SAN FRANCISCO — A 38-year-old San Francisco man has been sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for chasing down and firing a gun at a U.S. Postal Service worker.

On May 2, Vo Nguyen pleaded guilty to assault upon a federal employee with a deadly or dangerous weapon and discharging a firearm in connection with a crime of violence.

The incident happened on April 1, 2023. Nguyen yelled at a postal service worker who was delivering mail to his home, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a news release.

Nguyen admitted he “aggressively approached” the postal worker and “acted like he wanted to fight,” according to prosecutors.

The postal worker ran away. Nguyen followed him and the postal worker sprayed him with pepper spray.

Nguyen went back to his home, grabbed a 9mm pistol, got into his car and went looking for the postal worker.

After finding the postal worker, Nguyen fired five to six shots at him, paused and then fired another five shots, prosecutors said.

The postal worker ran in the opposite direction that Nguyen was driving. Nguyen made a U-turn and drove after the postal worker, who took cover behind a parked SUV.

Nguyen stopped in front of the SUV and fired another three shots, according to prosecutors. He then got out of his car and chased the postal worker, who sprayed him with pepper spray again.

Nguyen was arrested the same day. A federal grand jury indicted him on the charges the following month.

The sentence was handed down Thursday. In addition to the prison term, U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick sentenced Nguyen to a three-year period of supervision following his release from prison. A restitution hearing has been set for Oct. 10.

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco features some of the ritziest homes in the country and it has some unique real estate jewels but none of them may compare to one particular property in the city’s Miraloma Park neighborhood.

The 3 bedroom, 1 /2 bath home was built in 1930. Moss-green, velvety couches, crossbows, swords and countless other medieval items are carefully placed throughout the home

In the first week on the market, roughly 650 people have showed up to take a tour.

“We have a little half-bath,” said listing agent. Charlie Mader. “There’s a feature that has taken the internet by storm. The toilet paper holder.”

Even taking a tinkle comes with a suit and armor. 

“On Sunday, the influencers started showing up,” Mader said. “I know I’m on TikTok and Instagram. I knew I had a hit when, Monday morning, I got a call from Zillow Gone Wild requesting permission to run the photos.”

Mader says this listing came to him from a former client after Father Rodriguez passed away in April at the age of 93. The client is one of 12 beneficiaries of the Rodriguez trust.

“To be perfectly honest, I recommended we empty the house first,” Mader said. “Have everybody come collect and then paint it and stage it with smaller furniture to make the rooms look bigger. That’s when I was told ‘Oh no. We have to show it exactly as father had it because those were his wishes.’”

Now people are mesmerized by the carefully hand-painted windows, stained glass, the fine crystals and other artifacts that Father Rodriguez brought back from his travels to Europe. For just under $1.2 million the house is priced for someone else to call it home.

“He did die here on the property of old age, peacefully, in his sleep,” Mader said. “That’s part of the reason why its price is a little low because some people are concerned about that. But he died happy and he’s looking down on us smiling right now. I’m sure.”

All the items are not included in the sale of the home but anyone interested can come to an open house and submit an offer to take home a piece of 999 Portola Drive.

As SFist celebrates its 20th anniversary, we remember the ridiculous San Francisco City Hall scandals that made us a go-to destination for salacious political gossip and mockery in our early days.

We are celebrating our 20th anniversary at SFist this week, and in looking back, we acknowledge that some of our critics have called our tone perhaps a little unprofessional in the early years. But those early years were a time when San Francisco had a famously philandering mayor, a supervisor who used the word “fuck” at every board meeting, and another supervisor who secretly did not even live in San Francisco but still shook down local boba shops for $80,000 bribes. So really, our unprofessional tone was perfect for covering such an unprofessional era at SF City Hall.

SFist published its very first post just six months after Gavin Newsom was sworn in as Mayor of San Francisco in 2004. At the time, Newsom was married to a certain Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is (sigh) that Kimberly Guilfoyle. But back then, Guilfoyle was a highly respected SF assistant district attorney known for winning a conviction in a high-profile dog-mauling case.

The two had a dignified break-up in 2005. But the path going forward for both was anything but dignified.

The then-38-year-old Newsom quickly developed a reputation for dating much younger women. The most infamous of these paramours was a 20-year-old Brittanie Mountz (seen above), who appeared to have used a fake ID to get into events at which she drank with Newsom.

But there were others! So many others that SFist ran updated power rankings on the always fluid pecking order of Newsom’s various side-pieces: CSI: Miami bit-part player Sofia Milos, reality TV personality Erin Brodie, and the eventual winner of the Gavin girlfriend sweepstakes, Jennifer Siebel (now Jennifer Siebel Newsom).

This all hit fever-pitch in January 2007, in a bombshell incident that spurred the greatest SFist headline of all time. News broke that Newsom had an extramarital affair with his own campaign manager’s wife Ruby Rippey-Tourk. Her husband Alex Tourk had been Newsom’s deputy chief of staff before being named reelection campaign manager in September 2006. And for months after that, it became appointment reading to catch each day’s developments as side-splittingly summarized by SFist writers Eve Batey and Rita Hao in their As the Gav Turns series.  

Newsom blamed the behavior on alcohol and entered treatment. But many SFist commenters alleged that it was fake rehab and Newsom never really stopped drinking (which was confirmed by the Sacramento Bee years later).

It was during this phase that Newsom dealt with the fallout of a very hilarious photo of him staring at a woman’s breasts that became public. The image was from the political hit-job mailer against Newsom from the 2007 mayoral election seen below, and its origin, and degree of authenticity, are still unknown.

Just one week before the Rippey-Tourk affair scandal broke, Newsom’s campaign was reeling from a separate scandal, unearthed here at SFist.

SFist discovered that Newsom’s press secretary Peter Ragone had been posting sock puppet comments in the SFist comments section under someone else’s name, a scandal came to be known as SFistGate.

So at this point, SFist wasn’t just covering the scandal, we were part of the unfolding scandal.

Despite all of this mortifying behavior, Newsom still easily won reelection that year with a landslide 74% of the vote. This was likely because his opponents were a cast of gag-candidate characters like Chicken John, and Power Exchange bondage club owner Michael Powers.

There were other ongoing scandalous matters which obsessed SFist and our readers during this mid-to late-2000s era.

We chronicled the exploits of foul-mouthed then-supervisor Chris Daly in a series called Everybody Hates Chris. A reckless driving incident from then-state Senator Carole Migden inspired the How’s Carole Migden’s Driving? series. And surely the most bizarre ongoing SFist series of that day was Oh No, Ed Jew!, the saga of the then-District 4 SF supervisor who secretly did not even live in San Francisco, but more significantly, solicited an $80,000 bribe from a Quickly boba shop. He was sentenced to more than five years in prison.  

On a personal note from this SFist correspondent, one day I was called to serve on a jury duty pool with Ed Jew, and at the height of the Ed Jew scandal at that. I wrote a lengthy SFist comment about the experience, and SFist co-founder Rita Hao emailed me later that day and offered me an (unpaid) position as an SFist contributor. And I’m proud to once again be an SFist contributor today.

So in some ways, some of these scandals truly did, to some degree, make SFist what it is today.

SFist Turns 20: Here’s to 20 Years of Gossip, Snark, and Covering This Beautiful City [SFist]

Image: From a political hit piece, origin/authenticity unknown