My original plan was to dive right into the first topic for this column — a three-part series on longtime supervisor and mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin — but I decided a little introduction made sense, especially for those reading Reynolds Rap for the first time.
When I became editor in chief of the Marina Times newspaper two decades ago, I was most excited to write about two of my passions: food and animals. Along with that, the owner and publisher at the time, David Ish, asked that I pen a monthly editor’s note. In the beginning, it was a look at what was coming that issue, but later morphed into an opinion column about life in San Francisco. When David proposed starting a second publication, a tabloid-sized magazine called Northside San Francisco that would focus on lifestyle and include magazine-length feature stories, my work moved from the Marina Times to Northside, where my editor’s notes became more opinionated, taking on politicians and, for the most part, their bad decisions. In 2006, David offered to sell both the Marina Times and Northside to me as he was ready to live his dream — retirement as an ex-pat in Thailand. I asked my father if he would loan me the money, expecting him to say “no.” Mind you, when all my friends took summers off during college, my father told me to “get a job like he did” — but he did help me buy my first flat in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood from my landlord. “Interest rate will be 10 percent,” he said in his thick New England accent. “But Dad, that’s way higher than the banks!” I objected. “Then go get a mortgage,” he said calmly, knowing I was a kid with questionable credit. I took the deal.
Whenever I took my dad out for lunch, he knew something was up, and this afternoon at my favorite (and sadly now-closed) Italian eatery, Vivande on Fillmore Street, was no different. As I nervously approached the subject of buying the two publications, Chef Carlo Middione swept by to thank me for a recent review. “It brought in a lot of business,” he said, “and that means a lot to a small place like ours.” He set the table perfectly, no pun intended. After a couple glasses of vino and a sausage and pepper sandwich, my dad looked down at the latest copies of the Marina Times and Northside and said, “You’re talented. You’ve always been talented. I believe in you. The interest rate will be 15 percent.” I took the deal.
The 2009 issue of Northside featured an exposé on one of San Francisco’s richest and most lauded nonprofits, the San Francisco SPCA. Rescue organizations, familiar with my years of writing about shelters and animals, began telling me horror stories about the way it was being run — while selling themselves to the public as a wonderful organization and collecting millions in donations, the SFSPCA was in reality saving fewer dogs per year than the tiny grassroots Rocket Dog Rescue. I agreed to go undercover with Rocket Dog as a volunteer, which gave me access to the inner workings. By the time the piece debuted, the SFSPCA was nervous, threatening me with their “seven attorneys” who would be “making sure every word was true.” One of my inside sources, a charming eccentric woman from Pacific Heights, told me another board member said, “Who cares what that little rag has to say.” When all was said and done, the president, vice president, and half the board (including my biggest detractor) had stepped down.
That story put me, and Northside, on the map, but the bills were piling up and the Marina Times had fallen back to a folksy little paper yellowing on the doorsteps of the neighborhood’s Victorians. Then tragedy struck – my beloved pit bull, Jasmine Blue, about whom I wrote 56 chapters in a column called “Jasmine Blue’s Tails of the Dog Park,” was stricken with a rare cancer at just four years of age. Radiation treatment for Jazzy at U.C. Davis Veterinary Hospital meant spending Monday through Friday in Davis and coming home to the city on weekends. At the time my hair was long and thick and stuck to my shoulders during those sweltering 110-degree Davis days, and so I decided to chop it off. I looked at my iPhone and found a place called “Jazzy Salon.” It felt like kismet, but I couldn’t have known just how important that haircut would be.
As I sat in the chair making the usual small talk with the stylist, she asked what I did. “I publish a small newspaper and a magazine in San Francisco,” I explained. Her eyes lit up. “My brother was a publisher — have you heard of Focus Magazine?” she asked. “Of course,” I said. “It was groundbreaking for KQED and became San Francisco Magazine.” She nodded. “My brother was a vice president at KQED and he started Focus. He’s retired, but he’s bored. You should give him a call.” When Jazzy and I returned to the city, I called her brother, Earl Adkins.
