OAKLAND — The city plans to name a street after a family-run construction company that has remained open for three decades in an otherwise neglected East Oakland commercial corridor along Hegenberger Road.

The business’ headquarters on Collins Drive is in the same neighborhood where Len and Lance Turner spent their childhoods riding dirt bikes and hanging out in the 1960s, when the Oakland Coliseum was built and opened.

That small side street will soon be renamed Turner Group Drive in honor of their contributions — a legislation approved this week by the Oakland City Council.

Beyond overcoming the odds of sustaining a construction firm in an industry dominated by major corporations, the Turner brothers are also notable for being two of the rare defendants to beat federal conspiracy charges in a 2017 criminal trial.

Federal prosecutors had accused the brothers, along with a then-Oakland councilman’s son, of a bid-rigging scheme to skim nearly $2 million from the U.S. Department of Energy involving a Lawrence Livermore Lab renovation contract.

The public corruption investigation in the East Bay spun out of a wide-ranging probe in San Francisco that targeted Keith Jackson, a former city school board member, and ultimately brought down state Sen. Leland Yee and Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, one of the Bay Area’s most notorious organized crime leaders.

The Turner brothers spent years rehabilitating Turner Group Construction’s reputation after jurors acquitted Lance Turner and failed to convict Len. Now, their family’s name will live on in East Oakland, with a commemorative renaming appearing next to the Collins Drive sign.

On Monday, the council unanimously approved the legislation, first proposed by Councilmember Ken Houston, a childhood friend of the Turners who was mentored by the late patriarch Ben Turner after Houston lost his own father as a child.

“They built their business on Collins Drive and stood tall when other businesses left,” Houston said in an interview. “It’s just a beautiful thing.”

A sign for Too $hort Way is seen along Foothill Boulevard and High Street in Oakland. Too $hort Way was officially dedicated in honor of the Oakland rapper Too $hort, born Todd Anthony Shaw, on Saturday. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group) 

The Turners, who in the aftermath of their federal trial shifted their business to training smaller sub-contractors, have been hailed around East Oakland as a local success story.

They join other figures for which the city has renamed its streets, including the late journalist Chauncey Bailey, rappers Too $hort and Tupac Shakur and Black Panther Party members Huey P. Newton and Elaine Brown, as well as the late conductor Michael Morgan, whose own street renaming the council also approved Monday.

At times, the practice of renaming public infrastructure has raised eyebrows among ethics experts, especially when elected leaders commemorate family members or people they’ve done business with. Last year, then-Councilmember Treva Reid led an effort to rename the city-owned East Oakland Sports Center after her father, retired Councilman Larry Reid.

Houston, elected last November to the seat long held by the Reids, previously worked for the Turner Construction Group. While in an interview this week he insisted he was only an “independent contractor,” a resume he submitted for a city commission appointment said he was a “principal/employee specializing in residential, commercial properties, private and public” from 2006 to 2012.

Reached this week, Len Turner, a company executive, was overjoyed at the street renaming — bursting with memories of his childhood in East Oakland, where he grew up with five siblings and a Marine veteran father, Ben, who worked as a mechanic on Volkswagen vehicles.

Len ended up pursuing engineering, first making petrochemical valves and then picking up a knack for computers, which led him to a gig in Southern California as a designer for Disney.

He returned to Oakland in 2005, where his brothers were busy running Top Notch Builders, the family business founded 11 years earlier. Back then, it mostly subcontracting for a national corporation.

With Len’s help, Turner Group Construction built strong relationships around Oakland, including with Larry Reid, and grew into one of the Bay Area’s most successful Black-owned construction businesses, with government contracts in Antioch, Richmond, Oakland and Alameda County.

Then the feds came knocking. As Len tells the story, it was Reid’s son, Taj Reid, who first reached out to him about an out-of-state contractor, William Joseph, who was trying to break into the East Bay market.

The contact was actually undercover federal agent William Myles, a Connecticut man who made $9,000 a month working as what Len Turner’s defense lawyer described as “the utility infielder of the FBI’s national sting program.”

Federal prosecutors, relying mostly on Myles’ word, would later allege that the Turners agreed to submit a fake bid so that Myles could acquire an overbid contract worth $2 million and split the proceedings with his cohorts.

After officials from the U.S. Department of Energy paid them a visit with ominous questions, Len and Lance were soon hit with indictments in the sprawling case. It came as a shock to Len, who said he had never met Chow, the infamous San Francisco Chinatown gangster.

“It was horrible,” Len Turner said of the ordeal. “You almost think you’re guilty, too, because why else would the federal government come after you? But you need to fight through it. We had great representation, and the government had no case.”

Taj Reid leaves the Philip Burton Federal Courthouse in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, April 18, 2017. Reid, the son of Oakland councilman Larry Reid, is believed to be part of a bribery and bid-rigging scheme according to federal prosecutors. (Dan Honda/Bay Area News Group) 

The brothers’ attorneys argued in court that Turner Group Construction fully expected to beat out Myles’ cheaper bid, viewing him as an inept and unqualified contractor. Taj Reid, for his part, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge involving the Turner contract bid after an earlier conviction for conspiring with a state official to accept bribes.

Still, jurors acquitted Lance Turner and could not reach a verdict for Len. Last year, prosecutors dismissed charges against Len Turner through a “non-prosecutorial agreement” that was never publicly detailed, records show.

Houston, meanwhile, said he attended every court hearing date back in 2017. Years later, he is convinced the brothers were framed. It is very difficult to beat a federal criminal case; Pew research showed that fewer than 1% of defendants were acquitted in 2022.

“It wasn’t real,” Houston said. “It’s not in Len’s character, not in his fabric.”

Despite the community’s support, the Turners found themselves needing to evolve past the construction industry in the wake of those federal charges. They developed the Construction Resource Center, a program based in Richmond that trains small businesses on the messy world of government contracts.

LaSonia Mansfield, who sought guidance for her construction-site-cleanup business, had not known she would need a contractor’s license to operate — before the program taught her the “A to Z” of lasting in a crowded market. She likened the Turners’ guidance to that of a family, including another company executive, Len and Lance’s sister, LaTanya Hawkins.

“The bigger firms swallow us whole with the knowledge and back-office support they have,” said Carl Gordon, who runs Gordon Plastering in town. “With the Turners, I knew their help was coming from a genuine place.”

It is the least that Len Turner feels he can do, having stared down a high-stakes trial that changed his life forever.

“People always tell me, ‘You won, you won,’” he said. “Really, technically, I didn’t win — I just survived.”

Oakland city council member district seven Ken Houston speaks during the 2025 Inauguration Ceremony held at Oakland City Hall in Oakland, Calif., on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)