On the last day of his first term in January 2021, U.S. President Donald Trump issued scores of pardons and commutations, including one to a South County businesswoman whose plea for release from prison was supported by Chula Vista’s then-deputy mayor, John McCann.
Back then McCann said that he was asked to support the woman, then known under her married name of Adriana Shayota, by her brother Andres Camberos, the former owner of Chula Vista’s first legal cannabis business.
McCann called her “an incredibly good person” who got caught up in a massive food counterfeiting and fraud scheme headed by her husband, Joseph, at the exporting firm they both owned.
He wrote a letter that was part of the clemency package that landed in front of Trump.
But just six weeks after her release, according to federal prosecutors in San Diego, Adriana was back in the fraud game with her brother. Over the next two years her second food fraud scheme netted them an estimated $26 million in profits, court records show.
They also contributed money to political campaigns — including McCann’s, campaign finance records show. The brother and sister each contributed $360, the maximum allowed under the city law, to McCann’s 2022 mayoral campaign.
And 10 months later, Adriana Camberos dropped a $20,000 contribution into the coffers of The Community Leadership Coalition, a political action committee sponsored by the Lincoln Club of San Diego County.
That committee spent on a variety of campaigns and causes that year, the records show. But chief among them was independent expenditures opposing the campaign of McCann’s opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar.
In all the PAC shelled out nearly $105,000 opposing Campa-Najjar’s bid in 2022 — by far its largest expenditure on a single candidate that year.
McCann won that race with 52% of the vote.
Now, he’s running for the District 1 seat on the county Board of Supervisors. McCann gained the most votes in a primary election April 8 and faces runner-up and Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre. He faces an uphill fight in the district where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2-1 margin.
The outcome in the nominally nonpartisan race will affect the overall makeup of the Board of Supervisors, which is now split with two Republicans and two Democrats. The board faces a number of crucial issues in the coming years including budget issues, tackling the housing and homeless crisis and potential new taxes and fees the acting board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer called for in a speech April 16.
In an interview, McCann read a statement reiterating he was asked to write a letter in support, as did other — unknown — community leaders years ago, and said the Aguirre campaign was dredging up a five-year old story as the runoff campaign got underway.
“In 2020 I, along with other community leaders, was asked to write a letter to support the reduction in the sentence of Adriana Shayota,” he said. “I believe in giving people second chances. Understanding she was a mother with no prior convictions and completing almost half of her 26-month sentence, I provided a letter of support for her commutation to her family.
“Miss Shayota was given a remarkable opportunity to restore her life. I was saddened she chose instead to engage in illegal activity after her commutation. This is unfortunate but she will suffer the consequences of her choices.”
McCann said that he met Andres Camberos while touring Grasshopper Delivery, the first licensed cannabis dispensary in Chula Vista. The two had attended Bonita Vista High School, albeit at different times, and Andres Camberos told him about his sister’s plight. McCann said he researched the case, and then decided to write the letter.
He said he did not know of the family’s campaign contributions in 2022. “I was not aware of them at the time,” he said. “I was simply too busy campaigning.”
Campaign finance records show in 2022 the Lincoln Club committee spent funds on 11 separate campaigns, and opposed four candidates. None received the level of opposition as Campar-Najjar’s race.
The committee spent about $60,000 opposing the campaign of San Diego Unified School Board candidate Cody Petterson, and a total of $12,000 against two candidates running for county supervisor and mayor of Vista.
The campaign consultant for Aguirre blasted McCann’s connection to the Camberos.
“Mayors are supposed to stop criminals, but John McCann helps them out of prison and takes their money instead,” said consultant Dan Rottenstreich.
The scam
Adriana Camberos and then-husband Joseph Shayota were convicted of conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and copyright infringement in federal court in San Francisco in 2016 for a scheme involving the 5-Hour Energy drink.
The government said their company, Tradeway International, had a deal with the makers of the energy drink to distribute the product in Mexico. The manufacturer sold them bottles with labels in Spanish at a 40% discount from the price for distributors in the U.S. market.
Instead the Shayotas re-labeled the bottle, scraping off the Spanish language labels with a razor blade, then slapping on bogus English labels. They then sold the drink back into the U.S. market, at U.S. market prices.
Later, the company brazenly concocted its own home brew version of the drink, and for nearly a year sold millions of bottles of the drink in the U.S.
Adriana Camberos began her 26-month sentence in December 2019. Her family began seeking her release nearly right away, according to an account in The New York Times, hiring lawyers and filing a petition for clemency.
Just two months after she began serving her sentence, Andres Camberos made a $50,000 donation to a Trump re-election campaign committee, according to federal records.
After getting her grant of clemency, federal prosecutors said the siblings engaged in a similar scam. This time they purchased from manufacturers a wider array of goods — snacks, beverages, “everyday consumer goods” according to court records — with the promise to sell them in Mexico or in prisons and rehabilitation centers in the U.S.
They bought the goods, again, at discount. And, again, the products were sold back into the U.S. market at regular prices — and the two pocketed the difference in prices as profit.
Read the rest of the story at inewsource.org.
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