A preferred L.A. sheriff touted reforms in a troubled system. Then a younger FBI agent confirmed up

When Leah Marx started visiting Males’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles in 2010, it didn’t instantly elevate alarm among the many individuals who ran it. More often than not, jailers simply checked out her federal ID and let her in with out asking why she was there. In the event that they did, she mentioned she was investigating a human trafficking case. It was a good-sounding story. Plausible. Good to discourage additional questions.

Marx was in her late 20s, simply past her rookie 12 months on the FBI. She had been sitting at her desk when her supervisor handed her a letter from an inmate alleging jailers had been brutalizing folks of their custody. It was completely different from different letters. It had particulars.

Now she and her FBI colleagues had been on the jail conducting secret interviews, attempting to separate truth from rumor. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Division ran the jails. With a day by day inhabitants of 14,000 inmates or extra, it was the nation’s largest jail system, and had been identified for years as a cauldron of violence and dysfunction.

The company was within the palms of a would-be reformer, Sheriff Lee Baca. He’d promised transparency. He’d gained reward for his formidable inmate training program. However tales persevered of violent and corrupt jailers, of deputy gangs, of an institutional tradition so entrenched it resisted all efforts to root it out.

Marx appeared an inconceivable federal agent (at first, even to herself). She had been getting a grasp’s diploma in social work when somebody steered she strive the FBI. She didn’t know they employed folks like her.

She was new to L.A., and dwelling alone together with her canine. As she gathered inmate tales, she made it a degree to emphasise that their fees had been irrelevant to her.

“I feel they began to consider that I used to be there to really hear what was occurring,” she advised The Occasions.

Inmates had been telling her variations of the identical story. A jailer would assault an inmate whereas yelling “Cease resisting,” then cost the inmate with assault on a police officer.

As she weighed the credibility of inmates towards jailers, Marx was knowledgeable by a painful episode in her household historical past. Rising up in Wisconsin, she knew solely the outlines of a tragedy too painful for the household to debate — her grandmother and uncle had way back died in a home hearth in California.

In highschool, she discovered that the fireplace had been deliberately set, that the suspected arsonist labored on the native police division. He’d benefited from the air of impunity his place afforded.

“Somebody’s place doesn’t dictate whether or not they’re extra truthful or much less truthful than anybody else,” Marx would recall. “You don’t get on the spot credibility on account of your place or your function.”

On the jail, she discovered an inmate keen to assist — Anthony Brown, a financial institution robber ready to be transported to state jail on a 423-year jail sentence.

He advised her a couple of jailer who had provided to carry him a contraband cellphone for the best value, and he or she orchestrated a sting in summer season 2011. An spy handed over the cash, and the jailer delivered the cellphone to Brown.

The cellphone was supposed to assist Brown doc what he noticed. And it gave the FBI leverage to launch an formidable operation. The FBI would lease out a warehouse mentioned to be full of medicine, and use the compromised jailer to recruit corrupt colleagues to moonlight as guards.

However the plan was useless earlier than it might even get off the bottom. Nor did Brown get something helpful along with his cellphone through the week and a half that he had it. On Aug. 8, 2011, deputies discovered the cellphone in his cell, stashed in a Doritos bag.

Baca didn’t speak like different lawmen. He typically seemed like a social employee, or a panelist at a self-improvement seminar. “I are usually one that claims, ‘All proper, fixed development, fixed creativity,’” he would say. “All humanity issues.”

Baca had been raised by his grandparents in a Mexican American household in L.A. He dug ditches, washed vehicles and hauled barley sacks. He joined the Sheriff’s Division at age 23 in 1965, acquired a PhD from USC and labored his manner as much as grow to be one of many state’s highest-ranking Latino regulation officers.

When he took over the Sheriff’s Division in 1998, he promised a brand new age of regulation enforcement on the huge, scandal-plagued company. By the summer season of 2011, he was virtually 70 and had run the division for 13 years. Voters had reelected him thrice.

When it grew to become clear that the FBI had been secretly investigating his jails for a very long time, the person who preached reform and accountability confronted an unprecedented take a look at. He might cooperate absolutely with the federal investigation. As an alternative, he determined to go to warfare.

His division turned Marx’s informant right into a ghost, shuttling him between amenities beneath a collection of pretend names, as Marx tried doggedly to search out him. Even a federal writ failed to provide him. When Marx lastly discovered him 18 days later, at Lancaster State Jail, he met her with hostile silence — he believed the FBI had left him for useless.

