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Thief took Jobs’ wallet, tooBY KRISTEN PETERS

Daily Post Staff Writer

Police have arrested an Alam-eda man they think is responsible for the theft of more than $60,000 worth of items from the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ Palo Alto home — including Jobs’ wallet and driv-er’s license — as well as a bagful of Apple electronics and expensive Tiffany jewelry.

Kariem McFarlin, 35, was arrest-ed Aug. 2 after offi cers on the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) searched his Briggs Av-enue duplex in Alameda and found several iMac computers belonging

to Jobs, according to documents ob-tained by the Post yesterday.

REACT, a special law enforce-ment task force that investigates high-tech crimes, was the same

Police: Lego theft suspect cited ‘curiosity’

BY JEN NOWELLDaily Post Staff Writer

The SAP software executive who is accused of using homemade barcodes to buy Lego sets at a steep discount from Target stores said it was “curiosity” that led him into the store to see if he could purchase the Legos for a cheaper price, according to a police report.

Thomas Langenbach pleaded innocent yesterday to four felony counts of second-degree commercial burglary — entering with the intent to steal — and if convicted, he could face up to fi ve years in prison, said Santa Clara County Deputy District Attor-ney Paola Estanislao. A preliminary hearing is set to start Oct. 31, she said.

Langenbach said his “sole purpose of coming into Target (in May) was to fulfi ll his ‘curiosity,’” about whether his homemade barcodes would work with store scanners, ac-cording to the police report.

The 47-year-old was arrested on May 8 at the Target store in Mountain View on Showers Drive, after he was caught purchasing a Lego X-Wing Starfi ghter set with a switched barcode for a lower price, according to the police report.

McFARLIN

The College of San Mateo has just made the decision to cancel all its journalism classes that support the college newspaper for the fall semester, leaving the fate of the well-regarded student publication up in the air.

Students with the paper have clashed with the administration previously over the future of the classes and over what they say were its attempts to control some of the paper’s reporting.

Journalism professor Ed Remitz was sur-

Restaurant owners upset with Google

BY ANGELA RUGGIERO Daily Post Staff Writer

The owners of restaurants around Google’s Mountain View headquarters say that because Google offers its nearly 10,000 employees complimentary meals, their businesses are suffering. And they want Google to do something about it.

Restaurants including Falafel & Kebab at 1477 Plym-outh St. are meeting this afternoon with the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce to discuss ideas about what they and Google can do to help improve their businesses, especially considering Google’s continued expansion.

“They are hurting small businesses around them. They

PA COUNCIL CANDIDATE: Bob Wenzlau, 55, pulled papers yesterday for the Palo Alto City Council election in November. Wenzlau is CEO of Terradex in Palo Alto — a company that builds and operates web technologies to protect the environment. Also, former Palo Alto Mayor Liz Kniss fi led her papers yesterday.

RESTAURANT ROBBED: Mi Hacienda Taqueria at 895 2nd Ave. in Redwood City was robbed by a gunman last night, according to police.

IRAN HELPING SYRIA: Iran is playing a growing role supporting the Syrian regime and is helping to build and train a militia to fi ght opposition forces, U.S. defense offi cials said yesterday.

SCRABBLE CHEATING: One of the top young Scrabble players in the country has been kicked out of the game’s national championship tournament in Florida after he was

TERESA CHOI co-owns Sunny Bowl, one of several Mountain View restaurants that say their business is hurt by Google offering free meals for workers.

JOBS’ PALO ALTO HOME[See JOBS, page 22]

Authorities fi nd burglary suspect by tracking stolen Apple devices

Tech executive pleads innocent

LANGENBACH

[See LEGOS, page 22][See RESTAURANTS, page 10]

[See THE UPDATE, page 4]

[See COLLEGE, page 10]

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cannot see that, but we do,” said Dervis Yuksel, owner of Falafel & Kebab.

Google contracts with food ser-vices company Bon Appetit and offers employees unlimited complimentary meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. With free food, people don’t have a need to walk across the street to other restaurants in the North Bayshore area, said Yuksel.

The fact that Google is continuing to expand doesn’t help either, he said.

“They are taking over everywhere,” said Yuksel, whose business has been there for nearly six years. “There’s an empty building, they take over the build-ing.”

