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(01-05) 11:52 PST OAKLAND –

The nephew of former Oakland City Administrator Deborah Edgerly was sentenced Tuesday to a year of home detention on a weapons charge and ordered not to associate with gang members.

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William Lovan, 28, of Antioch, whose 2008 arrest prompted an investigation that eventually contributed to Edgerly’s firing, pleaded no contest in October to a charge of carrying a concealed firearm in a vehicle.

Lovan, who did not own the handgun, was also placed on five years’ probation by Judge Morris Jacobson of Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland.

In exchange for Lovan’s plea, prosecutors dropped a charge of carrying a loaded firearm and an enhancement alleging that he participated in a criminal gang. Jacobson ordered Lovan not to associate with gang members or participate in gang activity.

Lovan works for the city of Oakland as a parking-meter repairman, the same job he held when he was arrested. He is allowed to go to and from work as part of his sentence.

Police found the handgun June 7, 2008, in a Chrysler Sebring belonging to Lovan’s girlfriend, said Deputy District Attorney John Brouhard. The car, which Lovan had been driving, was parked outside a liquor store near 12th and Market streets in West Oakland.

Lovan was inside the store. Police, who arrived on the scene as part of an anti-gang operation, were preparing to tow the vehicle when Edgerly showed up, authorities said. She called Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan, who told her that her nephew was part of a larger investigation and that she should leave.

Less than two weeks later, Lovan was one of several dozen people arrested in raids on suspicion of being members of the Acorn gang in West Oakland. Lovan’s voice turned up on several wiretapped phone conversations, including one in which he called an alleged gang leader and told him about the raids, authorities said.

Lovan’s attorney, Adantй Pointer, told the judge Tuesday that many of the wiretapped conversations concerned “activity about women” and other noncriminal matters.

The prosecution came amid “a lot of sensationalism and a lot of media surrounding the case” that had no bearing on Lovan’s crime, Pointer said.

Lovan was convicted in 2000 of possessing an assault weapon, a felony, but after he served three years of probation, he successfully petitioned for the conviction to be reduced to a misdemeanor and have it expunged from his record, court records show.

Jacobson said Tuesday that he was “mindful of that history” but at the same time was aware that Lovan was “not on the FBI’s top 10 most-wanted list.”

Outside court, Pointer said that his client was not a gang member but that he accepted the conditions imposed by the judge.

Mayor Ron Dellums fired Edgerly in July 2008 after instances of possible nepotism involving her surfaced. Among them was the allegation that she had tipped Lovan about the impending gang raids.

Edgerly has filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit against the city. She said after Lovan’s arrest that she had done nothing wrong and that she was “being tried in the court of public opinion by rumor, innuendo and presumption of guilt.”

E-mail Henry K. Lee at hlee@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page C – 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle