In 1993, a small local company scored a big contract.
California Waste Solutions, a family-run recycler based in town, secured a deal with the city of Oakland to pick up old soup cans and cardboard boxes from the curbside bins of about a third of the city’s residents. It was the first-ever public sector contract for the Duong family, which now provides recycling services to San Jose and parts of Vietnam as well.
By the time the Duongs came back to Oakland’s City Council in 1997, asking officials to renew their agreement for another five years, everyone knew who they were. David Duong, CEO of California Waste Solutions, had spent the past four years showering them in dollar bills.
Between 1994 and 1998, according to the Oakland Tribune, Duong contributed a total of $25,000 to the campaigns of Mayor Elihu Harris and councilmembers Larry Reid, Ignacio de la Fuente, Jane Brunner, Nancy Nadel, Nate Miley, and Henry Chang, among others.
The second contract was approved. The Duongs got close to many of the city’s politicians, too, traveling with some on a business trip to Vietnam in 1993. One staffer who went on the trip, a future councilmember, would later say David was like family to him.
With that 1993 deal, the Duongs began to implement a playbook that they would return to time and again. Records from a local and state investigation into their political donations allege a deliberate strategy: Send money out in the form of political contributions and expect business to come in.
Now California Waste Solutions picks up the entire city of Oakland’s recycling, and its founders have contributed from their deep pockets to the coffers of politicians from current Oakland City Council members to Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
On Thursday, the FBI raided the residences of David Duong, 66, and his son Andy, 34, who works in sales and PR for California Waste Solutions. Agents searched Mayor Sheng Thao’s home, too. The agency has not said why it conducted these surprise searches and hasn’t publicly accused Thao or the Duongs of wrongdoing.
We reached out to several members of the Duong family for this story, including Andy and David, emailing, calling, and knocking on some of their doors.
Only David responded to our inquiries.
“Unfortunately our legal counsel advised us not to talk at this time and show full cooperation with law enforcement while they are conducting their duty,” Duong wrote in an email.
Vietnam’s “King of Trash”
“You’ve heard it before: A family leaves their homeland and comes to America seeking a new start, new opportunities, and the American Dream,” reads the website of California Waste Solutions. “This is the Duong family’s story.”
In another sense, the Duongs’ empire in the United States was a restoration of the family’s old Vietnamese business aspirations. In the 1970s the Duongs lived in a seven-story mansion in Saigon, said to be the biggest in the city, David Duong told CBS in 2015. The family had already amassed a fortune from running a mostly state-owned paper mill and recycling facility called Cogido.
David Duong’s father, Duong Tai Thu, was known in the area as the “King of Trash.” But Saigon fell in April 1975, and overnight, the family lost its fortune, home, and business. David was 15 when he and his family fled the country by boat, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, in his telling.
Their boat sank; a Russian ship came to the rescue. After spending some time in a refugee camp in the Philippines, the family eventually ended up in San Francisco.
Here the family lore has been worn smooth in the retelling. Their fortune gone, the members of the once-powerful Duong family—all 16 of them—were forced to squeeze into two studio apartments in the Tenderloin. Soon, they began picking up cardboard, bottles, and other recyclables along the city’s streets with a used truck bought for $700, selling these items for cash to rebuild their lost fortune.
In 1983, the recycling hustle became a company, based in Oakland, with a name harking back to the old country: Cogido Recycling, which sold paper, plastic, and metal recyclables to the U.S. and Asia. Less than a decade later, the small recycling company was bought by Norcal Waste Systems, now known as Recology, with David Duong coming on as general manager.
By 1992, David Duong had started a competitor to Norcal, California Waste Solutions. And as the Duongs worked to grow their business, they started collecting more than cardboard.
“My legendary uncle”
Today, it’s difficult to find an East Bay politician who hasn’t crossed paths with the Duongs. Andy Duong’s Instagram account is a gallery of selfies with elected officials, local and beyond. Here is Andy smiling cheek-to-cheek with Sheng Thao and Loren Taylor. Here is Andy gripping Joe Biden’s hand. Here is Andy next to Gavin Newsom, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama.
Rubbing shoulders with the powerful appears to be a time-tested strategy for the Duongs. In 2016, Andy Duong sent an email to his father which was later obtained by state investigators. The subject line was “2016 Political Analysis.” In it, he recommended which candidates to support in that year’s election—in his words, who was “most likely going to win.”
These politicians were in “groups that will be best beneficial for us in the long run,” he wrote.
First on the list was Rep. Eric Swallwell, then running for reelection. He listed about a dozen other candidates, from current Oakland City Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan to a Super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton. “All of the above people are strong and relationship well established in our hands,” Andy Duong said about several people running in Oakland.