The company now owns or leases more than 65 buildings in Mountain View.

He said he would like to see Google and other large companies in the area provide help in the form of hiring local restaurants for private catering. With the thousands of employees they have there, he said, even hiring his restaurant once a month for catering services for a meet-ing for example, would be a huge help.

“They can help us, and we can be happy,” he said. “We have employees, we have rent, we have family. When-ever Google takes over, we are losing business. It’s going down and down and down.”

Sunny Bowl, a Korean eatery also at the 1477 Plymouth St. center, will have its co-owner David Choi participate in today’s meeting.

“More than 2,000 Googlers and their families live and work in Mountain

View, participating in the community and supporting local businesses and schools. We regularly engage with lo-cal vendors and contractors that are essential to helping the business run smoothly,” said a Google spokesperson in a statement. According to Google, the company has offered its employees complimentary meals since it moved to its Ampitheater Parkway headquarters in 2004.

Chamber: It’s an opportunityOscar Garcia, president of the Moun-

tain View Chamber of Commerce, said that Google has contacted the chamber in the past to see how they can help lo-cal businesses.

“We see this as a bigger opportunity for larger companies to get involved and therefore increase the opportunity for small businesses,” said Garcia.

He said around fi ve restaurants will be represented in the preliminary pri-vate meeting today, including Falafel & Kebab, Sunny Bowl, Ole Taqueria and Hon Sushi. He said this is a way to see if the chamber can facilitate interaction and improve local business.

He said small businesses in gen-eral, not just restaurants, may not be equipped to provide services to thou-sands at once.

“It’s tough for a small business to be part of the process. For one, these com-panies have their set procurement pro-cess that they have in place,” said Gar-cia.

Be it for offi ce supplies or catering services, small businesses should at least be given the opportunity to bid on vendor opportunities, said Garcia.

Yuksel said although Google is the

prised to learn of the decision yester-day. He said he was “disappointed and puzzled” at the college’s decision, be-cause changes made over the last few years to revamp the digital media pro-gram, which covers journalism, had not yet had time to come to fruition. He said the classes were supposed to offer the honors program for the fi rst time this fall — but that won’t happen now.

College President Michael Claire told the Post last night that all four classes did not have enough students sign up for them. The college wanted each class to have around 20 students, and they weren’t remotely close, he said. The decision made yesterday to cancel them treated the journalism classes like any others, he said.

Remitz acknowledged that underen-rollment has been a chronic problem. He said that in the 23 years he’s taught at the school, he’s never seen 20 students en-roll in any one of those classes. He said last semester, he had 24 students total in his three four-unit classes and one one-unit class that build the paper.

But he said the program has been extremely successful, earning a slew of awards — including one from the Society of Professional Journalists that

RESTAURANTS main concern, other businesses, such as LinkedIn with its headquarters at 2029 Stierlin Court in Mountain View, also offer their employees catering services, and do not ordes locally. LinkedIn did not respond to Post inquires. A Micro-soft spokesperson yesterday declined to comment on the issue.

papers from two-year schools almost never win.

“We have very high standards and are involved in very serious competitions,” he said. And that’s despite what he said is an unusually low budget — an average of $4,600 a year, when he said most com-munity college papers have $16,000.

Claire said the canceling of the class-es did not necessarily mean axing the paper. He said students could form a club and run the San Matean, which has been published at the College of San Mateo since 1928. He also said students will be offered the journalism classes at Skyline College as an alternative.

Claire said the college has lost 22% of its now $28 million budget over the past four years, making hard choices in-evitable. Other classes have also been cut for low enrollment, he said.

“I kind of saw it coming,” said Kayla Figard, who was executive editor of the paper last year. She said the administra-tion had issues with the way the paper reported some budget cuts at the school, which led to some tense meetings be-tween the student editors and some ad-ministrators.

Claire disagreed, characterizing one of those meetings as offi cials offering the students friendly advice.

“I think they saw that they had a good reason to cut the program now, because it was so low-enrolled,” Figard said. “It’s really disappointing.”

She said she’d been contacted by people who saw her articles and then wanted to take the journalism classes and write for the newspaper.

“People really wanted to take that class,” she said. “They wanted to get that experi-ence they won’t get anywhere else.”

COLLEGE ---------