An emotional Mario Juarez described a brutal assault by Duong family members and associates in federal court on Thursday, painting a vivid picture for the jury of the events leading up to his decision to inform law enforcement of the alleged bribery conspiracy involving former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, her former romantic partner Andre Jones, and David and Andy Duong.
On May 3, 2024, a fuming Mario Juarez arrived at 1211 Embarcadero on the Oakland waterfront.
The building housed the headquarters of California Waste Solutions, Oakland’s recycling contractor, owned by the Duong family, and the offices of Evolutionary Homes, a housing company Juarez co-founded with the Duongs.
Evolutionary Homes’ owners had big plans to sell tiny housing units worth millions to local governments, including Oakland, but the company was now on its last legs. Juarez and the Duongs had threatened to sue each other, and both claimed the other side owed significant money. They’d talked about having one final meeting to figure out next steps.
But that day, Juarez found that he could no longer enter the offices, he testified Thursday in court. The Duongs, he said, had changed the locks on him.
He was able to enter the lobby, though, and there he found CWS CEO David Duong, along with his sister Kristina and son Andy. They got into a frenetic argument, recorded by Andy and played for the jury Thursday, about whether Juarez had a right to be on the property.
“If you don’t want trouble, get out,” David can be heard saying.
“Settle this now, or it’s gonna be bad,” Juarez responds.
That trouble did come, just minutes later, according to Juarez and evidence presented by the prosecution.
Juarez testified that he went out to the building’s parking lot with the Duong family members and waited there for the police to come and say whether he was a legal occupant of the building.
Instead, Juarez claimed, Andy called his brother Johnny, and within minutes, several cars pulled up, with about 10 people inside. Then they assaulted him, Juarez testified.
“They were hitting me with their fists, putting their hands in my pockets because they were trying to jack the gold chain I had,” he said, sounding shaken and at times sniffling. “They couldn’t rip it, so I could see many hands going in. They took my watch, my phone, my cash” — around $2,000, he said.
Prosecutor Abraham Fine urged Juarez to describe the assault in more detail.
“They started beating me and hitting me,” he said. “When I went on the floor, they were kicking me in the balls, and it was hurting. I knew I had to get up because if I [stayed] down, I knew I probably wasn’t going to stay around for long.”
After that, Juarez’s memory went in and out, he said, but he recalls lying on the ground and a woman turning his head to the side so he could spit out blood.
Fine showed jurors a photograph of an ambulance and a stretcher stationed outside of the Embarcadero building on the same day. Juarez testified that he chose not to get in it for fear of getting harmed more while inside.
In another photo displayed in court, Juarez is sitting huddled on the ground, seemingly after the alleged assault, while Johnny Duong, Kristina Duong, David Duong, a Starbucks employee in uniform, and an unidentified woman stand around him, observing.
At Andy’s house weeks later, the FBI would find the watch and the gold chain — given to Juarez by his late father — that he claims the Duongs physically stole off him during the May 3 incident.
Juarez went to the Oakland police a couple of days later, to file a report about the assault and reveal other alleged criminal activity by the Duongs, which he’d participated in.
“I confessed it all,” he said, referring to the elaborate, alleged bribery scheme between Juarez and the Duongs on one side and former Mayor Thao and her partner Andre Jones on the other. Juarez has pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit bribery, while the other defendants maintain their innocence.
“I was just done,” Juarez said.
A dispute over money that was barreling toward litigation
Before the alleged assault, Juarez and the Duongs exchanged a series of increasingly hostile emails about money.
In an email sent at the end of April 2024, a representative for the Duongs demanded an accounting from Juarez about how he had spent $750,000 they had invested in Evolutionary Homes. According to Juarez, he had submitted extensive expense reports, but they quizzed him on individual purchases for seemingly minor things, like a replacement tire and diarrhea medicine. He also admitted, on the stand, that he had pocketed about $200,000 for work and travel expenses he felt he was owed.
At a certain point, Juarez responded to an email by raising the possibility that David Duong was experiencing a “mental health condition.” On the stand, Juarez admitted that he didn’t actually believe this.
“This email is just an example of you being a jerk, isn’t it?” Fine asked. Juarez agreed.
According to Juarez, he and the Duongs were at the breaking point in their business relationship. He believed the Duongs were preparing to sue him. Fine showed the jury an email in which Andy told Juarez the family wanted to meet with him, and that if he declined to accept, they would pursue legal action.
Juarez agreed to a meeting on the condition that only Evolutionary Homes board members attend, and that “you will ensure David Duong or anyone in the family does not have a weapon at the meeting. I do not wish to be surprised again by David’s Glock.”
Juarez said on the stand that David keeps a gun in his office desk, which he had previously shown him.
But Juarez said he was “really done” at this point, feeling broken “physically, mentally, emotionally,” and financially. He reminded the Duongs that if they ended up suing him, he had plenty of dirt on them too.
In the same email, he threatened to expose how the Duongs had “killed a political story with payments and bribes” to curry favor with San Leandro Councilmember Bryan Azevedo after he “was caught using a brothel/sex parlors during a trip sponsored by California Waste Solutions and the Duong family to Vietnam.”
In the email, Juarez wrote he wanted to “document his case.”
“As you know,” he wrote, David and other family members had orchestrated a scheme to support Thao during the 2022 election and hire Andre Jones to funnel money to the mayor, in exchange for making sure CWS received various benefits. “Of this I have plenty of evidence that your father personally approved and facilitated these schemes,” Juarez wrote, speaking of David.
The Duongs had a lot to lose in a lawsuit, Juarez warned, in terms of money and reputation.
The hiring of prostitutes is “not going to fly well,” Juarez warned.
“The mayor said that if that story was to be published your relationship would change forever. Imagine the rest of the stories to come,” Juarez continued.
He ended the email by saying that he looked forward to responding to the Duongs’ “complaint/toilet paper” that he claimed would cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. He added that if they won a judgment, “good luck in collecting” because he would seek bankruptcy.
Is Juarez telling the truth?
In Juarez’s testimony, he described a vicious assault by his former business partners, and a decision — at his “wit’s end” — to come clean and tell everything to law enforcement. Everything the Duongs had done, and his own culpability, too.
At least, that’s what he told the jury under questioning from the prosecution.
At the very end of Thursday, and the beginning of what’s likely to be days of cross-examination, David’s defense attorney, Ed Swanson, began to chip away at Juarez’s credibility — starting with this very claim.
“You told the jury five minutes ago that you ‘confessed it all,’” Swanson said to Juarez.
But Juarez had actually claimed his own innocence in his initial conversations with law enforcement, according to evidence presented in court by Swanson.
“I tried to minimize my involvement,” Juarez conceded under questioning.