Former Santa Clara County undersheriff pleads guilty in gun permit bribery scheme
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For years, it was nearly impossible to secure a concealed carry gun permit from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office — except for a few business executives who provided iPads, box seats to hockey games and other bribes to top officials.
Santa Clara County prosecutors have won six convictions in the pay-to-play scheme since 2020, and on Monday they secured a plea deal with the final defendant: former Undersheriff Rick Sung.
Sung, 54, who pleaded guilty to two felony counts of solicitation of bribery, is the highest-ranking sheriff’s official ever convicted by the Santa Clara County district attorney’s office.
He was second in command to former Sheriff Laurie Smith, who was found guilty of six counts of corruption in a rare civil case handled by the San Francisco district attorney’s office in 2022. She was forced to resign but never faced criminal charges.
Prosecutors accused Sung of leveraging the Sheriff’s Office’s rarely issued gun permits to secure 200 iPads as well as a luxury suite for Smith and her friends at San Jose Sharks games.
Under the deal, Sung will permanently surrender his California peace officer certification and complete 400 hours of community service and six months of probation.
He will then be able to petition to reduce the felonies to misdemeanors and seek dismissal of the charges. But he will not be eligible to work again as a peace officer in California.
The unusual trial, which sought only to remove Laurie Smith from office, continued even after Smith abruptly stepped down Monday. She was found guilty on six counts of committing willful or corrupt misconduct in office.
The former undersheriff initially fought the charges, resulting in a mistrial last year. Prosecutors decided to retry the case, and Sung agreed to a plea deal in lieu of another court battle.
His attorneys said they have long believed the case against him was “politically motivated and unfair,” but that he wanted to move forward with his life after contesting the charges for nearly seven years. He retired from the sheriff’s department several years ago, they said.
“For Mr. Sung and his family, the retrial meant more years of legal fees, more public scrutiny, and more strain on his wife and children,” attorneys Naomi Chung and Tamara Crepet said in a statement. “When he was offered a resolution that guaranteed no custody and ended in dismissal, he took it.”
Nine current or former Northern California police officers were charged in an investigation of civil rights violations and fraud, authorities said.
Prosecutors began investigating the bribery scheme after receiving a 2018 tip about an unusual donation to Smith’s reelection campaign.
They discovered that then-Sheriff’s Capt. James Jensen had been asking employees of a security company, AS Solution, Inc., to provide campaign donations — a total of up to $90,000 — in return for concealed carry licenses for the company’s executive protection agents in 2018 and 2019.
During this same period, nearly all applications by members of the public for a first-time concealed carry license were completely ignored, prosecutors said.
Jensen was convicted of bribery and conspiracy in 2024 and sentenced to 10 months in jail. Three AS Solution executives took plea deals in 2020 and were convicted of misdemeanor conspiracy charges. A gun shop owner accused of acting as a middle man in the scheme took a plea deal in 2023 for one misdemeanor count of conspiracy.
“My Office enforces the law without fear or favor,” Santa Clara Dist. Atty. Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “Law enforcement in Santa Clara County must be equally determined to be incorruptible as it is determined to protect our community.”
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