THE IMPACT OF the translated notes of Bong Kim Suh reverberated all over town. The 75 members of the board of directors of SOMA held press conferences ad infinitum in board rooms, press clubs, City Hall and street corners denouncing the ruthlessness and venality of Maxfield O’Day who sought to make millions from his shady land deals, and tarnish the image of Save Our material Assets.

Four other Anglo Fortune 500 CEOs mentioned in Suh’s notes, in what was quickly dubbed SOMAGate, were forced to resign from their respective positions. Subsequently one of them went into a famous detox hospital up in Montecito—blaming his years of inebriation for his bad judgment in being part of the Jiang Holdings scheme. Another one opened a pottery shop in Santa Fe, another got a job as a consultant to prisoners in halfway houses, and the fourth wrote a book and sold the movie rights.

Of the three Korean men who were in on the Jiang fix among the Merchants Group, two of them left the United States for parts unknown, and the third attempted to make restitution to some of the land owners who had been forced to sign over their property.

One of the men who left the states, Park Hankyoung, was revealed in an article in the LA. Weekly to have ties with the Agency for National Security Planning, formerly called the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. There were allegations that certain officers of the military hierarchy in South Korea, which now enjoys a civilian-led government, had knowledge of Jiang, but this was never proven.

Ultimately, Jiang was a consortium of capitalists whose binding contract was not race or nationalism, but the making of money.

Linton Perry and Luis Santillion held a summit on black and brown relations. And Conrad James, Crosshairs Sawyer, and some other Rolling Daltons started a nonprofit economic development corporation. Some on the board of SOMA, in an effort to clean up their image, provided grants and technical assistance to the ex-gang members. There was even a meeting held between Crosshairs and some of the OGs and the Korean-American Merchants Group in an effort to arrive at strategies to staunch some of the violence in the inner city.

O’Day, who had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, died at home. It appeared he’d slipped in his shower/sauna and cracked his head open on the tile imported from Greece. The coroner ruled his death an accident by misadventure. Nobody hired Monk to look into it.