy's rehabilitation era.
[00:45:57]  And he basically becomes kind of a local folk hero.
[00:46:01]  Yeah.
[00:46:01]  Yeah.
[00:46:02]  I mean, nobody likes anything more than like a reformed gangster.
[00:46:05]  Oh, yeah.
[00:46:06]  Sensitive thug.
[00:46:07]  Exactly.
[00:46:08]  Exactly.
[00:46:09]  That's what they call me.
[00:46:10]  And so he gets out and he starts becoming like a volunteer community guy.
[00:46:15]  He doesn't exactly get, you know, a job or anything like that.
[00:46:19]  He starts getting into politics, including the recall Aaron Peskin campaign, which is so funny.
[00:46:26]  Aaron Peskin, the drunkest human being in San Francisco's history.
[00:46:29]  Also, the only person in San Francisco is maybe shorter than Shrimp Boy.
[00:46:34]  You know, he's hanging out with Gavin Newsome, the Getty himself.
[00:46:40]  By the way, Mr. Plump Jack Lines.
[00:46:42]  Good Lord.
[00:46:44]  Was that his?
[00:46:45]  Yes.
[00:46:46]  That's the one that he had.
[00:46:49]  Gavin, okay, when Gavin was out on the social scene before he became Mr. Mayor, he like was in a wine shop business with one of the Gettys and was called Pumpjack.
[00:47:02]  It's crazy because the Gettys, Max, Max met Gavin Newsome when he was really young because he was Max knew like an illegitimate Getty daughter, I guess.
[00:47:11]  Yeah, this is before I, anyways, I don't want to ride him out too much, but he had a mohawk and Gavin Newsom walked by and was like, hey, nice, nice mohawk, kid.
[00:47:21]  Oh my God.
[00:47:22]  The Gettys, the Trainas.
[00:47:24]  I got some good stories about those people.
[00:47:26]  These people are freaks.
[00:47:28]  But one of the Gettys had, and I can say this, had dreadlocks.
[00:47:32]  So he becomes a professional reform gangsters, although he kind of still likes to tell everyone, like, yeah, my car is bulletproof.
[00:47:37]  Like, I'm kind of like a hunted man, but also the community loves me.
[00:47:41]  He ingratiates himself, like I said, with a lot of city officials, you know, Gavin Newsome, Tom Amiano, which is, I once saw Tom Amiano say, I'm the real AOC, Amiano on cannabis, which I actually thought was, didn't make a lot of sense, but I still laughed.
[00:47:58]  The man looks weed.
[00:47:59]  And David Chu, although Chu is a special case, when he was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2008, he's approached by someone in Chinatown that says, shrimp boy, like, watch out for Shrimp Boy in a threatening way.
[00:48:11]  His family in Boston starts getting calls threatening people on behalf of Shrimp Boy, and he ends up getting police protection because of Shrimp Boy.
[00:48:19]  I mean, Shrimp Boy is like, on the one hand, he does kind of have this like reformed gangster thing going on, which yes, local politicos love.
[00:48:29]  And we should say at this time too, Chinatown is chocked full of developers hungry to redevelop and like, you know, build out Chinatown itself.
[00:48:45]  And so people like Rose Pak, who's very, very important in the San Francisco political scene, she's the head of the, I think it's the Chamber of Commerce in Chinatown.
[00:48:55]  Was, yeah.
[00:48:56]  Was no longer.
[00:48:57]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:48:58]  She's dead.
[00:48:59]  Oh, she is?
[00:49:00]  Yes, yes, yes.
[00:49:01]  She died.
[00:49:02]  I don't know.
[00:49:03]  I haven't been paying attention.
[00:49:04]  But she was super tight with Willie Brown and all of those circles who, I mean, Willie Brown, God bless him, blind as a bat, still, I think, probably had two, three strokes at this point.
[00:49:16]  When I say God bless him, I mean God damn him because he's son of a bitch.
[00:49:21]  Rose Pack, I gotta say, the one good thing about Rose Pack is there are many sort of convincing rumors that she also functioned as something like a, let's say, a source of information for the intelligence services of the People's Republic of China.
[00:49:34]  Oh, that's funny.
[00:49:34]  I am not surprised.
[00:49:36]  But she also basically stole the election for Ed Lee using, you know, really gangster tactics in Chinatown, et cetera.
[00:49:43]  But all these people are kind of like, there's a lot of money pouring into San Francisco, dot-com money pouring in.
[00:49:51]  Gavin Newsom himself is like newly, newly mayor, newly like looking at rising up.
[00:49:59]  He's yet to run for lieutenant governor, but everyone knows that the man is, you know, a political charmer.
[00:50:05]  And having someone be this kind of like face of reformed Chinatown is like a win-win for politicos, developers, and Shrimp Boy himself, right?
[00:50:16]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[00:50:18]  He can kind of get this career.
[00:50:19]  I mean, he hangs out a lot with this group called United Players with a Z, you know, who's like talking to kids about being a gangster and all that kind of stuff.
[00:50:27]  Like, you shouldn't do it, but also it's kind of tight.
[00:50:29]  He gets a normie girlfriend named Alicia Lowe.
[00:50:32]  Yeah.
[00:50:33]  She seems cool.
[00:50:34]  Yeah, she's seen.
[00:50:35]  I feel bad for the lady.
[00:50:36]  And he's actually even writing an autobiography and working on a film deal.
[00:50:40]  And you know what, Liz?
[00:50:42]  The guy is so involved in his community.
[00:50:44]  He actually gets involved in an organization, a, let's say, fraternal self-help organization called the G Kung Tong.
[00:50:53]  In fact, he becomes the head of that tong after the tragic murder, unsolved, of course, of a man named Alan Leal.
[00:51:17]  All right, so...
[00:51:18]  So before we get into the unsolved murder of Alan Le Young, we got to say that basically this is now the part of the story where we introduce the fall of the shrimp.
[00:51:31]  So we've had the rise of the shrimp, and then we have, of course, the tragic fall of the shrimp.
[00:51:36]  And that is kind of centered around this thing called Operation White Suit.
[00:51:41]  That's right, baby.
[00:51:42]  It really is basically the feds take down Shrimp Boy.
[00:51:46]  This was an eight-year investigation.
[00:51:49]  And amazingly, what starts as a federal probe into the Geekung Tong and Shrimp Boy's like, you know, his own activities basically sparked a separate but even wilder federal investigation into their relationship with a bunch of local SF politicians.
[00:52:06]  The code name of that investigation, and I swear to God, this is real, is called Operation Frank Discussion.
[00:52:14]  Jeez, Louis.
