SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The former CEO of a San Francisco homeless services charity will be arraigned Tuesday on nine felony charges after prosecutors said she stole more than $1.2 million in public funds meant to keep people off the streets.
Gwendolyn Westbrook, 71, raided the accounts of the United Council for Human Services while she had “near-exclusive financial control" over the nonprofit serving homeless and low-income people, according to a statement Monday from the district attorney's office.
“Prosecutors allege that between 2019 and 2023, Ms. Westbrook engaged in unauthorized self-payments, improper cash withdrawals, and fraudulent reimbursement practices that diverted public funds for personal use,” the statement said.
She faces charges including misappropriation of public funds, grand theft and filing false California tax returns. Her arraignment was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
Messages were sent to Westbrook and the United Council for Human Services seeking comment on the charges. An attorney for Westbrook could not be located.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the charges are the latest in a long history of trouble for Westbrook and the United Council of Human Services. She was accused in 1997 of stealing thousands of dollars from a cash box at a parking lot owned by the San Francisco Port, her employer at the time. In 2015, regulators found unsanctioned blackjack tables in the back of a charity bingo hall that the nonprofit operated, the Chronicle reported.
In the court documents filed this month, Westbrook is accused of buying luxury vehicles and making purchases at high-end retailers like Louis Vuitton and Neiman Marcus with the nonprofit's money. She led the organization, which ran a soup kitchen and collected millions in city contracts to shelter the homeless, for nearly two decades before her dismissal in 2023.
In Los Angeles, the CEO of a homeless services charity faces federal and state fraud charges related to allegedly using $23 million in taxpayer money to live a luxury lifestyle. Federal prosecutors said last month that Alexander Soofer took funds meant to support his nonprofit Abundant Blessings to buy a $7 million LA home, a vacation house in Greece and a $125,000 Range Rover.
Soofer was charged federally with wire fraud, and the state charges he faces include felony counts of conflict of interest, offering false evidence and forgery.
Gwendolyn Westbrook of The United Council of Human Services speaks after being presented with an award by San Francisco Mayor London Breed to honor her service during a ceremony honoring unsung neighborhood heroes of the pandemic at City Hall, in San Francisco, Nov. 15, 2021. (Jessica Christian/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
FILE - Tents line a sidewalk on Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, April 18, 2020. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
PARIS (AP) — The Louvre Museum's director resigned Tuesday after months of pressure following the October theft of the French crown jewels, as the world's most visited museum faced widening scrutiny over security failures, labor unrest and a suspected ticket fraud scheme.
Laurence des Cars quit after a punishing year for the former royal palace — the high-profile jewels heist from the Apollo Gallery, a mid-February burst pipe near the “Mona Lisa,” water leaks damaging priceless books, staff walkouts and a wildcat strike over overcrowding and understaffing.
The landmark has faced a narrative of an institution spiraling out of control.
And that pressure deepened in recent weeks when French authorities revealed a suspected decadelong ticket fraud operation linked to the museum that investigators say may have cost the Louvre 10 million euros ($11.8 million).
President Emmanuel Macron accepted des Cars’ resignation as “an act of responsibility” at a moment when the Louvre needs “calm” and new momentum for security upgrades, modernization and other major projects, according to a statement from his office.
Macron wants to give des Cars a new mission during France’s presidency of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, focused on cooperation among major museums, the statement said.
For many in France’s cultural world, the resignation answers months of head-scratching over why no top official had fallen after the heist: a daylight robbery that many in the country saw as the most humiliating breach of French heritage security in living memory.
It also came as lawmakers and cultural officials widened scrutiny of the museum’s leadership and security practices in the months since the breach.
Thieves took less than eight minutes in October to steal crown jewels valued at 88 million euros ($102 million) from the Louvre, in a weekend operation that stunned visitors, exposed glaring vulnerabilities and left one of France's most symbolically charged collections in criminal hands.
Several suspects were later arrested, but the stolen pieces remain missing.
Des Cars, one of the most prominent museum directors in Europe, had offered to resign on the day of the robbery, but it was initially refused by the culture minister.
In remarks after the theft, she described the moment as a “tragic, brutal, violent reality” for the Louvre and said that, as the person in charge, it had felt right to offer her resignation.
In an interview published on Tuesday by daily newspaper Le Figaro, des Cars said that she had tried to steer the Louvre through the fallout from the heist, but had concluded that she could no longer carry out the museum’s transformation in the current institutional climate.
Staying on, she said, would have meant managing the status quo when the museum still needs deep reform.
“I was there to take the lightning” as museum director, she said.
Des Cars also said that the October break-in exposed problems that she had been warning about since taking office, including aging infrastructure, obsolete technical systems and severe congestion.
She had led the Louvre since 2021, taking over one of the museum world’s most prestigious jobs as the institution emerged from the coronavirus pandemic and mass tourism returned.
In June, a wildcat strike by front-of-house staff and security workers forced the Louvre to halt operations, stranding thousands of visitors outside the glass pyramid and underscoring the depth of anger among employees over overcrowding, understaffing and what unions called untenable working conditions.
Workers said that the pressure of daily visitor flows — particularly around the “Mona Lisa” — had become unmanageable and that promised reforms were arriving too slowly. There were growing complaints that the infrastructure and staffing of the crumbling medieval structure haven’t kept pace with the crowds pouring through its galleries.
The resignation came at an especially punishing moment, less than two weeks after French authorities revealed the separate ticket fraud scheme.
That case widened scrutiny beyond the jewels robbery and toward the museum’s day-to-day controls.
Prosecutors say tour guides are suspected of — up to 20 times a day — reusing the same tickets to bring in different visitor groups, at times allegedly with the help of Louvre employees, in a system investigators believe operated for a decade.
In a rare interview just days ago with The Associated Press after the fraud case was made public, the Louvre's No. 2, general administrator Kim Pham, said that fraud at an institution the size of the Louvre was “statistically inevitable.”
He argued that the museum’s sheer scale — millions of visitors, multiple checkpoints and a sprawling historic complex — makes it uniquely exposed.
But he also acknowledged shortcomings, and said that the museum had tightened validation checks and increased controls.
The succession of crises has put new political weight on a project Macron has heavily championed: the Louvre’s sweeping overhaul plan, branded the “Louvre New Renaissance.”
Unveiled by Macron in January 2025, the renovation, which could take up to a decades, aims to modernize a museum widely seen as overstretched and physically worn down by mass tourism.
The plan includes a new entrance near the Seine River to ease pressure on I.M. Pei’s pyramid, new underground spaces and a dedicated room for the “Mona Lisa” with timed access — all intended to improve crowd flow and reduce the daily crush that has become a symbol of the Louvre’s success and its dysfunction.
The project is expected to cost roughly 700 million-800 million euros ($826 million-$944 million), with funding from ticket revenue, state support, donations and Louvre Abu Dhabi-related income.
The scale and cost of that plan now loom over the search for des Cars’ successor.
Macron has framed the overhaul as a national priority, comparing its ambition to other landmark French restoration efforts and casting it as part of a broader defense of French cultural prestige.
People queue outside the Louvre museum, in Paris, France, Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
FILE - Laurence des Cars, director of Le Louvre museum, poses before a hearing at the Culture commission of the Senate, three days after historic jewels were stolen in a daring daylight heist, Oct. 22, 2025 in Paris. (AP Photo/Emma Da Silva, File)