Duong’s email, made public in a court filing in 2022 in the course of an investigation into California Waste Solutions’ political giving, offers some insights into how the family viewed politicians and their utility to the business. Duong said of then Richmond Councilmember Jael Myrick, “He is a great person to keep a close relationship with for near future projects and opportunities within the Richmond to Contra Costa area.” Moraga Mayor Ken Chew, who was running for an Alameda County BART seat, was someone whose “political career is wide open” and could be “very useful within the county down the line.” Duong described Rob Bonta as someone who had always been “very supportive” of the family, an ally who “will deliver whatever we ask for when help needs in the future.”
Andy concluded his report to his father: “Please approve these as soon as you can. Thank you, Andy Duong.”
Relationship well established in our hands. The Duongs could’ve said this of any number of local politicians. But one person stands out in the family’s story: Larry Reid, former longtime member of the Oakland City Council.
Reid got his start in politics as a City Hall staffer. In 1993, working for Mayor Elihu Harris, he traveled to Vietnam with his boss, the Oakland Chamber of Commerce president, and David Duong. It was reportedly David’s first trip back to his home country since fleeing. But the trip was about business.
The delegation visited Ho Chi Minh City in hopes of convincing Vietnamese officials to use the Oakland Port if and when President Bill Clinton lifted the longstanding trade embargo between the countries. Harris reportedly paid for his and Reid’s trips using campaign funds.
Meanwhile, Reid, who went on to serve on the Oakland City Council from 1996 to 2020, built a deep personal connection with David Duong. Reid told reporters in 1998 that he was the godfather to David Duong’s three children. Andy Duong called Reid “my legendary uncle” in a 2016 Instagram post.
When workers at California Waste Solutions went on strike in 1998, claiming contract violations and unfair wages, the union called in Reid and Harris to mediate. The workers hoped they’d be able to encourage the Duongs to reach an agreement. At that point, the two men had received the largest local donations from the family—$5,250 for Reid and $6,050 for Harris. The mediation didn’t work—the strike later ended after other councilmembers stepped in and put pressure on the Duongs. Reid told reporters the union was being stubborn, assuming California Waste had more resources at its disposal than it did.
“He’s like my brother,” Reid said about David Duong in an interview with the Tribune. “If you have friends that you believe in, you support them, and David is like my family.”
A surprise win for California Waste Solutions
In 2002, California Waste Solutions secured its first contract with San Jose and was continuing to expand its reach around the Bay Area. Around this time, the company won an even bigger contract with the city of Oakland than it had previously. In 2004, while there was some disagreement within the Oakland City Council, its members ultimately voted to expand California Waste Solutions’ contract to handle half of the city’s recycling until 2012.
“This is the type of company we want to see grow and prosper in Oakland,” former Councilmember Jane Brunner told the Oakland Tribune at the time.
The majority of those in favor of this expansion cited the company’s status as a small minority- and family-run local business. Others countered that the company had outgrown that “small” descriptor. Former Councilmember Nancy Nadel said at the time that she feared the expanded contract with the growing company would look like favoritism.
Regardless, the city went ahead with the new contract and further secured California Waste Solutions’ future within Oakland. A few months later, the company hired a new lobbyist: Treva Reid, Larry’s daughter, who’s currently a councilmember for District 7.
Larry Reid did not respond to an interview request, and Treva Reid’s staff said she was unavailable to talk.
In 2006, the Vietnamese government reached out to the Duongs about returning to their home country to do business. The next year, the Duong family invested $150 million to start Vietnam Waste Solutions, a recycling facility in Ho Chi Minh City, calling it “the biggest waste treatment facility in Vietnam, managing solid waste collection, landfills, recycling and composting.”
Back in the U.S., the Duongs continued to expand their business ventures in the Bay Area, and by 2014, the company said that it had nearly doubled in size since its inception.
In 2012, the city issued requests for proposals from companies to handle Oakland’s lucrative garbage, recycling, and landfill services. The city’s call for bidders for this “Zero Waste” contract would start a bitter and confusing battle over who would win Oakland’s coveted trash deal.
According to a 2016 Alameda County civil grand jury report, Oakland officials engaged in a “tortured procurement process” for three years that focused on two bidders: California Waste Solutions and Waste Management of Alameda County. At the time, Treva Reid was pursuing the Zero Waste contract on behalf of the company.
In May 2014, Oakland’s Public Works Department recommended that the council award all three contracts—garbage, recycling, and landfill—to Waste Management, a national trash services company based in Texas. The council rejected this option. After reviewing “best and final offer” proposals from both companies, Public Works again recommended Waste Management. Department staff warned that California Waste Solutions “lacked the existing infrastructure necessary to perform services at the expiration of the existing contract,” according to the civil grand jury report.
