Armed investigators from the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office raided the Mexican American Community Services Agency (MACSA) Youth Center at 660 Sinclair Dr. in East San Jose Thursday.

The raid began some time this morning. By 5pm, at least five officers with badges around their necks and guns on their belts were loading two unmarked police vehicles from a side door of the community center.

In 2004, Miguel Baldoni was working as a substitute teacher in rural Appalachian Ohio when he heard about a new charter school opening on the East Side of San Jose. He uprooted himself, came to California and got a job teaching chemistry at the Academica Calmecac, which was run by the Mexican American Community Services Agency (MACSA).

He says he was pleased that the position offered him a chance to change the lives of at-risk students who had been left behind by traditional public schools. But he freely admits that the exceptional retirement package promised to all MACSA teachers really cemented his decision to pack his bags and come to Silicon Valley with 10 bucks in his pocket.

“This was the biggest reason why I took this job,” Baldoni says.

This is to correct and clarify several points contained in your article “SBLC Helps Big Political Contributors Erase Their Tracks,” [Sept. 22]. Your article states: “Enforcement of city election laws falls on the Government Integrity Unit of the District Attorney’s Office.” That is inaccurate. Section 12.06.260, which prohibits contributions from card rooms to candidates or candidate controlled committees is found in the San Jose Municipal Code, Title 12. Enforcing violations of Title 12 fall within the jurisdiction of the City of San Jose and its Elections Commission. Title 12 lays out an entire regulatory framework for the investigation of Title 12 violations, including campaign contribution violations.

The city’s fearless and occasionally politically tone-deaf leader, Chuck Reed, was riding high after successfully placing pension reform and binding arbitration on the ballot with a carefully stitched-together coalition that seemed to spell the end of organized labor’s control of the San Jose City Council.

The afterglow was short-lived, however. Reed threw the new majority into chaos with his divisive endorsement of gay marriage opponent Larry Pegram for a council seat, just a day before a California court overturned Prop 8.

There were cheers and hugs in the District Attorney’s office on the Friday that Jeff Rosen’s victory over Dolores Carr was announced.

Rosen spent Monday and Tuesday walking from desk to desk shaking hands with everyone in the office, and leaving handwritten notes for those who were out. Since he’d been on leave for the campaign, Rosen wasn’t carrying his entry badge, so the DA-elect had to go to the office’s information desk and be issued a visitor’s badge.

When he returned on Tuesday, he didn’t have a county-issued parking spot, so he went in to get a placard and returned to a ticket on the dash. Rosen says he wants to talk to the officer who issued the ticket, not to ask for a break but because the timekeeper wasted no time in writing the summons.

It’s official: it was determined Friday afternoon that Challenger Jeff Rosen defeated District Attorney Dolores Carr Tuesday in an upset victory by a previously unknown 15-year prosecutor.

At the close of Tuesday’s poll, Rosen held a 2,217-vote lead, but the County Registrar’s office determined Wednesday it would still have to count 77,000 provisional and mailed ballots to determine a victor.

San Jose Inside’s mad dash through Santa Clara County’s primary night parties. VIDEO

Over at District Attorney Dolores Carr’s re-election party at the Britannia Arms on Almaden, it was nearly impossible to distinguish Carr backers from the juiced-up Celtics-Lakers game watchers.

Waiters jostled through the crowd with pitchers and canapés while Carr’s husband, John, checked polls on an iPad.

In an unannounced but unsurprising appearance before the Hall of Justice in San Jose today, Deputy District Attorney Jeff Rosen stood with Lauren Chief Elk to denounce what they said was a bad decision by the DA’s office not to test evidence recovered in the 2007 De Anza rape case.

Chief Elk was one of three female soccer players who reportedly pulled an intoxicated 17-year-old “Jane Doe” from a room at a party attended by members of the De Anza College baseball team, where she was allegedly being gang raped. They were joined today by other rape victims.

In a rare move, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren announced this morning that she is throwing her support to Deputy District Attorney Jeff Rosen in his bid to defeat sitting DA Dolores Carr. “It’s true, I don’t get involved in local races very often,” she said after making a statement in front of the Santa Clara County Hall of Justice.

Unlike the San Jose Mercury News, which championed Dolores Carr’s opponent four years ago and has been unrelenting in its criticism of her ever since, Metro endorsed Carr in the 2006 general election. We believed an outsider would be healthy for an office with a succession process as ingrown and medieval as the Vatican’s papal conclave

Sadly, her troubled tenure has been plagued by rookie mistakes, judgment lapses and a tin ear for the appearance of conflicts of interest. And despite the edge she now holds in managing a county department, we’ve concluded that the less experienced Jeff Rosen will grow into the job faster than it will take Carr to repair the county’s damaged prosecutorial apparatus and restore its reputation.

Former District Attorney George Kennedy says that he has mellowed out in retirement. Sitting beachside in Santa Cruz where he now lives, a strong breeze tossing his newly longish hair, he looks very much the part of the retiree, not so much the fearsome four-term district attorney.

Kennedy was the first person outside of his family that Assistant DA Jeff Rosen consulted with over his decision to run against his boss, District Attorney Dolores Carr. And though Kennedy has traded his wing-tips for flip-flops, he agreed to jump into the fray on Rosen’s behalf.

An odd alliance seems to have been forged between the left-leaning South Bay Labor Council boss Cindy Chavez and gang-bashing Republican crime-fighter Dolores Carr. Chavez last month made an impassioned plea to SBLC members for endorsing the district attorney, which reportedly surprised many of the executive board members and union delegates in attendance. According to a source who was present, Chavez stood and railed against challenger Jeff Rosen. Rosen, Chavez reasoned, is endorsed by Sam Liccardo, who is linked to former mayor Tom McEnery  and Deputy District Attorney David Pandori.

On the back of the surprising endorsement of Sheriff Laurie Smith’s challenger Richard Calderon, Mayor Chuck Reed made the less shocking decision to back District Attorney Dolores Carr in her bid for re-election. As he did when endorsing Calderon, he cited her work with the Mayor’s Gang Prevention Task Force. “She’s been personally engaged in the issues. She doesn’t just send someone to the meeting who sits there and does nothing,” he says.

In what felt more like an elaborate editorial meeting than legal proceedings, DA candidate Jeff Rosen emerged from court on Monday morning with a new draft of his candidate’s statement, hammered into shape by the judge, his lawyer James Towery and his opponent DA Dolores Carr’s lawyer, Guyton Jinkerson. “I’m very pleased,” he said. “We won.”

That’s a somewhat subjective interpretation.