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Former Santa Clara County Undersheriff Rick Sung pleaded guilty last week to two felony bribery charges where he asked for Apple iPads and San Jose Sharks tickets in exchange for concealed carry gun licenses.
Sung was previously the second-in-command to former Sheriff Laurie Smith, who resigned in 2022 right before a grand jury could remove her as part of a larger investigation by District Attorney Jeff Rosen into corruption under her watch.
The grand jury indicted Sung in 2020, accusing him of holding up the distribution of concealed carry licenses until applicants provided something of value. He was initially indicted on three charges for incidents dating between 2017 and 2019, and Rosen said at the time that investigators found some of the bribery money was sent to Smith’s 2018 reelection campaign.
“My Office enforces the law without fear or favor,” Rosen said in a Sept. 21 statement. “Law enforcement in Santa Clara County must be equally determined to be incorruptible as it is determined to protect our community.”
Following the indictments in 2020, Rosen said Sung and others, including former sheriff’s office spokesperson Capt. James Jensen, treated the licenses as “commodities and found willing buyers.”
A mistrial was declared in 2025 after Sung’s first trial, and Rosen was prepared to retry him before negotiating the plea deal. Sung must permanently surrender his peace officer certification and complete 400 hours of community service, according to the district attorney’s office.
He will not spend any time behind bars, instead serving six months of probation. After his probation and community service is complete, the court will set aside the plea and dismiss both cases, his defense counsel said.
“We have always believed this prosecution was politically motivated and unfair,” Sung’s attorneys Naomi Chung and Tamara Crepet said in a statement. “For Mr. Sung and his family, the retrial meant more years of legal fees, more public scrutiny, and more strain on his wife and children. When he was offered a resolution that guaranteed no custody and ended in dismissal, he took it. His family had suffered enough.”
According to the initial indictments, Sung and Jensen withheld four gun licenses from Apple employees until Apple’s Chief Security Officer, Thomas Moyer, donated 200 iPads worth almost $70,000. The donation was canceled at the last minute after Sung and Moyer learned that the district attorney’s office had issued a search warrant in 2019 regarding the sheriff’s office’s concealed carry license records in 2019.
Sung also received a bribe from Harpreet Chadha, a local insurance broker who held the license to a luxury suite at the SAP Center where the San Jose Sharks compete, according to the District Attorney’s Office. Chadha offered $6,000 worth of box seat tickets to a Sharks game on Valentine’s Day 2019 to be donated to Smith and her guests.
Chadha was acquitted in 2025 as part of the same trial that resulted in a hung jury for Sung.
In Santa Clara County, a concealed carry license generally costs between $200 and $400 and is issued by the sheriff’s office, not the undersheriff. Sung’s attorneys argued this point in court and reiterated it in their statement to the press following the guilty plea.
“This case was never about Mr. Sung lining his own pockets. It concerned concealed-weapons permits, which under California law only the Sheriff, not the Undersheriff, has the authority to issue,” his counsel wrote.
The district attorney’s office said Sung’s plea puts an end to the eight-year-long investigation into corruption in the sheriff’s office. Jensen, the former captain, was convicted by a jury in 2024 and sentenced to 10 months in jail. Both Chadha and Moyer, who were accused of offering bribes to sheriff’s office executives, were acquitted.
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