The latest turn in the race to replace disgraced former county Supervisor George Shirakawa, Jr., the Santa Clara County Democratic Party has filed a complaint against candidate Teresa Alvarado, alleging that she illegally coordinated with a political action committee. Alvarado and fellow candidate Cindy Chavez, who has also been accused of illegal campaign coordination and is supported by the county Democratic Party, will face off in a July 30 special election. With only three weeks left in the race, an important debate is being waged on what constitutes unfair campaign assistance.

To handle the surge of complaints, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office set up a fraud hotline in Vietnamese and English for customers bilked by a San Jose travel agency. Sunlight Travel, founded in 1996 by Diane Ho, suddenly closed up shop June 5, leaving customers in a lurch. Many of them stand to lose thousands of dollars for flights bought but never booked. Sunlight Travel catered to a lot of Vietnamese clients from its now-closed strip mall storefront on South King Road.

The Government Attorneys Association (GAA) held a special meeting Friday, and sources tells San Jose Inside that if the county attorneys agreed upon anything, it’s that a “deep division” exists amongst the membership. The big question is how can this be resolved when the union’s leadership continues to focus on scoring fleeting political points.

Will Xavier Campos ever break free of George Shirakawa Jr.’s shadow? Last week, District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced a new felony charge against Shirakawa after the former county supervisor’s DNA was found on a stamp affixed to a 2010 political hit piece against Magdalena Carrasco, Campos’ San Jose council opponent that year. Campos released a statement that failed to deny involvement. A look back at some of his 2010 campaign disclosure forms has now created some intriguing new questions.

Dozens of alleged Nuestra Familia gang members were indicted by a criminal grand jury on 77 charges, which range from meth sales to murder. It’s the largest gang case Santa Clara County has ever tackled: 48 people charged in a hefty 99-page indictment. “This is a sophisticated, complex criminal organization that required a sophisticated, multi-faceted law enforcement and prosecutorial response,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement released Tuesday morning.

If stupidity were a felony, ex-county Supervisor George Shirakawa would be spending a lot more time in jail. The new charges filed by District Attorney Jeff Rosen against Shirakawa, resulting from DNA samples found on a political dirty trick mailer, is the latest example. But this brings us to a new problem: Shirakawa didn’t act alone. The pieces were written, designed and printed by others. There must be more DNA out there that identifies those who helped. These folks should be lawyering up right now.

A cloud has been cast over the 2010 election of San Jose Councilman Xavier Campos with this morning’s announcement that George Shirakawa Jr. participated in a covert effort to change the election’s outcome, according to the Santa Clara County District Attorney. Shirakawa, the disgraced former county supervisor who will be sentenced for unrelated crimes Friday, allegedly licked stamps affixed to fraudulent campaign mailers that were designed to discredit council candidate Magdalena Carrasco, who lost two close elections to Campos, a friend and staffer of Shirakawa’s at the time of the crime.

County supervisor candidate Cindy Chavez has confirmed that she raised concerns about prosecuting George Shirakawa Jr. during a luncheon with Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen at P.F. Chang’s in January. Despite the intervention by Chavez and others, Shirakawa was charged five weeks later with five felonies and seven misdemeanors and immediately resigned from office. He subsequently pled guilty to all of the charges.

On January 22, five weeks before former Supervisor George Shirakawa Jr. was charged with 12 criminal counts, Cindy Chavez met District Attorney Jeff Rosen for lunch at P.F. Chang’s in downtown San Jose.  Not only did Chavez throw down the race card and lobby Rosen “not to do anything,” South Bay Labor Council’s new executive Ben Field also lunched with Rosen and echoed the message.

Two years ago, District Attorney Jeff Rosen cleverly cushioned the effects of county-mandated pay cuts for some of his senior prosecutors through an accounting loophole. After his top supervisors were disproportionately affected by the cuts, he started giving them “admin leave” so they could collect vacation time for a payout down the road to replace lost wages. The slick move, legal under county policies, got the attention of County Executive Jeff Smith, who’s now asking Attorney General Kamala Harris to investigate. The question is: What’s really happening here?

It’s always a shame to let facts interfere with a good story, but county Supervisor George Shirakawa Jr.‘s downfall didn’t start with a hushed voice from a trench coat in the dark corners of a parking garage. Here’s how Metro/San Jose Inside uncovered some of the disgraced politician’s illegal activity.

My professional life has been filled with many ups and many downs. One big down moment came in a Jan. 9 email from District Attorney Jeff Rosen to Superintendent De La Torre, with a “cc” to the SCCOE Board of Education. In this email, Rosen said he had received a complaint that Darcie Green’s recent Board appointment was unlawful.

Metro reported this week that Supervisor George Shirakawa—the top elected official in the county—has been submitting fraudulent expense reports. He has spent thousands of dollars on lavish dinners, alcohol and luxury hotel rooms and rental cars with a county credit card. Amazingly, he avoided detection despite two audits of his county credit card purchases. Many of the people Shirakawa treated to meals were unaware that taxpayers were picking up the tab, and have since sent checks reimbursing the county. This group includes San Jose Police Chief Chris Moore.

President Barack Obama’s “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) program, a policy enacted in June that allows illegal immigrants who arrived in the United States as children to obtain a work permit, a valid Social Security number and a contingent promise of deferred action with regard to deportation. DACA does not provide a path to lawful permanent resident status, U.S. citizenship or legal immigration status. But, perhaps unintentionally, a new study from Stanford suggests that DACA could result in drops in crime nationwide.

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors took the month of July off from work as usual, but some discreet construction has been occurring behind closed doors. As part of a $900,000 project approved in closed session in October 2011, a panic room is being installed in the Board chambers.

On Monday, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced that more than 60 people in Santa Clara County have been sentenced to too harsh of sentences under the Three Strikes law, and his office intends to scale back punishments or even free some of these individuals.