[00:52:16]  So fucking funny to me.
[00:52:20]  That investigation eventually led to the conviction of state senator Leland Yee and the arrest of multiple local San Francisco politicos.
[00:52:29]  The God.
[00:52:30]  Yeah, the mayor of the time, Ed Lee, we keep talking about him.
[00:52:32]  He denied any knowledge of any kind of pay-to-play activities from his campaign staff, but he like 100% for sure knew.
[00:52:40]  Also, he's now dead, as we mentioned.
[00:52:42]  And a lot of his cronies were eventually later arrested for crimes that would not have been out of place.
[00:52:47]  Yes.
[00:52:47]  Spoiler alert too, Shrimp Boy doesn't fare too well.
[00:52:50]  He ends up life in prison.
[00:52:52]  We're going to talk about it.
[00:52:53]  Leland also ends up in the old Gray Bar Hotel himself.
[00:52:58]  And Ed Lee, of course, dies of a heart attack literally in the ice cream aisle at Safeway on Monterey Boulevard, which if you know the Safeway I'm talking about, I think at least feels sufficiently undignified.
[00:53:09]  Yes.
[00:53:10]  I remember when that happened and it was, everyone was kind of just like, hmm.
[00:53:13]  Well, wonder who's going to be mayor.
[00:53:16]  That's sad.
[00:53:17]  Yeah, it was London Breed.
[00:53:19]  All right.
[00:53:20]  So let's back up for a second and walk through what happened here.
[00:53:24]  So we're in 2006.
[00:53:26]  A guy named Alan Leung, he's 56.
[00:53:30]  He's found dead inside his own import-export business on Jackson Street, which is mere blocks away from Hop Sing on Waverly.
[00:53:42]  Reports were that a masked gunman broke in, demanded a bunch of cash.
[00:53:47]  And though Alan agreed to give him the money, he gets shot dead before he's able to grab the money.
[00:53:53]  Alan's wife is standing there just watching the whole time.
[00:53:56]  So as Brace kind of laughed at, import-export might give a clue.
[00:54:00]  Alan is not just a simple minority small business owner trying to make it on his buck.
[00:54:04]  He actually ran a small business, one, trading shark fin.
[00:54:10]  Okay.
[00:54:10]  Which is illegal.
[00:54:12]  But should it be?
[00:54:13]  And actually, he was what we call the dragonhead, the head of the tongs.
[00:54:19]  In fact, two tong orgs, the hopsing tong and the qi kong tong, the, you know, also aka the Chinese Freemasons, which is sort of their like more legitimate name.
[00:54:28]  They're not actually, to be clear, Freemasons.
[00:54:31]  And I'm not really sure why they're called that, but yeah.
[00:54:33]  I don't know either.
[00:54:35]  I think it's just to lend it some sort of like elk club sounding thing.
[00:54:39]  Yeah.
[00:54:40]  It is not an elk club.
[00:54:42]  Although maybe it's a kind of elk club.
[00:54:44]  I don't know.
[00:54:44]  Anyway, I want to say not coincidentally too, just so we get a little picture of Alan Leon here.
[00:54:51]  He was also appointed by Willie Brown to the board of the Chinatown Economic Development Group.
[00:54:57]  Oh, yeah.
[00:54:57]  And Gavin Newsom personally reappointed him.
[00:55:01]  So this man was fully enmeshed in the San Francisco political world.
[00:55:06]  He also had the highest honorary position for pro-Taiwan leaders as a commissioner for the government of Taiwan, which is really funny.

=== Shrimp Boy and the Board (16:05) ===

[00:55:15]  Yes.
[00:55:16]  And you know, it's funny about the Chinatown economic development thing.
[00:55:19]  I believe the one big thing that they've been able to get done, which is a big thing and actually been able to get done isn't really the right phrase for it.
[00:55:27]  But the insane subway to Chinatown that they're making costs billions of dollars and covers about eight blocks and tears up all these businesses.
[00:55:34]  It's a fucking, Should say too that you know, even for Alan, that almost all actually not almost all Taiwanese government positions are honorary.
[00:55:46]  So, yeah, you know, I mean, it's just it's like uh, Taiwan is kind of like the Texas of China, right?
[00:55:52]  It's like, okay, you're independent, you know, you're the lone star state, but like, really should be so.
[00:55:59]  Alan's death unsolved, his murder unsolved.
[00:56:03]  There's a huge memorial service, it's held at Victory Hall in Chinatown, and there's like a fucking massive procession down, I think it's down Montgomery, um, with like hundreds of people marching down the street in attendance.
[00:56:18]  Yeah, um, this included at the time, by the way, then San Francisco Assemblyman Lilin Yi, okay, then city supervisor Fiona Ma, the goat, and even a guess, an actual cabinet member of the Taiwanese government.
[00:56:35]  Bizarre.
[00:56:36]  Uh, there was another man in attendance, by the way, a man curiously, ostentatiously fitted in a white, albeit a small white suit, who was leading a Free Mason suit salute, which is very funny.
[00:56:51]  If you can't guess by now, the man in the white suit, Shrimp Boy.
[00:56:55]  He is the same tailor as Hezbollah, actually.
[00:56:58]  I believe they believe they say we go to the same guy.
[00:57:00]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:57:01]  That's who inherited it.
[00:57:03]  Yeah, so it turns out Shrimp Boy and the local mafia so slash Foliticos were not the only guys in attendance.
[00:57:11]  There were multiple agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
[00:57:15]  And this is kind of what begins the years-long federal investigation into Raymond Chow, aka Shrimp Boy, which was because of this very moment dubbed Operation White Suit.
[00:57:29]  So, all right, the Fed start investigating him because of the white suit, and they're like, Oh, that means you're like ascending to power, which is like, okay, maybe he is ascending to power.
[00:57:38]  Chow says, or Shrimp Boy rather says that, uh, you know, it's a sign of respect and like we do this at Chinese funerals.
[00:57:44]  He's, by the way, the only person in a white suit actually is.
[00:57:46]  Yeah, I don't buy it.
[00:57:48]  I think, uh, yeah, I think Shrimp Boy knows what he's doing.
[00:57:50]  Uh, I will say that as somebody who worked in a heavily Chinese neighborhood that was in a flower stand that was on the way to the graveyards in Colma, Chinese people do be buying white flowers to lay on graves and stuff.
[00:58:06]  There's actually, I believe, two Chinese, at least one Chinese graveyard holiday called Qingming, which would be one of our big money maker days of the year.
[00:58:15]  Um, and that's a little floris factoid.
[00:58:18]  I like that little fluores factoid.
