Jury in state Sen. Emil Jones III bribery trial hears earful about his corrupt former colleague Martin Sandoval
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State Sen. Emil Jones III may be the one who’s on trial for bribery, but the jury deciding his fate heard plenty Monday about one of Jones’ former colleagues: deceased state Sen. Martin Sandoval.Sandoval, the once-powerful head of the Senate Transportation Committee, took tens of thousands of dollars in cash over a two-year period from a red-light camera company executive who was secretly cooperating with the FBI, according to testimony. He was wined and dined at steakhouses and plied with cigars, the jury heard. And he had pleaded guilty and was cooperating with the government when he died suddenly of COVID-19 complications in December 2020.Among those who attended Sandoval’s funeral was FBI Special Agent Kelly Shanahan, one of the case agents in the investigation and a handler for Omar Maani, the SafeSpeed LLC executive and co-founder whose work as an FBI mole helped bring down not only Sandoval but nearly a dozen other elected officials and political operatives.Shanahan acknowledged...