Path to San Mateo County sheriff’s removal

After a county investigator found Corpus violated policies on nepotism and conflicting relationships, voters empowered the supervisors to remove her, a three-month process slated to begin at the end of April. If successful, it would be the first removal of a county sheriff in California history.

Six cities in San Mateo County have called for her resignation. The county executive is suing Corpus. Corpus is suing the county. Taxpayers are probably picking up the tab for all of it. At stake is the administration of law enforcement in one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country.

Corpus’ road to professional peril began when the sheriff’s captain decided to run for her boss’ job in 2022. 

Her opponent, then-Sheriff Carlos Bolanos, had his years in office bookended by scandal. In 2007, when he was the undersheriff of San Mateo County, he and former Sheriff Greg Munks were briefly detained by police in a raid at a Las Vegas brothel. The raids were dubbed “Operation Dollhouse.” Five people were arrested, but Munks and Bolanos were not among them. 

Munks said at the time that he believed the brothel was a legitimate massage business. Bolanos could not be reached by CalMatters for comment. 

Fifteen years later, in one of his final acts in 2022, Bolanos sent four Sheriff’s Office employees to Indiana to raid a production facility that makes $210,000 Batmobiles, complete with flamethrowers to simulate the superhero vehicle’s jet turbine exhaust. The reason: A constituent complained that his car delivery had been delayed over a missed payment. Attorney General Rob Bonta declined to investigate Bolanos. Corpus ran as a reformer and promised changes.

Bonta endorsed Bolanos and the incumbent held a significant early polling advantage, but Corpus won the 2022 nonpartisan open primary anyway with 57% of the vote. Candidates who receive more than 50% of an open, top-two primary vote are declared the winners without the need for a general election. 

“We stood up to an establishment,” Corpus said on the night of her primary victory, “and it’s been amazing.”

A contemporaneous account of her election night watch party in the Redwood City Pulse said Corpus’ supporters presented her with a large custom bottle of Champagne emblazoned with her name, the year and the Sheriff’s Office logo. 

Beneath that were the words: “A sheriff we can trust.” 

Before everything that followed — the arrest of the deputies’ union president; a damning, 400-page outside investigation; the sheriff’s divorce and whispers about her personal conduct — this was one of the first and last highlights of Corpus’ early tenure. 

When the sheriff-elect was thanking her volunteers, she called out four by name. One of them was local activist Nancy Goodban.

“A lot of us activists were her best volunteers, because we wanted a reform sheriff,” Goodban said. 

So what transformed Goodban from one of Corpus’ top supporters to someone who attends board meetings just to call for her removal? 

“Oh,” Goodban said. “When that report came out.” 

Hiring an ally kicked off firestorm

The trouble started, according to a November report commissioned by the county, when Corpus named one of her campaign consultants to a position in the Sheriff’s Department, executive director of administration.

Retired Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell’s report described the campaign consultant, Victor Aenlle, as “someone who has far more experience as a Coldwell Banker associate real estate broker than he has in law enforcement.” (Aenlle served for 17 years as a reserve deputy in the Sheriff’s Office, according to records held by the Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training.)

Rumors were already swirling in the county building about the relationship between Corpus and Aenlle, according to the 408-page report, specifically a trip to Hawaii the pair took with Corpus’ children in October 2022, four months after she won election. 

Corpus’ then-husband, who was also a sworn member of the Sheriff’s Office, allegedly told a former Sheriff’s Office employee that “Corpus was having an affair with Aenlle and that he did not go on the Hawaii trip because Corpus told him that the flight was full and that there wasn’t a plane ticket available for him,” according to the report.

Corpus’ ex-husband could not be reached for comment.

In an interview with CalMatters, Aenlle said he and Corpus are just close friends, and any other insinuations are meritless. 

“It’s made up,” Aenlle said. “It’s fabricated. I’ve always spoken very highly and cared deeply about the sheriff. I came into the scene when she decided to run because I really saw the injustices in the department. I saw the abuse, the corruption.” 

Cordell found that Corpus violated the county’s policy on nepotism and conflicting relationships. She alleged in the report that, by 2024, Corpus had “relinquished control” of the department to Aenlle. 