In a surprising move, the City Council waved aside these concerns and approved all three contracts for California Waste Solutions.
Waste Management turned around and sued the city of Oakland, alleging that the city had violated its own bidding laws, leaked confidential information about Waste Management to California Waste Solutions, and offered the local company an unfair second chance to propose better rates.
Waste Management also began gathering signatures to place a referendum measure on an upcoming election ballot that would have allowed voters to weigh in directly on the contract disputes.
In September 2014, the City Council held a special meeting to discuss the contract issue and the lawsuit. The council voted to approve a settlement that would split the contracts by giving Waste Management garbage and compostables collection and landfill disposal and letting California Waste Solutions keep recycling. Larry Reid was absent from that vote. After this decision, Waste Management agreed to drop the lawsuit against the city.
In a second vote several days later to solidify the contract split, Reid was again missing with an excused absence. Councilmember Desley Brooks abstained from both votes.
The 2016 grand jury wrote that city staffers were sidelined during the settlement negotiations and that public transparency “was undermined by the contractors’ closed-door negotiations” and lack of public debate before the City Council.
The report said, “It appears to the Grand Jury that the city council paid minimal attention to the impact of the cost for services provided to the ratepayers.”
Legal troubles compound for the Duongs
Just a few years later, Oakland sued its recycling provider. In the 2017 case, the city claimed that California Waste Solutions was overcharging landlords of apartment buildings for its “premium” backyard service, through which workers, instead of residents, haul the bins to the curb. The company filed a countersuit in response.
The city and California Waste reached a settlement in 2017, with the company agreeing to refund property owners over $6 million. It also slashed its rate for premium service from $188 per cart to $34. City Attorney Barbara Parker called it a “win” for the landlords, who’d be able to “recoup unfair charges they were previously required to pay.”
It took until this year for the sides to reach an agreement on how to distribute the refunds and set up a new system. California Waste Solutions has not commented on the settlement, but in a statement on its website, the company said the agreement doesn’t mean it’s admitting fault.
A group of landlords have also sued the city, claiming the city’s “franchise fee,” which waste collectors pay to operate in Oakland, is an illegal tax that gets passed down to customers like them.
“Help me raise Im serious”
The money came out of Andy Duong’s wallet. That’s one thing Kevin Jiang said to investigators about the day in 2016 that he allegedly became a “straw donor.” Jiang was a friend of Andy’s; the two were partners in a vape business. Chatting in his office that day, Andy asked Jiang if he could make a contribution to a political campaign. Jiang said he couldn’t afford it.
Not a problem. Andy would pay him back. Jiang got his checkbook and wrote a check. The recycling heir opened his wallet and “reimbursed him the same amount in cash.” That’s what Jiang alleged in a September 2020 interview as part of a joint investigation between the Fair Political Practices Commission and the Oakland Public Ethics Commission. That investigation is ongoing.
Soon, Andy allegedly was asking Jiang to find people who’d be willing to write contribution checks, according to Jiang’s account. Andy wanted a few checks at a time, and Jiang would go and retrieve them from his family and friends, with Andy providing instructions on what info to write on each check, including the payee and amount. Jiang reimbursed the donors with “cash primarily from a drawer located in Duong’s CWS office,” investigators wrote. Money was moving fast: Jiang recalled that Andy would ask him on many occasions to make his collections quickly “since he did not have enough checks.”
Oakland’s campaign finance watchdogs eventually got a tip that something illegal may have been happening. Jiang and the people giving him checks had been caught up in an alleged scheme to secretly–and illegally–pump tens of thousands of dollars into the campaigns of numerous local politicians whom the Duong family wanted to support. The ethics investigators called them“straw donors”—people who take another person’s money to make political contributions on that person’s behalf, disguising the origin of the donation.
According to the investigators, using straw donors allowed Andy Duong to circumvent Oakland’s campaign finance law, which bars contractors who are trying to do business with the city from giving money to candidates or politicians. This rule is supposed to prevent pay-to-play relationships. During the period when Andy Duong was allegedly collecting checks from straw donors, California Waste Solutions was negotiating with Oakland about the relocation of its West Oakland facilities to a new site on the old Army Base. The company employed a well-connected lobbyist, Greg McConnell, to meet with councilmembers about the plan.
The joint investigation of this alleged scheme spilled into public records because many of the people suspected of taking part refused to cooperate with investigators, prompting the commission to file petitions to enforce the subpoenas in Alameda County Superior Court.
According to investigative records, California Waste Solutions, with Andy Duong acting as its agent, was the true source of at least 93 contributions to numerous local political campaigns between 2016 and 2018. Investigators said the Duongs contributed $67,000 to committees backing Dan Kalb, Rebecca Kaplan, Lynette Gibson McElhaney, Larry Reid, Abel Guillen, Desley Brooks, and Sheng Thao, who was a councilmember at the time.