[00:58:20]  So, this investigation, Operation White Suit, like all, basically all very good, no problem at all with any part of them investigations by the FBI, relies heavily on criminal informants and undercover officers.
[00:58:35]  Yeah, it's crazy how this all culminated in Shrimp Boy actually in going on a shooting rampage.
[00:58:41]  But I guess just the FBI didn't catch him in time.
[00:58:43]  Oh my God.
[00:58:44]  No.
[00:58:45]  This case primarily rests on the hard work of one agent, UCE499 aka, who I'm going to refer to agent 99, because that sounds cool.
[00:58:56]  A man who went by the name Dave Jordan, one of the worst undercover names I've ever heard, who posed as a member of the Cosa Nostra.
[00:59:05]  Yeah.
[00:59:06]  Like he literally showed up, was like, yeah, I'm a mobster.
[00:59:08]  I'm from the East Coast.
[00:59:10]  I'm extending the business.
[00:59:13]  Oh, you know, no pizza pies here in Chinatown, huh?
[00:59:16]  Yeah.
[00:59:16]  No, this actually was remarkably successful.
[00:59:19]  Yeah, it's crazy how this worked because I mean, from, I mean, obviously I'm not privy to all the details in this investigation, but I've read the entire affidavit.
[00:59:26]  It's a long affidavit.
[00:59:27]  I'm not sure really how he was able to convince these guys of all of this stuff.
[00:59:31]  I guess he had a lot of money.
[00:59:33]  Well, he was able, so he was able to ingratiate himself with Shrimp Boy through an introduction by another undercover agent.
[00:59:40]  This was a guy named Jimmy Chen.
[00:59:41]  Okay, now that's a good name.
[00:59:43]  Yeah.
[00:59:43]  And Jimmy himself, he like tried to run rope Shrimp Boy into a bunch of deals.
[00:59:49]  So he, for like two years, he was trying.
[00:59:52]  There's like hours and hours of FBI tapes of him trying to get Shrimp Boy to take FBI bait.
[00:59:58]  But he's unsuccessful.
[01:00:00]  So in 2010, after basically getting like wasted and part, they would just get like wasted and party like hard.
[01:00:07]  Party fucking hard.
[01:00:09]  Shrimp boy like tells Jimmy, and this is such a kind of sensitive thug quote, which I really like.
[01:00:15]  He goes, I don't dance no more.
[01:00:18]  That's so sick.
[01:00:19]  That's so that's really cool.
[01:00:22]  And actually, you know, I want to say, Brace so far has been saying, I want to play this song.
[01:00:29]  We're going to play this song.
[01:00:30]  I have another song for this section.
[01:00:33]  And I think we should start it right now.
[01:00:39]  Now, that to me really encapsulates the ethos and vibe of the moment here.
[01:00:47]  That's what we're doing.
[01:00:48]  Yeah.
[01:00:48]  So Jimmy Chen vouches for Dave Jordan and he's like, don't worry about it.
[01:00:54]  I know this guy's dad.
[01:00:55]  He's a total legit mobster.
[01:00:57]  He's on the East Coast.
[01:00:58]  He's with the Costa Nostra.
[01:01:00]  They do mob stuff.
[01:01:01]  And I don't know.
[01:01:02]  Somehow this like fucking works.
[01:01:05]  He stays undercover for about four years, basically eventually getting indoctrinated as a quote unquote consultant for the CKT in 2012, which is actually pretty legit.
[01:01:17]  So I got to say, too, that's probably one of the most fun undercover jobs you could possibly have.
[01:01:24]  Imagine like you're the FBI agent who has to go undercover like the fucking, I don't know, Aryan nations in order to get them to commit some robberies or something or kill somebody.
[01:01:32]  And then imagine you're the guy who gets to hang out with Shrimp Boy.
[01:01:35]  Yeah, cue the song night and day.
[01:01:38]  Yeah, and Dave, by the way, like goes fucking nutty with it.
[01:01:42]  So he shows up with all these off-the-truck crates of Johnny Walker and Hennessy.
[01:01:47]  And he's like, DePops is jacking trucks and de Big Apple or whatever he says in Mobster Voice.
[01:01:53]  Yeah.
[01:01:53]  And all the SF Chinatown gangsters are like, damn, that's cool.
[01:01:57]  And so Dave starts supplying all of like the Chinatown restaurants and bars and businesses, some of which are very cool, by the way.
[01:02:06]  Yes.
[01:02:06]  With all this like illegal liquor, which, by the way, just because I really want to drive this home, Dave is an undercover FBI agent.
[01:02:13]  This is Agent 99.
[01:02:15]  So the government of the United States of America is just supplying Chinatown restaurants and bars with like racks and racks and racks of like illegal Johnny Walker.
[01:02:26]  Whoa, it's crazy.
[01:02:29]  I was getting super drunk in Chinatown around this time too.
[01:02:33]  Everyone was going to Lipo.
[01:02:34]  Remember when like girls playing Lipo?
[01:02:36]  That was happening right now.
[01:02:37]  Yeah, Buddha Bar.
[01:02:38]  Fucking I went to.
[01:02:39]  I went to a bar there with my buddy, Eric for his birthday or we were just walking around and uh, it's called like the Lips Lounge or something, and we get down there and it's like we're like oh, it's karaoke.
[01:02:49]  And then we realize that it's like a.
[01:02:51]  It's like a bar for, let's say, women that might work for Shrimp Boy, I see, and I I drank a Budweiser that had expired in 2006, in 2010.
[01:03:01]  Yeah well, the government wasn't helping that bar.
[01:03:03]  No, we're not.
[01:03:05]  Dave aka agent 99 is like fucking partying with Shrimp Boy.
[01:03:09]  They are i'm talking like they're going to Morton's.
[01:03:12]  They're going to hanging out with strippers.
[01:03:14]  They're doing blow.
[01:03:15]  They're doing three stems like cue the song.
[01:03:21]  You know what, cue the other song too, but also cue my song too.
[01:03:29]  All of this gets recorded on tape and what's funny is that it's not actually an open and shut case for the government.
[01:03:37]  So let me let's pull up an example of this.
[01:03:40]  There's a recorded conversation between Shrimp Boy and Dave Agent99, where Dave offers him an envelope and Shrimp is on the recording going like no, I don't do that, I don't know.
[01:03:53]  And Dave is like, you can say no and that's fine, but I want you to take this, so there's Kind of a lot of gray area there.
[01:04:00]  This happens a lot, too.
[01:04:02]  Like, there's many, many, many, many instances of them trying to be like, you know, here's some money, or like, you know, what do you think about this illegal venture?