Cordell afforded all of the 40 people she interviewed anonymity in the report. Most of the allegations relating to the personal relationship between Aenlle and Corpus are attributed to one person, identified only as Employee No. 3, a civilian working in the Sheriff’s Office. 

That person alleged that Corpus and Aenlle were physically intimate, sharing massages and on one occasion kissing in front of the employee. 

Then there were the boots. 

Purchased at a Nordstrom’s, according to Employee No. 3, and hidden away in a black shoebox in the back of her van, the $1,200 boots — and an $11,000 pair of diamond earrings — were the physical embodiment of an inappropriate relationship between Corpus and Aenlle. 

Employee No. 3 told Cordell, according to the report, Corpus showed her the boots and said “I’m keeping them back here for now so (her then-spouse) won’t see them.” 

Over the next two years, Corpus would make at least four requests to raise Aenlle’s salary. One was granted, raising his pay to $246,979. The other three were denied by the county’s human resources department. 

Cordell concluded that their relationship went beyond friendship. She considered the earrings and the boots, allegations that Aenlle gave Corpus late-night rides home from the office. 

“These, and so many more observations reported by interviewees demonstrate that Aenlle and Sheriff Corpus are not engaged in a ‘mere friendship,’” Cordell wrote.  

In the meantime, Corpus’ husband filed for divorce. 

Corpus has not responded to multiple calls from CalMatters seeking comment. When asked at a November press conference about her relationship with Aenlle, Corpus dismissed the allegations as “rhetoric.” 

“I have a personal relationship with Mr. Aenlle and with other members of my staff,” Corpus said during a heated reply at the press conference. “I’ve been dealing with this kind of rhetoric my entire career. I am a woman of color that has gone up the ranks in a male-dominated field. This is nothing new to me.” 

Meanwhile, morale in the office was cratering. 

“Of course it’s demoralizing,” Eliot Storch, secretary of the San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies union, said. “Fear, retaliation, we are seeing it.”

The deputies’ union and the command staff of the Sheriff’s Office filed a complaint with the California Public Employment Relations Board, alleging that the sheriff and Aenlle had created a toxic work environment and were retaliating against union members. 

On Nov, 12, the county published Cordell’s report. 

Then, the mess at the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office turned into full-blown chaos. 

Deputies’ union president arrested

Hours before Cordell’s report was published, the president of the deputies’ union was arrested and charged with time card fraud.

The Sheriff’s Office alleged that the president, Carlos Tapia, was doing union business on company time and falsified the record of his working hours. But an investigation by the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office found no reason to charge Tapia, determining that the errors on his time cards were clerical and concluding that Tapia “should not have been arrested.” 

A captain in the Sheriff’s Office resigned rather than arrest Tapia, and Tapia alleged in a lawsuit filed against the county that Corpus demanded his arrest as retaliation against him for complaining about her leadership.  

A series of formal no-confidence votes against Corpus followed: from the cities of San Carlos, Millbrae and San Mateo and from the Organization of Sheriff’s Sergeants, the union representing command staff. In its unanimous no-confidence vote, the Millbrae City Council cited “the decline in leadership, poor decision making, low morale and a fear of retaliation by Sheriff Corpus and her executive management team” among the reasons for the resolution. 

A day after Tapia’s arrest, the county Board of Supervisors demanded Corpus’ resignation. She refused. But Aenlle was relieved of duty the day after the judge’s report’s release, according to county records released to CalMatters.  

Regardless, Corpus brought Aenlle back into the office in January, along with a puppy that, as is common with young dogs in new places, urinated a lot. Quite a lot, according to an email sent by a Sheriff’s Office captain to the rest of the staff and obtained by the Palo Alto Daily Post.  

Aenlle’s appearance was distressing to department employees who had spoken to Cordell as part of the county investigation, the email from Capt. Mark Myers said, and employees worried that Aenlle might have been carrying a concealed weapon.

Aenlle denies all of the allegations against him. He, like Corpus, believes he’s a victim of a long-entrenched good-old-boys network that was loath to release its grip on the county. 

