REDWOOD CITY — Where there's smoke, sometimes there's fire — and San Mateo County officials are checking for flames in a sizzling scandal.

News broke on Tuesday that San Mateo County's two top cops — Sheriff Greg Munks and Undersheriff Carlos Bolanos, were detained by Las Vegas police Saturday night during a raid on a suspected brothel off the Las Vegas strip.

Now, County Manager John Maltbie is requesting that the county Controller's Office examine "any expenses related to a law enforcement run in Las Vegas for this year and the past three years" and report the findings to the county's Board of Supervisors, according to a Wednesday statement from county spokesman Marshall Wilson.

Munks and Bolanos had traveled to Las Vegas to participate in the Baker to Vegas Challenge Cup Relay, an annual run for law enforcement.

Lt. Lisa Williams, a spokeswoman for the Sheriff's Office, affirmed Wednesday that no county funds wereused to pay for Munks' and Bolanos' trip.

"Each participant paid their own way for the trip," said Williams, though she added that some county vehicles were taken to Las Vegas.

For the time being, members of the Board of Supervisors have largely kept mum on the subject.

"It would be premature for me or any other public official to comment on these news reports until we have all of the facts," Supervisor Rose Jacobs Gibson said Tuesday in a prepared statement.

Neither Munks nor Bolanos was arrested during

the Las Vegas police raid, dubbed "Operation Dollhouse," and both men have denied engaging in any illegal activity — claiming that they mistook the brothel for a legal massage parlor.

"I believed I was going to a legitimate business — it was not," Munks told the press Tuesday.

Both Munks and Bolanos have refused to comment on the weekend's misadventure beyond an apology and a denial of any wrongdoing delivered in a prepared statement.

The two San Mateo County law enforcement officials were found on the property of the raided business, the Las Vegas police department confirmed.

"I'm not prepared to say they were actually customers," said Las Vegas police spokesman Bill Cassell.

According to Cassell, the "massage parlor" did not have a sign advertising its services and was in a mixed residential and light-industrial neighborhood, some two miles west of the commercial Las Vegas strip.

The suspected brothel was one of nine targeted by police, the FBI, the IRS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the result of a two-year investigation into an Asian organized-crime ring. Six people were arrested during the series of raids, and law enforcement seized some 3,500 Ecstasy tabs and about $25,000


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Original article at: Inside Bay Area - County to check funding for officers' Vegas trip
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