PASADENA, Calif. (CN) — A billionaire Chinese real-estate developer acknowledged he provided an Los Angeles city councilman with multiple free trips to Las Vegas, including complimentary gambling and prostitutes. But these were just “classic goodwill gifts” and not bribes, an attorney for the developer told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this week.
Shen Zhen New World, the U.S. subsidiary of Chairman Wei Huang’s real-estate empire, on Friday tried to persuade an appellate panel to throw out its conviction for bribing José Huizar, a former city councilman representing downtown LA. Huizar in January was sentenced to 13 years in prison after prosecutors accused him of running a pay-to-play scheme for developers.
Yaakov Roth, an attorney for Huang’s company, told the three-judge panel in Pasadena that the gifts the chairman provided to Huizar were an investment. They may have violated state and local gift or ethics laws, Roth said, but they weren’t bribery under federal law.
“Their theory was he’s giving, giving, giving, and in the future he’s going to make a request,” Roth said, referring to the prosecution’s argument at trial. “That’s very different from ‘I’m giving and I expect in exchange that you will give me what I want, and we’re going to enter into agreement on that up front.'”
The Las Vegas trips, Roth said, were intended to increase the likelihood favorable governmental actions down the line. Such gifts don’t become a bribe simply because Huang may have had intent to ask Huizar for a favor years later, he said.
The judges expressed skepticism about this interpretation of federal bribery law.
“You’re ascribing some sort of temporal element to the intent,” U.S. Circuit Judge Gabriel Sanchez, a Joe Biden appointee, observed. “If I’m giving a gift, but I’m intending for there to be a quid pro quo for an official act five years later, why isn’t that a bribe?”
Roth countered that the gambling trips were no different from typical lobbying, in which a lobbyist takes a politician out for dinner or golf for years to establish goodwill.
Later, when there’s a bill that the lobbyist wants the politician to act on, they make their pitch, Roth said. In cases like this, he argued the dinners and golf outings don’t become bribes retroactively.
“So, all that was happening here was just lobbying, a sort of getting-to-know-you kind of thing?” Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Paez, a Bill Clinton appointee, asked somewhat incredulously. “The trips to Las Vegas, I mean, were just a little bit much.”
Rounding out the panel was U.S. Circuit Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, also a Bill Clinton appointee.
George Esparza, Huizar’s former special assistant and the government’s star witness, told jurors at trial in 2022 that Huang and Huizar bonded over gambling and prostitutes during as many as 19 Las Vegas trips between 2013 and 2018.
On each trip, he said, Huang gave the councilman $10,000 in chips to start with. When the billionaire was winning, he sometimes gave Huizar even more.
On top of the trips, Huang also funneled $600,000 to Huizar to help him settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit. That lawsuit could have upended Huizar’s reelection to the city council, prosecutors said, preventing him from helping Huang build a 77-story mixed-use development in downtown LA.
Huang left the U.S. in 2018 as prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in LA closed in on Huizar and his cronies.
Although he was also indicted, Huang never appeared in court and is now considered a fugitive. His subsidiary was fined $4 million following its bribery conviction.
Responding to arguments from Shen Zhen New World, Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Har told the appellate panel that there was a very clear line between ingratiation and quid pro quo bribery intent.
“When you’re dealing with ingratiation or lobbying, there’s no specific object in the provider’s mind for the purpose of those gifts,” Har said. “It’s just for building a reservoir of goodwill.”
In this case, she argued, Huang had a clear intent from day one: He wanted the councilman’s assistance in redeveloping of the LA Grand Hotel into the largest skyscraper west of the Mississippi.
“This was the whole reason he came to the United States,” Har said, referring to Wei’s ambition to expand his real-estate empire by constructing the tallest building in the western United States. “He’s meeting José Huizar in the context of being introduced him as the gatekeeper for all development in Los Angeles. He holds the keys to the kingdom.”