“The minute I received that title (of executive director of administration), the jealousy ensued, and they had to do everything they could to break us down,” Aenlle said.  

Aenlle said he and Corpus arrived as reformers and immediately ran into resistance, followed by the allegations of an intimate personal relationship. 

He disputes several elements of the Cordell report, beginning with its design; Aenlle said it’s unfair to grant anonymity to people who were free to make unsubstantiated claims about him and Corpus. 

For instance, he said, the report makes mention of his lack of law enforcement experience. Aenlle points to his time as a reserve deputy, but Cordell alleged he was out of compliance with the necessary hours to maintain his reserve status and could face misdemeanor charges in connection with wearing a gold Sheriff’s Office badge.

“This report hinges on the voices of just 40 individuals — current and former employees — who stand in opposition to progress,” Aenlle wrote in a four-page rebuttal to Cordell’s report. “These individuals represent a faction resistant to the transformative changes aimed at improving our communities, clinging instead to the remnants of a previous administration that lost the community’s trust and mandate to lead.”

Aenlle asserts that the transcripts released with the report of his interview by Cordell were missing crucial pages, including his own defenses of himself and Corpus, and his allegations of a set-up by San Mateo County Executive Mike Callagy. He also said he knows who Employee No. 3 is, and believes that person is seeking revenge because Corpus denied the employee a promotion. 

Overtime, and Cordell report

But the biggest change Corpus made, he said, was the reason for the campaign to remove her from her elected office: Threatening the overtime pay deputies had come to expect. That, he said, led to the Cordell report and all of the ensuing fallout.

Some sheriff’s deputies in San Mateo County earn annual overtime that far exceeds their salaries. One deputy received $168,000 in regular pay in 2024 and $489,183.94 in overtime. Another deputy, also in 2024, earned $140,000 in regular pay and more than $318,000 in overtime. 

And beginning in 2024, to cover vacancies and encourage deputies to work overtime, the Sheriff’s Office offered double pay for overtime instead of the usual time-and-a-half pay. 

That, Aenlle said, led to ballooning overtime costs in the first half of 2024.

Aenlle said he has personally reviewed documents showing the Sheriff’s Office spent $17 million on overtime in the first six months of 2024, which would exceed the amount spent in any previous year. 

Corpus made the same assertions while defending her actions in a September press conference, alleging that Callagy, the county executive, negotiated the massive overtime bill behind her back and without her knowledge, calling such actions “serious political dirty dealings.”

CalMatters requested a month-by-month breakdown of the county’s overtime spending on sheriffs’ deputies working in patrol and the jails. Records provided by the county show that in 2024, the Sheriff’s Office spent slightly less in the second half of the year, about $2.2 million per month, than it did in the first half of the year when it spent about $2.6 million per month on average. 

The records do not reflect a significant reduction in overtime spending after June 2024.  

Voters decide

Finally, on March 4, the question of how to handle Corpus went to the voters. Titled Measure A, the San Mateo County ballot measure asked voters to choose whether to amend the county charter to give the Board of Supervisors the power to remove the sheriff by a four-fifths vote. 

San Mateo is a charter county, giving its supervisors the cheaper and quicker option of removal, rather than a recall campaign. At least one California county sheriff has been recalled before, back in the 1970s, and a few have resigned with a recall on the ballot, but Corpus would be the first sheriff removed from office. 

The measure passed with 84% of the vote. Corpus again refused to resign, setting off a removal process at the county that’s expected to last about three months. At a board hearing in April, members of the public urged county supervisors to move quickly. 

The final removal hearing is scheduled to take place behind closed doors, though CalMatters has requested that the meeting be held in an open session. 

No matter what happens, Corpus may still face further investigations, this time by San Mateo County District Attorney Steven Wagstaffe, who said his office was looking into Corpus’ conduct but decided to wait until the removal process plays out. 

“We are waiting, but we have not closed (the investigation into Corpus),” Wagstaffe said. “There is evidence we have uncovered that provokes us to continue with our inquiry.”

CalMatters journalism engineer Tomas Apodaca contributed reporting to this story. CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.