At our first meeting at my condo on Buena Vista Avenue, Jazzy slept nearby in her bed as Earl looked at both publications. He liked what he saw, until he saw the books. We were in debt up to our eyeballs, as my dad would say. But it was definitely kismet, and Earl agreed to come on as publisher. Decisions were made that I wasn’t happy with but turned out to be the right ones. Northside was costing a fortune to print, Earl pointed out, but it was the Marina Times that had the brand recognition. He felt my writing was the strongest thing about Northside, but that it needed to come over to the Marina Times, which meant folding Northside’s lifestyle content into the Marina Times and shutting down Northside. With Earl directing the show and me as the main talent, we were able to attract more strong contributors. Slowly but surely, Earl took us from the red to the green — the Marina Times became profitable, and I brought Earl on as my partner.
My editor’s note, now called “Reynolds Rap,” also became stronger and began attracting a larger readership. I have lovers and haters, and some who love me or hate me depending on which city official I’m writing about. For example, I was the only reporter to call for the resignation of San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr when young men of color were being shot in the back with alarming frequency, but I also endorsed the recall of progressive former district attorney Chesa Boudin. I called out Aaron Peskin and his wife when their NIMBY Telegraph Hill Dwellers group tried to bully a man from opening a club in North Beach, but I also endorsed him for supervisor because I felt, with his decades of budget and legislative experience, he was the best person to lead District 3, and the City of San Francisco, out of the pandemic.
In April 2019, I wrote a column called “It’s time for Mayor Breed to sweep DPW boss to the curb,” detailing Department of Public Works director Mohammed Nuru’s decades of corruption that had flown under the noses of four mayors. I noted that his Twitter account showed him partying in China with bigwigs while the streets of San Francisco were some of the filthiest in the world. That column elicited a lengthy, handwritten, anonymous letter, obviously from inside the agency that mentioned another more personal reason — “He dated London Breed” (several other DPW sources also said they were aware of this, and one even hinted it may not be a thing of the past). The letter also mentioned other messy Nuru scandals, including “creating the Fix It Department for current girlfriend Sandra Zuniga” after she didn’t get a managerial position within DPW. I published an update in June 2019, and in January of 2020, Nuru was arrested on charges of fraud (his girlfriend Sandra Zuniga was also indicted).
Tips started rolling in about corruption in other departments, leading to a column in March 2020 about San Francisco Public Utilities Director Harlan Kelly having an affair with his subordinate, Juliet Ellis, and how the couple frequently traveled together on the ratepayers’ dime. Three months later, federal officials obtained personnel files for the couple, along with complete records related to any trips they took, including expense reports and reimbursement records, back to 2005.
The FBI raided Kelly’s home in November 2020 and the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged him in an alleged long-running bribery scheme. Those charges stemmed from another story I broke in my July 2020 “Friends with Community Benefits” exposé — an illicit arrangement with contractor and permit expediter Walter Wong. I wrote that Kelly should be sweating the guilty pleas of Wong, which included an agreement to cooperate with the FBI. It’s no secret that Wong did favors for a lot of city bigshots, and that included Harlan and Naomi Kelly. Numerous workers inside the SFPUC told me not only did Wong do work for the power couple, but “Harlan bragged about it openly.”
All of these stories broke in an opinion column in a small, underfunded neighborhood newspaper and were ignored by mainstream media, including daily newspapers the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, and so-called “progressive watchdogs” like blogs 48 Hills and Mission Local. In 2021, Earl and I sold the Marina Times to the parent company of L.A. Weekly (they purchased New York City’s venerable Village Voice on the same day). The talented editorial team, including our core group of editors and designers — Lynette Majer, John Zipperer, Bill Evans, and Sara Brownell — worked together as a well-oiled machine, and all of them are joining Earl and me on this new journey with The Voice of San Francisco.
For next week’s issue, Reynolds Rap will feature part 1 of a three-part series on the aforementioned Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who recently tossed his hat into a crowded field of mayoral candidates. It should be noted that I started working on this series a year ago, after numerous tips and rumblings from sources intrigued me to start looking into how Peskin went from unknown activist to powerhouse NIMBY to the city’s longest serving supervisor to one of Telegraph Hill’s biggest real estate tycoons. Buckle up. It’s going to be a wild ride.