[01:04:11]  And Shrimp Boy is like, I don't do that anymore.
[01:04:14]  No, I mean, maybe he suspected something was amiss, but he also did hang out with this guy a lot.
[01:04:19]  So, I mean, he couldn't have suspected too much.
[01:04:21]  But he was really adamant.
[01:04:23]  And basically, I mean, there's almost no quotes that they can really pin on him where he actually admits to or does take part in illegal activities.
[01:04:32]  Yeah, so much so that during the trial, like it's not, or like when they, the, the, the first indictment, which has a shit ton of counts on it, like 162.
[01:04:44]  I don't have the number written for me.
[01:04:45]  I say an obscene amount, or over 140, don't include two charges that the feds tack on later.
[01:04:52]  They tack on two murder charges because the Rico and racketeering case was so weak based on what they actually had on tape from Shrimp Boy.
[01:05:02]  Oh, yeah.
[01:05:04]  Which is to say that that gray area is basically what Shrimp Boy's lawyers argue when he gets arrested March 2014.
[01:05:14]  Massive FBI raid.
[01:05:15]  Over a dozen federal officers break down his girlfriend's door in the middle of the night and they handcuff Shrimp Boy on the floor.
[01:05:23]  They hit him with, yeah, over 140 counts, including not limited to racketeering, money laundering, conspiracy, trafficking, contraband cigarettes.
[01:05:34]  What's a contraband cigarette?
[01:05:36]  They're like, listen, we're going to sell these American spirits to men and not women.
[01:05:41]  Oh my God.
[01:05:44]  So I want to pause for one second and mention just a real quick word about Shrimp Boy's lawyers before we get into the stuff with the politicians.
[01:05:56]  Because Jay Tony Sarah is just an incredible character in a slew of incredible characters in this story.
[01:06:02]  This is a real Bay Area legend.
[01:06:05]  He is.
[01:06:06]  I want to say that his Wikipedia page describes him first and foremost as a tax resistor.
[01:06:12]  Me too.
[01:06:13]  Which, by the way, he actually did.
[01:06:15]  He refused to pay taxes during the Bush administration on account of the Iraq war.
[01:06:19]  And then he fucking went to jail for it, which is cool as hell.
[01:06:22]  Then when he gets out, he sued the state seeking wage restitution, arguing that prison wages were unconstitutional.
[01:06:29]  I mean, he has, I believe, been working pro bono since the 1960s.
[01:06:33]  Yes.
[01:06:34]  Like, I don't think he's ever actually taken money for a case.
[01:06:36]  Yeah, he's now 87.
[01:06:38]  He, at the time of the trial, he was 80, a ripe 80.
[01:06:41]  And he successfully defended Huey Newton against those bunk murder charges that the cops tried to hit Huey with back in whatever it was.
[01:06:49]  It was like, they tried like three times.
[01:06:51]  It was like 65 or something up through the 70s.
[01:06:54]  And for people who know that history with the Black Panthers, the attempt to get Huey on murder, and then I think they tried manslaughter a couple of times or whatever, it sparked these like three years of protest movements where people are rallying around that slogan, Free Huey, Free Huey.
[01:07:10]  J. Tony Sarah basically brings that back with Shrimp Boy and starts minting free shrimp boy shirts.
[01:07:16]  If you have one of these, by the way, if you were able to procure a free shrimp boy shirt, please let us know.
[01:07:23]  And if you're willing to part with it, really, most importantly.
[01:07:25]  We should probably just make our own.
[01:07:27]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:07:28]  I guess we could just boot them.
[01:07:29]  We could boot like them.
[01:07:31]  Yeah, yeah, that free shrimp boy.
[01:07:33]  Really took off.
[01:07:34]  This was like, this was a moment.
[01:07:35]  Free Shrimp Boy.
[01:07:37]  If you were in San Francisco in this era when this song was playing, then you remember Free Shrimp Boy.
[01:07:44]  And he was already this kind of local icon.
[01:07:47]  And now he becomes this real like folk anti-hero to the city.
[01:07:51]  So the thing is, it's not just Shrimp Boy that goes down here either.
[01:07:56]  Shrimp Boy is the only one who is really worthy of a t-shirt slogan type case, but he takes a couple other, and by a couple other, I mean like almost over two dozen other people down with him.
[01:08:09]  And this includes Leland Yee, who is now actually a state senator at this point.
[01:08:15]  Not now as in the present day, but now as in the time we're talking about in the podcast.
[01:08:19]  Yes.
[01:08:19]  Yeah.
[01:08:20]  He represented about half of San Francisco, which is a county and a city.
[01:08:24]  In fact, I love to repeat.
[01:08:26]  He had no city council, just a board of supervisors because it's one of the same.
[01:08:31]  Yes.
[01:08:31]  Also why the city has such a huge budget.
[01:08:35]  But he also represented some of San Mateo in the state.
[01:08:39]  And I literally cannot remember a time in my life, I grew up in San Francisco, where I did not see a Leland Yee sign or a post in a window, poster like in a window.
[01:08:47]  And like this man ran the sunset.
[01:08:50]  Yeah, I didn't grow the sunset, but I saw these posters every fuck every fucking place.
[01:08:54]  He was a bigwig.
[01:08:55]  I mean, Leland Yee is a state senator from that district that he represented is a big deal.
[01:09:01]  And he had a lot of, let's say, clout in the city.
[01:09:05]  So Leland gets charged with six counts of depriving the public of honest services, which is a really funny charge.
[01:09:12]  That's a crime.
[01:09:13]  One count of conspiracy to traffic in guns, which is a very crazy crime.
[01:09:21]  It turns out he got got by another undercover FBI agent.
[01:09:25]  So let's walk through how this went down.
[01:09:28]  Leland Yee was running for Secretary of State.
[01:09:32]  He, which, but Secretary of State of California, to be honest.
[01:09:37]  He was based.
[01:09:38]  He was serving on his second and final term as state senator.
[01:09:41]  There's a term limit there.
[01:09:42]  And he had also served as a California state assemblyman, a San Francisco County Supervisor, San Francisco School Board.
[01:09:50]  Look, the man's a politician.
[01:09:52]  He had it all, right?
[01:09:54]  Yeah, and that is always, by the way, the trajectory.
[01:09:56]  They always start at the San Francisco School Board, which we have talked about.
[01:10:01]  Not, I don't know if we've talked about the podcast.
[01:10:02]  We've definitely talked about each other.
[01:10:04]  The San Francisco School Board is one of the most bad shit, nasty, crazy establishments.
