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"  (Optional Video Accompaniment To This Post) Is there some kind of employee of the month deal going on at the FBI? Just today, they&amp;#039;ve busted a California state senator and the mayor of Charlotte, as well as raiding the offices of an state assemblyman in New York? In California, state senator Leland Yee got arrested and the FBI seems to be accusing him of having wandered into a Dashiell Hammett novel. The agency was executing numerous arrests and search warrants in the Bay Area, FBI Special Agent Michael Gimbel said outside the offices of Ghee Kung Tong, a fraternal organization in San Francisco&amp;#039;s Chinatown that was among the sites searched. Lee said a second man, Raymond Chow, was also arrested. Chow, who was known as &amp;quot;Shrimp Boy,&amp;quot; was reportedly the head of Ghee Kung Tong and had returned to Chinatown after serving time in prison on gun charges. (One of Yee&amp;#039;s major accomplishments in office was forcing the California State University Stanislaus to admit that it paid Sarah Palin $75,000 to give a speech. That&amp;#039;s about 75 cents per malaprop. Somebody needs to go to the sneezer behind that.) Meanwhile, Patrick Cannon, the mayor of Charlotte in the newly insane state of North Carolina, seems to have gotten into his alleged trouble the old-fashioned way. FBI agents, working on a tip that Cannon, 47, was potentially involved in illegal activities, started an investigation in August 2010, Tompkins said in a statement. Cannon - elected mayor five months ago after a long political career in Charlotte - solicited and accepted cash bribes and other items of value from undercover FBI agents, who were posing as commercial real estate developers and investors who wanted to do business in Charlotte, Tompkins said. In the federal complaint against Cannon, there&amp;#039;s one interesting little bit of alleged byplay between Cannon and the undercover agent who was working him. On December 12, 2012, UCE1 and CANNON had dinner together. At that dinner, CANNON inquired as to whether UCE1 would be willing to invest in a business that CANNON allegedly was creating named &amp;quot;HERS.&amp;quot; HERS, according to CANNON, was a feminine hygiene product to be marketed and sold in the United States. UCE1 agreed to provide CANNON a $12,500 &amp;quot;zero-percent-return-on-investment loan&amp;quot; for the alleged HERS product in return for his assistance with zoning and permitting for the Firehouse nightclub/bar. You have to admit. It&amp;#039;s a creative -- if somewhat strange -- euohemism. Elsewhere, the Feebs also dropped in on Assemblyman William Scarborough in Queens. Assembly William Scarborough, a Democrat, told reporters the feds and state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman&amp;#039;s office are probing whether he abused his Assembly travel expenses. Scarborough, first elected to the Assembly in 1994, insisted he&amp;#039;s acted legally. The FBI raided his home in Queens, his district office, his Albany office and his Albany hotel room. He said they took his records and his smartphone. The veteran lawmaker in 2012 led the Assembly in putting in for travel expenses known as per diems - $33,986 worth. This one seems a bit penny-ante, and more a job for the New York State Police, unless the Feds are building some sort of tax case against Scarborough. Nevertheless, your tax dollars have been hard at work this afternoon. So coffee all around, I guess. Who gets the trophy and who gets the set of steak knives? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28395/fbi-busts-032614/>