Permit 'expediter' Jen jailed on fraud charges

(Thanks to my good friend, Greg Letts, for bringing this to my attention via his blog, Survey Landmarks.)

by Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer

An unlicensed civil engineer and notorious  San Francisco permit "expediter" faces more than 200 felony charges for allegedly creating bogus documentation for about 100 construction projects in the city, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Jimmy Jen, 56, who has repeatedly been cited for violating building codes, was allegedly involved in "massive fraud" over two decades, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris said during a news conference.

He was jailed on $50 million bail following his arrest on Tuesday and is expected to be arraigned Friday on 232 separate felony counts. Harris said Jen is considered a flight risk.

Jen's employee, Jian Min Fong, was being held on nearly $2.3 million bail on charges that he was involved in the scheme, which raised questions among prosecutors about the city's approval process.

A former plan checker for the city of San Francisco, Jen was well known in construction circles for his ability to push permits through building inspectors and for his close friendship with the agency's former deputy director, Jim Hutchinson, who left the post in 2005.

Jen is not a licensed surveyor and only had an "on again, off again" civil engineering license as part of his Delta Design and Engineering Systems business, prosecutors said.

He is accused of using the names of licensed engineers and even making fake rubber stamps with their names on them in a variety of projects submitted for approval since 1990.

Prosecutors said he took the name and replicated the stamp of a licensed surveyor and engineer, Ching-Liu Wu, starting in 1990. Wu actually does not do surveys, he is an engineer for Bechtel, prosecutors said.

Jen nevertheless used Wu's name on surveyor maps of 26 properties from 1990-95, prosecutors said. Then, from 2000-07, he used Wu's engineering stamp on 60 residential projects.

Wu has said he never worked for Jen on any projects, let alone those ones, Harris said. Prosecutors believe that Jen had no license, but did the work while masquerading as Wu to get approval.

Jen is also being accused of claiming that licensed engineer Tai-Ming Chen had done work on 10 projects, notably the pending proposed renovation and other work on the landmark 1923 Alexandria movie theater.

The investigation began in November 2008, when a land surveyor raised questions about a lot subdivision in one of Jen's projects on Madrid Street. He contacted Wu, triggering the probe.

Harris said the investigators soon realized that there were "very obvious" discrepancies between the approval stamps and engineers' signatures compared to the ones Jen submitted. One "curious" circumstance, she said, was that no building inspectors ever asked any questions related to the surveys or engineering plans in any of the projects. Had they done so, they would have discovered that the engineers had no role in creating the plans, she said.

"We are curious about that," Harris said, noting that prosecutors are seeking to find out how 500 bogus documents could be reviewed by the Department of Building Inspection without a single question asked.

"We will find out exactly what was going on," she said, about how the documents could make it through "these offices and that office in particular over the course of two decades without notice."

Bill Strawn, spokesman for the Department of Building Inspection, said that so far no project mentioned by prosecutors has been found to be problematic.

"We are working with the D.A. on this," he said.

Strawn said his office reviews 60,000 applications a year, signed under penalty of perjury as valid, and would not typically verify every detail of a submission.

Jen, who faces $1.5 million in fines to the city for code violations on one of his projects, was named as a target of an arson investigation involving a San Francisco home, owned by his former wife, that caught fire in February 2009. He denied setting the blaze and was never charged.

E-mail Jaxon Van Derbeken at jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page C - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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