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Fall Into the Cash

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The ethos of San Francisco's homegrown "progressive" movement is concerned less with traditional left-wing issues such as poverty, the environment, and racism more than with fighting against changes in the local physical environment. San Francisco's best days are behind it, this rearview-mirror-gazing sensibility says. So don't alter anything.

During the 1980s, these residents fought to stop the construction of skyscrapers. In the 1990s, they rose up to battle live-work lofts. Currently they're strategizing and propagandizing to prevent the construction of apartments in areas of the Mission, Potrero, and SOMA neighborhoods, citing a mysterious need for a midtown "industrial preservation zone."

In their efforts to freeze San Francisco in time, this group has a potential patron saint — an S.F. Mumia Abu-Jamal, if you will — in local real estate investor Luke Brugnara. This great man is currently facing charges of tax evasion and endangered-species poaching. If local progressives truly believe in the preserve-it-in-amber ethos they profess, they should join the incipient popular movement, launched this very moment right here, to prevent the IRS and government wildlife officials from throwing Brugnara in jail.

Brugnara was no idle S.F. progressive. He backed his heroic dreams for a fully-preserved city by risking more than $32 million. Brugnara put his personal prestige on the line, and, according to a new IRS indictment, he now risks going to prison for three years as punishment for the way he supported the cause.

In 2002, Brugnara laid out his vision of a San Francisco–themed casino in Las Vegas for SF Weekly's Jeremy Mulman: "You'd enter over the Golden Gate Bridge with water running under you," he enthused. "You'd have a cable car going up through a mock skyline, past Victorian homes and everything. I mean, it would be like one of those things you'd see in a snow globe, a condensed version of the entire city, with Coit Tower and the [Transamerica] Pyramid if we could get rights on the Pyramid. ... You could have a Chinatown full of slot machines. You could have the Castro District ..."

Like the current preserved San Francisco, where rents and property values continue upward because new buildings rarely get built, Brugnara's San Francisco in Las Vegas would have been exclusively for the rich and totally kitschy and annoying. It would have been, in other words, a monument to the San Francisco that progressives have so far built.

Tragically, Brugnara's erstwhile plans to turn his $32 million purchase of a decrepit Vegas Strip casino into a grandiose San Francisco–themed resort crapped out. The Nevada Gaming Commission determined he was not fit to hold a casino license, thanks to a past that included alleged threats of violence, medical-waste dumping, and other perceived slights. In 2002 he sold most of his Vegas lot, earning a profit of $8,458,399, according to an IRS indictment, which earlier this month charged him with failing to report income on his tax returns. If convicted, Brugnara could face three years in prison. That doesn't include recent charges he's facing for allegedly poaching endangered trout on a 200-acre property he bought near Gilroy with cash earned selling properties at the start of this century.

San Francisco progressives: Keep Luke Brugnara free.

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