Investigators claimed that “straw donors” channeled money from Andy Duong of California Waste Solutions. One of these individuals was Phuc Hong Tran, an insurance broker and president of the Oakland Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce. His daughter, Jennifer Tran, served as a campaign consultant to the committee backing Sheng Thao’s election to council in 2018. Investigators claimed that this committee had a “suspect cluster” of contributions. This included money–given by the restaurant Kim Huong Vietnamese Cuisine–that investigators wrote “we know to be laundered.”
The Duongs also allegedly reimbursed campaign contributions paid to politicians outside Oakland. Investigators claim that Andy Duong arranged for straw donors to make contributions to political candidates in Milpitas, San Jose, and Santa Clara County.
As laid out in investigative records, the scheme is almost surprisingly casual. For example, in a series of text messages in May 2018, Jiang and Duong talked about getting checks for a couple campaigns.
“Andy, do you still need them for desley? Cause its past the date Lemme know quick,” Jiang wrote on May 21, 2018. It appears Jiang was referring to Desley Brooks, who was running for reelection that year.
“Lol all of them Help me raise Im serious,” Duong replied.
Between May 22 and May 26, 2018, Desley Brook’s PAC received contributions from six alleged straw donors who each gave a maximum $800 contribution.
Jiang told investigators he secured at least 34 reimbursements from Duong for political campaign contributions he and others made. Jiang said he limited communicating with Duong after their vape business folded because he didn’t like how his former partner treated people.
Hop Nguyen, proprietor of Kim Huong Vietnamese Cuisine, was also interviewed by investigators. Nguyen’s restaurant fell under new ownership and was operated by Andy Duong as KultMix. Nguyen told investigators that Duong asked him to provide blank checks in exchange for cash.
Investigators wrote that “Duong did not explain why he needed the blank checks, but that it was common for people to do favors for each other in the Vietnamese culture.”
The empire expands
The Duongs have come a long way from their storied studio apartments in San Francisco. Today, Andy Duong’s house, the one raided by the FBI, sits atop the Oakland Hills. A flashy Mercedes SUV and coupe were out front on the day of the raid, agents diligently swabbing their interiors.
David Duong’s house on Skyline Boulevard is anything but modest: a sprawling home with balconies featuring ornate pillars and a pond with a small bridge in front.
A few of the Duongs’ other businesses
- The Duongs paid $2.9 million for a bankrupt golf course in a suburb of Sacramento through a company called Auburn Sierra Golf Club LLC.
- Victor Duong set up a company called VABA Venture Capital LLC that appears to be linked to a $50 million venture capital investment fund.
- The Duongs set up a mobile-home company called Evolutionary Homes LLC. Mario Juarez, a controversial businessman and former political candidate, was involved in the project.
- Michael Duong launched an entertainment media company called AsianNet Media. Andy Duong was a producer for an action film called Codename: The Dragon.
Look around at Oakland’s current political landscape. There’s an Oakland councilmember with whom the Duongs are tight enough to be considered family. There’s another to whom they’ve donated thousands of dollars. There’s yet another who’s plastered all over one son’s Instagram.
The Duongs’ recycling stronghold and political connections in Oakland have come under scrutiny since the raid. But in the background, David, Andy, and their relatives have been working on a bigger scale, throwing money at national campaigns and quietly creating a sprawling network of companies
While the Duong family’s prolific campaign contributions straddled the political aisle over the years, since the start of the pandemic there’s been a notable shift. In 2020, David Duong gave the Trump Victory political action committee over $250,000. In 2022, he gave $155,000 to a Republican committee bankrolling dozens of candidates running for seats in the House of Representatives. In 2020, Kristina Duong—David’s sister—also gave $50,000 to the Trump Victory committee, and $25,000 to a PAC supporting Republicans in 2022.
California Waste Solutions has also spent tens of thousands of dollars lobbying federal elected officials on COVID relief, vaccine distribution, and developing trade relations with Vietnam, according to disclosure reports.
Then there are the new companies, many using the 1211 Embarcadero mailing address in Oakland, the location of the California Waste Solutions office that was raided along with the houses. Family members bought a bankrupt golf course. They launched a mobile home enterprise. A venture capital investment fund, an entertainment company. Andy Duong even helped produce an action film, Codename: the Dragon.
The Duongs’ empire has spread well beyond the borders of the East Bay. This is what empires do: expand. A $700 van had become a recycling behemoth with billion-dollar municipal contracts had become a sprawling collection of business ventures. One thing converted into another thing converted into something new. Recycling, after all, is the family business.
