By Thomas K. Pendergast

Most businesses lining the 2500 block of Noriega Street are closed by 8:30 p.m., except for a restaurant that stays open until midnight and a bar on the corner of the next block.

But even in such a relatively quiet neighborhood, the restaurant at 2543 Noriega St. stood out as being maybe a bit too quiet.

“For a while there was this place called Underground Grill King (UGK). And it seemed like nobody was ever in there and it was always closed,” said Zameer Maqsood, a neighbor who lives nearby. “I’ve seen people around there at nighttime but I don’t think I’ve seen people actually going in and out,” he said.

And then there was the mysterious music that could barely be heard late at night and into the early hours of the morning. Nobody seemed to know where exactly it was coming from.

“It was just weird how there was always the sound of music,” said another neighbor, Thelma Gutierrez. “I remember always walking my dog at night and you could hear the music but if you go around the corner and go see where it’s coming from, it was completely closed off, like there’s nothing to show that there was someone living there or working there. So, it was kind of fishy; ‘What’s going on in here?’”

This is her second year living in the neighborhood. She was warned about the noise when she first moved in.

“I didn’t know what they were talking about until I started living here for a little bit more time, and then I was like, ‘Oh, I see the noise that they were talking about,’” she said. “It’s always been like you can’t figure out what is going on; you would just hear that music in the background.”

Also, the security camera in front of the space seemed odd to her.

“There was a little camera in the corner top and I’m like ‘Why is there a camera if that place has been closed down?’ That restaurant has been closed down forever.”

“I would be silly and I would call ‘it’s the mafia!’” she said with a giggle.

Another local, Jess Pfeiffer, also wondered about the noise.

“I would notice it only sometimes, like middle-of-the-night hours, three o’clock to five o’clock in the morning, and it was like techno music or something,” Pfeiffer said. “And then it started going more and more and more frequent, like sometimes even starting at nine-thirty (or) ten at night and going until seven o’clock in the morning.

“It was really weird because you could hear it very clearly from our backyard. You could hear that it was coming from those areas of those shops,” she said. “But when we would go out to look for the sound, because we wanted to call the police and make a noise complaint, we didn’t even know where to tell them to look because you would go out and walk around the block and as soon as you would turn that corner to go to the shops the sound would just disappear.”

Police Raid Restaurant

At about 3 a.m. on Aug. 4, however, this sleepy little neighborhood got a rude awakening when San Francisco police loudly announced over a bullhorn that they were outside with a search warrant.

Police say the warrant was served by the department’s Special Victims Unit investigation into an alleged underground club, involved in alleged sex crimes. They took one suspect into custody and seized “multiple firearms and various suspected narcotics.”

Because it is still under investigation, police say, they are not releasing further information.

Among the questions put to the SFPD that they have yet to answer are: Has the owner of the club been identified or charged? How many and what caliber of firearms were seized? What kind of drugs were seized and in what amounts? Was there any evidence of drug dealing like weights or scales found? Was anyone arrested for pimping or pandering? Were any sex trafficking victims found there or identified by investigators?

Instead, police deferred to the FBI, which became involved in this because they are prosecuting the one man they acknowledge was arrested that morning.

Cankun He, 31, is facing a felony charge of conspiracy to commit robbery affecting interstate commerce.

The federal indictment alleges four of his co-conspirators, Hailong Ma, 30, Yuziang Wei, 25, Jordan Cantie, 48, and Robert Maynard, 41, all from the San Francisco Bay Area, drove up to Portland, Oregon, on April 14 and committed armed robbery of 200 Apple iPhones and five cameras.

During the robbery, according to the indictment, they wore fake FBI jackets, bullet-proof vests and used red-blue flashing lights to imitate law enforcement and gain access. While Ma and Wei waited nearby, Cantie and Maynard forced employees into the building at gunpoint, then zip-tied and threatened them.

The suspects met He the next day and gave him the iPhones, which He accepted. The indictment alleges that He also participated in the planning of the robbery and recruited Cantie.

Ma, Wei and Maynard tried the same thing again in Portland on May 19, but this time authorities foiled their plan. Maynard was arrested that day, while Ma and Wei were arrested on Aug. 1.

Cantie was not with them and remains at large.

Wei is now facing felony charges with the others, but is out on $50,000 bail.

If convicted, each defendant faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

As of press time, no more information was forthcoming about the Aug. 4 raid on Noriega Street from the FBI because the press officer for the San Francisco FBI office was on vacation.

The last known business at 2543 Noriega St. was called Xian Bistro, but it’s unclear if it is owned by the same people who ran the Underground Grill King.

There is evidence, however, that whatever has been happening there might have been going on for many years.

An application for a Discretionary Review filed with the SF Planning Department in March of 2017 claims “illegal karaoke” was happening there.

A neighbor at the time who lived around the corner, Hwa Jun Bae, alleged the restaurant had been “operating a karaoke bar and nightclub for over one year with no permit.”

“The karaoke rooms exist and have been operating illegally for over one year,” Bae wrote to the department. “The business is stealthily operating as a restaurant, but it is actually a karaoke and nightclub playing loud music.

“They need to apply for an entertainment license and to do that they first need to get a permit and zoning change for their location,” he explained. “They already have a karaoke (room) built. They have been operating for the past year.

“I have a house which shares a wall attached to both the UGK south wall and my bedroom walls. I have three school children, and we cannot sleep. The music plays after 9 p.m. until 3-4 a.m. sometimes. I have asked them to stop numerous times.”

Maqsood lives a few houses away, but close enough to also have heard the music.

“It wasn’t like blaring, like so loud where we considered calling for a noise complaint or something like that but it was noticeable, especially from the back half,” he said. “It has been a restaurant under a couple of different names and I feel like I never see people in the restaurant. It was always kind of weird to us.”