[01:10:10]  We should do an episode about that.
[01:10:11]  It is, it is a place where if you get declared by God and the government to be the most mentally insane human being in your closest, you know, maybe the city that you are in or whatever, move to San Francisco, become a member of the school board, go nuts.
[01:10:26]  Yeah, they'll love to have you.
[01:10:27]  They'll love you there.
[01:10:28]  Yeah, I want to say just one couple words about Leland.
[01:10:31]  So Leland once tried to criminalize violent video games in the state of California, which passed and I believe was shut down by the Supreme Court.
[01:10:45]  So not a friend to gamers.
[01:10:47]  He also was once arrested for boosting a bottle of suntan oil by putting it in the front of his shorts.
[01:10:52]  And I really only included this because I really wanted to say boosting.
[01:10:56]  Well, okay, I want to be clear here because there's a lot of different reasons that a guy would put like a large bottle on the front of his shorts.
[01:11:04]  And like, I don't know, you know, he wasn't stealing it.
[01:11:07]  Maybe he was just trying to make the clerk think he was cool.
[01:11:10]  Oh my God.
[01:11:11]  Had a big penis.
[01:11:12]  Despite all of this, Leland Yi has never lost a race ever in his entire political career.

=== FBI Agent's Undercover Mission (14:51) ===

[01:11:20]  That is until he met a man named Ed Lee.
[01:11:28]  So Leland's path to victory in San Francisco always went straight through the sizable Chinese American base in the city.
[01:11:37]  He like really never had to compete for those votes before in his political career.
[01:11:41]  Basically, I mean, some of the reason is also because of the districts he was running in, right?
[01:11:46]  But that was like always his base.
[01:11:48]  Ed Lee comes in, who was now we kind of back up a little bit.
[01:11:54]  He was an appointment mayor.
[01:11:55]  This was like a contested kind of hot potato.
[01:11:58]  Basically, Newsom ran for lieutenant governor, which was at the time we were like, God, that's so weird.
[01:12:04]  He's running for that.
[01:12:05]  Smarter than me, because now he's a fucking governor.
[01:12:08]  Runs for lieutenant governor.
[01:12:10]  He was the mayor at the time.
[01:12:12]  He's got to step down.
[01:12:13]  They've got to appoint an interim mayor.
[01:12:16]  And basically, every single local San Francisco anybody is like, you got to appoint me.
[01:12:23]  Yeah.
[01:12:24]  The Board of Supervisors was like completely divided.
[01:12:27]  And out of this like war of division and everything emerges Ed Lee, which, if you don't know what Ed Lee looks like, please right now, stop the podcast.
[01:12:37]  Google him.
[01:12:38]  A diminutive, tiny little man.
[01:12:40]  He's very unassuming, very meek.
[01:12:44]  Zero charisma.
[01:12:45]  Didn't punch me when I said something nasty to him prior to his death.
[01:12:50]  But, you know, Ed Lee was sort of the choice that people could kind of be like, all right, because number one, Ed Lee promised and he gave his word on this that he was going to be a caretaker interim appointment mayor.
[01:13:03]  He was very clear about this.
[01:13:04]  This was the reason that people voted to allow this to happen.
[01:13:08]  And by people, I mean like Board of Supervisors allowed this to happen is because Ed Lee said, no, I don't want to be mayor.
[01:13:14]  I have no political ambitions.
[01:13:15]  And he did seem like an ambitionless man.
[01:13:18]  Even though I'm best friends with Willie Brown, don't even worry about it.
[01:13:20]  But don't worry about it.
[01:13:21]  I'm not taking for mayor.
[01:13:23]  Here's a little hot tip.
[01:13:24]  Well, true-non hot tip.
[01:13:25]  If you find yourself in a situation where you're in a highly contested interim mayor race, election, debacle, and a kind of out-of-the-blue compromise candidate emerges who says that they will be a caretaker mayor and not run for re-election.
[01:13:47]  Don't believe them.
[01:13:48]  No, Don't believe them.
[01:13:51]  A woman named Rose Pack says, you know what?
[01:13:54]  Ed has said he doesn't want to be mayor, but I'm going to put up thousands and tens of thousands of dollars worth of signs all over the city with the slogan, run, Ed, run on them, because the people demand that Ed Lee, a guy that most people had never heard of six months prior, actually runs for mayor.
[01:14:10]  And he does run for mayor.
[01:14:11]  Yeah, he wins.
[01:14:12]  And here's the thing that sucks for Leland because Leland, the man who is running out of political positions to take and run for, he himself was running for mayor.
[01:14:22]  Uh-huh.
[01:14:23]  And now Ed Lee comes in, takes that Chinese American base right out from under him, and boom, Leland cannot survive the raw political prowess of Ed Lee, finishes fifth place.
[01:14:36]  And that, which is actually fifth place, I got to say, on that election, that does not great.
[01:14:40]  I think behind broke ass Stewart, who always runs for mayor.
[01:14:46]  Yes.
[01:14:46]  I mean, the guy is running constantly.
[01:14:49]  Broke ass Stewart.
[01:14:51]  Yeah, that's how you say it.
[01:14:53]  So yeah, this is a pathetic showing for him.
[01:14:57]  The problem is, though, it actually costs a lot of money to run for mayor.
[01:15:01]  And he racks up about $70,000 worth of debt, which is really makes it tough to run for the next election that he plans on running for, which is, like we said, Secretary of State.
[01:15:13]  Yeah.
[01:15:13]  So this is when his right-hand man, a man named Keith Jackson, decides to go to work.
[01:15:19]  Now, Keith is the former head of the San Francisco Board of Education and himself a bit of a power broker.
[01:15:27]  He runs a, let's say, I'm going to use some huge air quotes here, really exaggerated air quotes consulting firm called Jackson Consulting.
[01:15:40]  So Keith goes to Leland.
[01:15:42]  It's like, don't worry about it, man.
[01:15:44]  I'm going to hit you up.
[01:15:46]  Our friend Raymond needs some help.
[01:15:51]  Keith introduces Leland to, yes, our friend Shrimp Boy.
[01:15:57]  By the song.
[01:15:59]  Now, to Leland's credit, Leland knows who Shrimp Boy is.
[01:16:03]  He's not, you know, he's not stupid.
[01:16:05]  Everyone knows who Shrimp Boy is.
[01:16:07]  And he's basically unsure about getting involved.
[01:16:09]  There's one recorded conversation where Leland says, you know, some people still think that he killed that Alan Lee Young guy.
[01:16:17]  Shit.
[01:16:19]  As much as I want that 5K, I can't do that, man.
[01:16:22]  Shit.
