Mau's firing and the theft charges against her are central to the government's corruption case against former Honolulu prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro and other defendants.
When Laurel Mau started to receive postcards from companies advertising bail bonds in 2014, she didn’t know why.
The architect and interior designer who had just been fired suddenly from her job at the engineering firm Mitsunaga & Associates Inc. didn’t yet realize that four counts of second-degree theft had been filed against her.
“When you received them in the mail, were you aware that there was a warrant out for your arrest?” Special Prosecutor Michael Wheat asked Mau as she sat on the witness stand Thursday in the trial of former Honolulu prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro.
“No, I did not,” she said.
Mau and the theft charges against her, which prosecutors say were phony, are central to the government’s case against Kaneshiro and five other defendants, but jurors hadn’t heard from Mau herself until she took the stand Wednesday afternoon and Thursday.
Wheat’s questioning of Mau covered her time at Mitsunaga & Associates, the sexual harassment she said she experienced while employed there, her abrupt firing in 2011, her civil lawsuit against the company and the theft charges leveled against her by Kaneshiro’s office.
The government is attempting to show that Dennis Mitsunaga, CEO of Mitsunaga & Associates, orchestrated the donation of nearly $50,000 to Kaneshiro’s campaign to persuade him to bring the meritless case against Mau for revenge.
Kaneshiro and Mitsunaga, as well as former Mitsunaga & Associates attorney Sheri Tanaka, secretary Terri Ann Otani, chief operating officer Aaron Fujii and president Chad Michael McDonald, are all charged with multiple counts of conspiracy to commit fraud and violate a person’s rights. They have all pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The defense has maintained that all of the contributions given to Kaneshiro’s campaign were legal and say Mau stole from Mitsunaga & Associates by performing side jobs using the firm’s name, time and resources.
Defense attorneys did not have a chance to cross-examine Mau on Thursday.
Mau, who started working with Mitsunaga & Associates in 1996, said she would often work 50 to 80 hours per week, though the accounting department always told her to put only 40 hours on her timesheets.
She also described a close relationship with Mitsunaga, her former boss. Wheat showed the jury a photograph of a Christmas card sent to Mau by Mitsunaga thanking her for her “dedication, loyalty and hard work,” and signed with a friendly message from his dog, Miki.
But Mau said conditions at work worsened when one of her supervisors, Steven Wong, sent her an email with attachments containing photos of her head photoshopped onto a suggestive image of a model.
“I kept it and didn’t know what to do with it at first,” she said. “I think I was just shocked.”
The harassment continued for a few years, she said, and she detailed some of it in a letter to Mitsunaga in 2004.
Mitsunaga replied by offering her “perks,” including a gas card, a cellphone and a paid parking spot at the office, Mau said.
Conditions at the company, though, did not improve, and Mau sent another letter to Mitsunaga telling him about low morale among employees noting that many people were leaving for jobs with higher salaries and better benefits.
She asked for a raise and got it, but Mitsunaga later sent her a letter full of critiques about her performance on the job.
“I was flabbergasted and shocked to have received such a letter,” she said.
She replied with her own letter and dropped it off with the office secretary on Nov. 10, 2011.
When she returned from lunch that afternoon, Fujii was standing at her desk.
“(He) said, ‘Laurel, we’ve got to let you go,’” she said. “I said, ‘Why are you letting me go?’ He didn’t say anything.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the employee who recorded her on video.
She started to pack up her things as another employee, Robert Sakuda, recorded her on video.
“I just felt, I think, ‘I better not do anything stupid,’” she said. “That’s how I reacted.”
She said Nakatsuka and another employee started going through a box she kept under her desk with files and information about small projects and side jobs she said she sometimes did with other Mitsunaga & Associates employees.
That box stayed at the office after she left that day, she said.
“I haven’t seen it since,” she said.
Wheat’s line of questioning turned to the dispute between Mau and her former employer over her eligibility for unemployment insurance and a letter she received from Tanaka on Nov. 26, 2011, stating she was under investigation for misconduct.
The letter accused her of falsifying timesheets, using company funds to entertain clients and doing multiple side jobs using the name, time and resources of the company, which was “strictly against company policy.”
Mau told the jury that when she received the letter, it was the first time she had heard the allegations against her. She also said no one had ever told her it was against company policy to do side jobs and that she even did side jobs for Mitsunaga himself, as well as his daughter, Lois.
She later won her unemployment benefits on an appeal and obtained a right to sue letter from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she said.
About two years after filing a lawsuit against the firm in 2012 for age and gender discrimination, Mau said she learned about the four second-degree theft counts against her.
“I called my attorney, Carl Osaki,” she said.
She was arrested on Dec. 9, 2014, booked and fingerprinted, she said.
Wheat pulled up an image of her mugshot taken on the day of her arrest. She was arraigned in court, pleaded not guilty and posted $20,000 bail.
A state judge later threw out the charges.
Wheat then began to question Mau about a long list of side jobs Mitsunaga & Associates accused her of taking on while at the company.
She described multiple jobs, including doing an interior assessment at the home of Carol and Kyle Nakamura in Manoa and planning for a stone wall at the home of her cousin in Kaimuki. She said she didn’t receive any payment for the jobs.
But lawyers for the defense objected to the line of questioning and said not all of the side jobs on the government’s list were cited in any of the three cases involving Mau and Mitsunaga & Associates — the unemployment insurance case, the civil lawsuit and the criminal case.
Defense attorney Thomas Otake, who is representing Mitsunaga & Associates president Chad Michael McDonald, said the representation to the jury was that all of the side jobs being discussed were raised as allegations by Mitsunaga & Associates in the various legal proceedings.
“The court needs to instruct the jury that that was just not accurate,” he said.
Before the end of the day, Judge Timothy Burgess told the jury to disregard Mau’s afternoon testimony relating to the side jobs.
The trial will resume on Monday.
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