When Mission Local this month visited the sprawling former citadel of former San Francisco fixer Walter Wong,there were many strange and terrible things to see. Those included a penthouse with a secret passageway and a secret floor wedged between the 95,000-square-foot building’s second and third stories.
Following our visit, based on a tip, Mission Local asked the building’s new owners about a hulking antique safe hidden in a section of the complex formerly inhabited by a caretaker. To the surprise of all, it was still there, concealed behind a wooden panel beneath a staircase, unopened.
Wong in 2020 pleaded guilty to federal charges that he participated in a kickback scheme to siphon $1.5 million from the Chinatown Hilton. He cooperated with the feds in their cases against his former allies, most notably since-convicted former San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager Harlan Kelly.
He was, for decades, the city’s preeminent “permit expediter,” leaning on the many workers he placed within the city’s building department to work magic for clients navigating San Francisco’s treacherous construction landscape.
The building’s new owners, the adult film company Kink.com, say that after Mission Local’s queries about the safe, they reported its discovery to the FBI. And on Tuesday, FBI officials entered the building — with the adult film company’s consent. Along with a man described as a “certified master safe-cracker,” the agents oversaw the opening of the giant antique safe.
The FBI confirmed to Mission Local that it today visited “Uncle Walter’s Mystery House” and opened the safe.
And within it? Alas, nothing much.
A former Wong associate described the contents of this safe in prior years as the “things Walter didn’t want anybody to know about.” If so, those things are now elsewhere: Eyewitnesses today described the content of the safe as being “a couple of Post-It notes that had some scribble on them.”
While journalists were not permitted on-site, Mission Local obtained photographs and spoke to observers. We are told that the Post-Its were, dutifully, placed into an evidence bag by agents wearing gloves.
The safe-cracker surprised both the onlookers and FBI agents on-site by opening the safe so quickly. He had, we are told, studied up on the internal workings of this model of safe, an antique from L. H. Miller’s Safe & Iron Works of Baltimore, which was likely well over a century old. He knew exactly where to bore into the safe with his carbide-tipped drill. He then slipped thin tubes equipped with scopes and mirrors into the pinholes, and was able to open the combination lock from within.
The interior of the safe looked largely as it did when this device was new in the late 1800s or early 1900s. An observer described it as “super old-timey and pretty well-preserved. It’s not like it was exposed to sunlight.” Within were crimson, patterned carpeting and several wooden drawers. The agents found the scraps of paper within the drawers. “As expected,” one of them purportedly sighed when the contents of the safe were revealed to be underwhelming.
“Well, it was a lot of fun,” said an observer. “And, I have to say, the FBI agents were extremely agreeable.”
Following the cracking of the safe, Kink staff invited the agents to tour the secret floor, dubbed “floor 2.5” by workers here. The agents, we’re told, obliged, mounting a ladder, ascending through a panel in the ceiling and taking photos of the prodigious amount of labels left behind on the floors.
It was, staffers here say, “a consent-based process.”