[01:16:23]  Fuck shit.
[01:16:26]  Well, the thing is, he could do that.
[01:16:28]  Yeah.
[01:16:29]  Now, after just a couple months, he says, you know what?
[01:16:31]  Maybe he didn't kill that Alan Leon guy.
[01:16:33]  I'll actually take that money.
[01:16:35]  And he took $5,000 in exchange for a proclamation in the state government honoring the CKT.
[01:16:44]  Yeah, the relationship between the two only further develops from there.
[01:16:48]  Shrimp Boy introduces Keith.
[01:16:51]  Now, this is where it gets really good.
[01:16:52]  Shrimp Boy introduces Keith to one of his friends, too.
[01:16:56]  To Agent 99.
[01:16:58]  That's right, our old friend, Dave Jordan.
[01:17:01]  And Keith, who strings along his son, Brandon, goes nutty with Dave and starts selling him guns, bulletproof vests, fake credit cards, all this shit where you're like, damn, Keith, like, dude, slow down.
[01:17:16]  Like, this is kind of fast.
[01:17:17]  Keith tells Dave that his son Brandon is moving 300 pounds of weed out to Memphis and making about 50K a week.
[01:17:26]  Whoa.
[01:17:27]  And then he's like, Dave, can you help me get my son Oxy?
[01:17:31]  Can you help us move some Coke?
[01:17:32]  Dave is like, yo, that's a bit much for me.
[01:17:35]  I am but a simple Cosa Nostra guy.
[01:17:39]  But, you know, Keith continues to bug him about helping his kid, helping him to like fucking traffic drugs for about two years.
[01:17:46]  And finally, Dave relents, introducing him to, by the way, another undercover FBI agent.
[01:17:54]  It's so insane to me, too, that like it's his son that he really just keeps being like, yeah, hey, my kid just needs some help moving this Coke, man.
[01:18:03]  Like, you know how it is.
[01:18:04]  Like, I'm a dad.
[01:18:04]  You're a dude.
[01:18:06]  Can you help him?
[01:18:07]  Can you help him sell this fish scale for me?
[01:18:09]  Oh, my God.
[01:18:10]  Keith also hits up Dave, which I want to just continue to reiterate, is an undercover FBI agent for money for Leland.
[01:18:20]  So Dave declines, which is kind of weird, actually, but introduces Keith to other FBI agents who basically their job now is to accept political bribes.
[01:18:31]  So Keith offers them all this like sweet classico style, you know, all this like deal making of you give us $10,000, we can make political stuff happen for you.
[01:18:41]  So they, you know, a bunch of these checks get made out to Leeland Yi, Secretary of State, and, you know, political favors get cashed in.
[01:18:48]  Classico.
[01:18:50]  Yeah, I mean, there are just a ton of meetings between all these guys.
[01:18:54]  I mean, Keith, I got to say, as a consultant for Leland, he is doing, I mean, if you're doing the crooked thing, he's doing a really good job.
[01:19:01]  Yeah, he's good at his crooked job for sure.
[01:19:04]  I mean, he sets up all of these fundraisers.
[01:19:06]  Checks get made out to Leeland Yi for Secretary of State.
[01:19:10]  You know, he does that I was talking about before with Norman Shu, the straw donors thing, where he gets people to donate.
[01:19:17]  Oh, you know, maybe it's not their money exactly.
[01:19:20]  It's the way that works, by the way, we should say is that so for these campaigns, there's a $500 campaign limit.
[01:19:27]  Yeah.
[01:19:28]  And so what they do is, like, for example, this is what happened is Keith sets up these fundraisers that are basically, I mean, unfortunately for Keith, all attended by undercover FBI agents.
[01:19:38]  You don't want them there.
[01:19:39]  No.
[01:19:39]  And they all write checks to Jackson Consulting for like $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 each, whatever it is.
[01:19:47]  And then Keith then parcels out that money into $500 donations.
[01:19:53]  So they can't be traced, except the fact that it's coming from undercover FBI agents to the campaign to make it legit.
[01:20:00]  Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of meetings between them.
[01:20:03]  The undercover FBI agents want to get into the weed game.
[01:20:07]  So a different agent gets to talk to Leland, who, you know, he's posing as a businessman, I believe from Nevada.
[01:20:14]  And he says he wants to become the, quote, Anheuser-Busch of medical marijuana and ask Leland Yi for help changing some laws in California.
[01:20:22]  Yeah, which now this means that we can get into like the real fun stuff, which was the guns.
[01:20:28]  Brace noise, not the song.
[01:20:30]  Now, Keith, like I said, is pretty nutty.
[01:20:35]  He arranges for a meeting with Leland and Dave Johnson, aka Agent 99, Undercover FBI, in order to discuss importing guns from the Philippines through Newark.
[01:20:47]  And to be clear, I mean, illegally.
[01:20:49]  Yes.
[01:20:51]  Import export.
[01:20:52]  Yes.
[01:20:52]  Keith introduces Dave to a man named Dr. Lim, who says he can help set them up with a multi-million dollar arms deal.
[01:21:02]  And in an amazing sequence, this is all on tape.
[01:21:05]  Leland himself, again, state senator Leland Yi, asks about getting shoulder-fired rockets, which he is very interested in, and says he himself had an opportunity to fire on a trip to the Philippines.
[01:21:18]  So what I don't understand about this is that, okay, I don't think the Philippine Army actually has shoulder-fired like surface-to-air missiles or rockets or anything like that.
[01:21:29]  So I'm like, is he talking about RPGs?
[01:21:31]  Like, what is he?
[01:21:31]  Because that's technically a recoilless rifle.
[01:21:34]  I don't know what the fuck he's talking about here.
[01:21:36]  But yeah, he is definitely saying like he can get some heavy fucking ordinance, but he shot one too.
[01:21:42]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:21:43]  This is how this was supposed to go down.
[01:21:44]  Dr. Lim was going to be the point of contact for the weapons deal while one of his relatives would work with a group in the Philippines to get said weapons.
[01:21:53]  Now, that group was the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which is a radical Islamic separatist group attempting to set up an independent Sharia law-governed island.
[01:22:04]  So, just to kind of really sum this up, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, aka MILF, is literally attempting to establish Islamic MILF Island, which Leland Yi is trying to get guns from in order to move through Newark through his Cosa Nostra associate, who's actually an undercover FBI agent, who will then move those guns back to Sicily.
[01:22:33]  And in exchange, Leland Yee will get two and a half million dollars.
[01:22:38]  I mean, I gotta say, seems like a flawless plan.
[01:22:42]  What could go wrong?
[01:22:43]  You just gotta get these guns from this group in Mindanao.
[01:22:46]  I actually think that MILF is part in some government.
[01:22:49]  I can't call him.
[01:22:50]  It's MILF.
[01:22:50]  I'm sorry.
[01:22:51]  I can't call him.
[01:22:51]  Yeah, it's true.
[01:22:52]  It's ridiculous.
[01:22:54]  You know, I talked to some people who've had some not medians, but like interviewed some people from MILF over there.
[01:23:01]  I'm like, how can he keep it?
[01:23:02]  I mean, this is just, I know, the CIA gets too cute.
[01:23:06]  No, yeah, because they're a breakaway group from a breakaway group.
[01:23:10]  Yeah, this is a bad plan.
[01:23:11]  Well, in case you're like, damn, Leland doesn't seem too involved in all this.
[01:23:14]  Like, maybe he's just trying to get paid.
[01:23:16]  Maybe he just wants to sell his debt.
[01:23:17]  Let me just read you a quote from the local paper, San Francisco Chronicle, which was covering it at the time.
[01:23:22]  Senator Yee was intimately involved in the planning.
[01:23:26]  He wanted to ensure that revenue streams and other transactions were structured in a way that could not lead back to them.
[01:23:32]  He told Dave Johnson that there would be multiple more opportunities for arms deals if he became California Secretary of State, which is just a very odd thing.
[01:23:42]  I don't know if that's true.
[01:23:44]  I mean, maybe, you know, I mean, I don't, yeah, this is more than if he wasn't.
[01:23:49]  This is a direct quote from Leland.
[01:23:51]  There's a part of me that wants to be like you.
[01:23:54]  You know how I'm going to be like you?
[01:23:56]  Just be a free agent out there.
[01:23:59]  Well, you know, part of him does want to be like him, which is working for the government.
[01:24:05]  Yeah, I, you know, Agent 99 agrees to give Leland $100,000 in exchange for his help.
[01:24:11]  Oh, brother.
[01:24:12]  In total, by the time of the arrest, Leland and his campaign staff took about $43,000 from various undercover FBI agents, along with their kind of standing agreement for the $2.5 million arms deal from the MILFs.
[01:24:25]  In one last pathetic detail, just to round all this out, there's a recorded conversation from a meeting at a Sacramento Starbucks between Leland and Keith.
[01:24:35]  And at this point, I don't know which other FBI agent, there's like a billion at this point.
[01:24:40]  And Leland is on tape saying, I'm just trying to run for Secretary of State.
[01:24:46]  I hope I don't get indicted.
[01:24:48]  Oh, man.
[01:24:49]  What a pathetic quote.
[01:24:50]  Yeah.
[01:24:51]  Well, Leland got indicted.
[01:24:52]  And he, along with Keith, Keith's son, Brandon, they all pled guilty for a deal with the government.
[01:24:58]  And Leland got sentenced to five years.
[01:25:02]  And actually, I believe was released just back in 2020.
[01:25:05]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:25:06]  No, he's out.
[01:25:06]  I saw a little news story on it.
[01:25:09]  Shrimp Boy, though.
[01:25:11]  I mean, it has to be the deal with the government they had.
[01:25:13]  I'm sure there's no doubt in my mind that they ratted on Shrimp Boy and tried to pin a lot of this on him.
[01:25:19]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:25:20]  It was a pretty drawn out trial and a very high profile case.
[01:25:24]  There's, again, there was a fantastic, bizarre spread in the New York Times.
[01:25:29]  Great article, but just incredible photo shoot.
[01:25:32]  And a lot of favorable coverage, local and national, especially considering how intricate the FBI case was.
[01:25:40]  And also, I mean, I do think how much it verges on real entrapment.
[01:25:45]  Like a lot of faith operations.
[01:25:48]  Yeah, Shrimp Boy really got sent up here.
[01:25:50]  And in fact, I believe even one of the FBI agents was himself taken off the case at a certain point because of financial impropriety.
[01:25:57]  Yeah.
[01:25:57]  The jury, though, is not as sympathetic as people thought they might be.
[01:26:01]  And they return a guilty verdict on all counts, all counts.
[01:26:05]  And he gets life in prison.
[01:26:07]  Sad Shrimp Boy.
[01:26:09]  But you know who didn't get convicted or even charged?

=== Chinatown's Bizarre Trial (05:03) ===

[01:26:12]  Ed Lee.
[01:26:15]  That's right, the mayor of San Francisco.
[01:26:17]  Again, handpicked by Newsom and Willie Brown, the Leland Ye nemesis.
[01:26:22]  He was also embroiled, as they say, in all this pay-for-play shit.
[01:26:27]  And Shrimp Boy's lawyers, interestingly, there was an early motion that they submitted when they were trying to dismiss the charges, correctly pointing out that Ed Lee was named by the FBI in the discovery files for taking substantial bribes in exchange for all the political favors.
[01:26:46]  So his defense team, Shrimp Boy's defense team, they wanted to introduce all this evidence at trial to show how the FBI funneled basically illegal contributions to Ed Lee's fundraisers.
[01:26:55]  And the judge wouldn't allow any of this in.
[01:26:58]  No, which is, which is really surprising to me, because if you read any of this stuff, it seems pretty cut and dry.
[01:27:05]  I mean, maybe they're trying to say that like it's not directly related to Shrimp Boy, but like it clearly is within the same opera, the aegis of the same, under the aegis of the same operation.
[01:27:13]  Yeah, it totally was.
[01:27:14]  And the feds, for some reason, decided not to pursue that.
[01:27:18]  And it's interesting, I think, because of political pressure and because of all the blog coverage and the local media coverage of how many like kind of local fixers were were kind of, you know um, kind of thrown up in this case uh, the Sf district attorney.
[01:27:40]  After Shrimp Boy's conviction, of course, they announced felony bribery and money laundering charges for two of Ed Lee's campaign staff members and another consultant that is yes, again Keith Jackson.
[01:27:54]  Turns out that Keith Jackson was also working with Ed Lee's campaign staff, which included former San Francisco human rights commissioner Nasli Mohajer and her former employee Zula Mae Jones, to raise like basically a bunch of money for Ed Lee's mayoral campaign.
[01:28:12]  The same one he was running against Leland Yi.
[01:28:15]  My man Keith is working all angles here.
[01:28:18]  Yeah, and Ed Lee's whole thing, I mean, this is, this is always what was so enraging about Ed Lee is he had this sort of veneer of innocence.
[01:28:24]  Like, oh, I had no idea that this was going on behind my back.
[01:28:27]  I can't believe that these people were doing this.
[01:28:29]  You know, like, I'm just trying to run a normal city here.
[01:28:33]  But at one point, Zula Jones actually confirms to the FBI that Ed knows that if you gave him the 10K, he also knows that we had to break the 10K up.
[01:28:41]  Yeah, the FBI chose not to go after Ed Lee and chose to take down Leland and Shrimp.
[01:28:46]  But this is just how SF politic works.
[01:28:48]  You know, I mean, tale as old as time.
[01:28:52]  So I think to end, you know, this is a real quote here from the FBI wire transcripts.
[01:28:58]  This is also from Zula Jones.
[01:29:00]  This is, this is really what she says.
[01:29:03]  Yeah.
[01:29:04]  You pay to play here.
[01:29:06]  We got it.
[01:29:07]  We know this.
[01:29:08]  We are the best at this game.
[01:29:10]  We're better than New York.
[01:29:12]  We do it a little more sophisticated than New Yorkers.
[01:29:14]  We do it without the mafia.
[01:29:17]  That's right.
[01:29:17]  This is San Francisco, baby.
[01:29:19]  Cue the song.
[01:29:20]  Welcome to my baby.
[01:29:22]  Take control down.
[01:29:24]  We can't even slow down.
[01:29:27]  We don't have to go out.
[01:29:30]  Welcome the mouth.
[01:29:32]  Well, sweetheart, that's the sacket of Shrimp Boy.
[01:29:35]  That's Chinatown.
[01:29:36]  Wait, what's the quote from the movie?
[01:29:38]  That's Chinatown.
[01:29:40]  Wait, that's not.
[01:29:40]  Wait, for the movie Chinatown?
[01:29:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:29:43]  Do you think the quote from the movie Chinatown is that's Chinatown?
[01:29:47]  No, what does he say?
[01:29:48]  He's like, yeah, no, no, it's cool.
[01:29:50]  At the end of the movie Chinatown, they're both pointed at Chinatown and they say in unison, that's Chinatown.
[01:29:57]  They're at the LA River.
[01:29:58]  He says it forget.
[01:29:59]  No, they're not.
[01:30:00]  They're in Chinatown.
[01:30:01]  He says, forget it, Jake.
[01:30:04]  It's Chinatown.
[01:30:06]  That's Chinatown.
[01:30:08]  That's Chinatown.
[01:30:09]  And you know what?
[01:30:10]  That's actually the entire town.
[01:30:12]  I mean, fucking, goddamn, London Breed had the same shit go down with her campaign like two years ago and no one gave a shit when like her ex-boyfriend was arrested.
[01:30:22]  Did you ever watch that show Streets of San Francisco?
[01:30:25]  I did not, no.
[01:30:26]  Oh, really?
[01:30:27]  No.
[01:30:28]  Oh.
[01:30:28]  I've watched no show.
[01:30:30]  What?
[01:30:30]  It's Fantastico Classico.
[01:30:33]  It is like 1970s, 80s detective show in San Francisco.
[01:30:38]  Streets of San Francisco.
[01:30:39]  It's fantastic.
[01:30:41]  But I feel like just as you were saying that, I was thinking, damn, it sucks that we don't, that San Francisco doesn't have.
[01:30:48]  I don't know why this is where my brain went.
[01:30:50]  It sucks that San Francisco doesn't have like a Ben Affleck Matt Damon duo because they only got Boston movies on the map.
[01:30:57]  Yeah.
[01:30:58]  We need some San Francisco movies.
[01:31:00]  Yeah.
[01:31:00]  Yeah.
[01:31:01]  Where's the San Francisco movie about the, you know, about the Pelosis, about the local mafias, about the Gettys, about the Drainas?
[01:31:10]  Well, I think it's because all those people are like enmeshed in the kind of people who would make the movies about it.

=== San Francisco Movies Needed (02:09) ===

[01:31:15]  Wow.
[01:31:17]  Yeah.
[01:31:18]  I mean, I guess, you know, the guy who made the last black man in San Francisco, his dad wrote the fucking The Devil's Chessboard.
[01:31:24]  That's true.
[01:31:26]  I guess that's just the one family that there is.
[01:31:30]  I don't know.
[01:31:31]  What do I know?
[01:31:32]  I live in Tepena Canyon now.
[01:31:34]  My life is filled with parrots and cavorting 90, 45-year-old women in bikinis.
[01:31:41]  Oh my God.
[01:31:42]  I'm wearing leggings right now.
[01:31:45]  That'd be crazy.
[01:31:46]  That would be so crazy and you were wearing leggings.
[01:31:49]  I'm wearing yoga pants, not having fucking crazy.
[01:31:52]  There are two ways this would be crazy.
[01:31:54]  Dude, have you ever used it?
[01:31:55]  One, if it was the American Apparel LeMay, I don't know what that was.
[01:31:59]  Remember those?
[01:32:00]  Remember the like shiny purple LeMay?
[01:32:02]  Oh, I do.
[01:32:02]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:32:04]  Okay, so if you stood up right now and you had those on, the other kind of crazy way that would be is if you stood up and there were just like totally normal, regular Lululemon.
[01:32:13]  Yeah, just like Lululemon, like just like dollar Lululemon yoga.
[01:32:17]  Basic black girlfriend collective, something normal.
[01:32:22]  Is there a company called the Girlfriend Collective?
[01:32:25]  Yeah, it's like woke leggings.
[01:32:27]  What do they manufacture?
[01:32:29]  Nagging?
[01:32:30]  No, leggings.
[01:32:31]  What do they come?
[01:32:32]  Nagging?
[01:32:33]  No, leggings.
[01:32:34]  Is that what they produce?
[01:32:36]  Oh, we ethically source our nagging from Los Angeles and New York.
[01:32:42]  All right.
[01:32:44]  I'm sweating.
[01:32:45]  Yeah, you got to take those leggings off.
[01:32:47]  I'm Liz.
[01:32:48]  My name, of course, is the Longista Lad, the Crab Fella.
[01:32:55]  Mr. Yeah, Crab Man.
[01:32:59]  I'm Dirty Gary.
[01:33:01]  That's a horrible nickname.
[01:33:03]  What?
[01:33:03]  Crab Man.
[01:33:04]  I'm the Crab Man.
[01:33:05]  I'm clicking and clacking and pinching your butt with my tong fingers.
[01:33:10]  Of course, our producer is Young Chomp, Young Tongsky, Young Chomsky.
[01:33:17]  And the podcast is called Truanon.
[01:33:21]  And welcome to my house.
[01:33:23]  We'll see you next time.