Baca, livid in regards to the intrusion onto his turf, advised the native FOX 11 morning present “Good Day L.A.” that the feds had damaged the regulation by planting a cellphone on one in every of his inmates.

“Who polices the police?” a bunch requested.

“We police ourselves,” Baca replied.

At the same time as he spoke, his division had a surveillance crew on Marx. That afternoon in September 2011, as she approached her house, two sheriff’s sergeants had been ready for her.

“I’m within the technique of swearing out a declaration for an arrest warrant for you,” mentioned Sgt. Scott Craig. He had his jacket off, and his gun was exhibiting.

Marx interpreted it as an try and intimidate her. She advised him to name the FBI.

“And the primary thought I had is that if they had been keen to return to my home and do that, what else are they able to?” she mentioned.

Baca confronted U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte, who had accepted the jail investigation. In response to Birotte’s trial testimony later, Baca erupted angrily, “I’m the goddamn sheriff. These are my goddamn jails. You need to gun up in right here? Is that what you need?” Birotte took the phrase to imply, “Would you like our companies to go to warfare?”

Contained in the FBI, there was an ongoing debate about whether or not to incorporate Baca within the jail investigation. He was a worthwhile regulation enforcement ally. His deputies labored with the feds on many job forces. However the incident outdoors Marx’s house largely ended that debate.

“If that isn’t a transparent indication that we can not work with them, I don’t know what’s,” mentioned Carlos Narro, who was the FBI’s public corruption supervisor in L.A. on the time.

The sheriff had catastrophically misjudged his adversary. As an alternative of quashing the probe, his heavy-handed ways had solely fueled it. Was it doable to develop the case past civil rights violations to an obstruction of justice case? How precisely was Brown made to fade contained in the jail system?

James Sexton had some solutions. The son of a Southern sheriff, he had joined the LASD hoping to make his title. He was just a few months into his job as a custody deputy on the downtown jail in 2009 when he discovered the worth of nonconformity. A theft suspect sucker-punched him, he says, and his colleagues ostracized him for failing to retaliate with a beating.

Nonetheless, Sexton’s tech prowess and different abilities started to win him some consideration, and finally earned him a job with an elite intelligence unit. In August 2011, his experience with the jail pc system made him helpful. The brass had an uncommon request. They wished him to make an informant disappear.

“We had been going to make it tough for different regulation enforcement companies to search out him on the pc,” he mentioned. “After which all of them checked out me.”

Sexton had discovered the worth of defiance. He helped to vary Brown’s title. The aliases included John Rodriguez, Kevin King, Chris Johnson and Robin Banks.

When sheriff’s officers determined to unload Brown on the state jail system, Sexton wrote an electronic mail notifying his bosses.

“Gents,” Sexton wrote, “I’m going to deal with reserving our good friend again beneath his true alias.”

The e-mail would grow to be a vital piece of proof. In it, Sexton coined the time period that will grow to be inseparable from the entire scheme. The topic line: Operation Pandora’s Field.

Sexton thought the Brown episode was behind him. However in early 2012, he mentioned, he was scared. He had reported misconduct on an unrelated case, involving one other jailer’s doable affiliation with a skinhead gang.

He knew he would by no means be trusted once more. Co-workers had been calling him a rat.

He determined to grow to be an informant for Leah Marx. He was stunned at how little she acted like a cop. “I acquired a social employee,” he mentioned. “You gotta love the calculation of the FBI. She is simple to speak to. I ought to have been smarter.”

Sexton talked to the FBI dozens of instances. He advised a federal grand jury how he had manipulated the jail computer systems to cover Brown from his federal handlers. This admission would damage him severely. In December 2013, he was indicted, one in every of 18 present or former sworn members charged with civil rights violations, corruption, inmate abuse or obstruction. Amongst them had been the 2 sergeants who had confronted Marx outdoors her house.

At trial, Sexton’s lawyer portrayed him as an “overeager child” attempting to assist the FBI, a low-ranking jailer who exaggerated his significance within the scheme. The lawyer in contrast him to Walter Mitty, the character with the boring workplace job who escapes into elaborate imaginative worlds — a protection Sexton hated. He was convicted and acquired an 18-month time period. He was thrown into solitary confinement. He counted the times by plucking enamel off a comb.

After 4 months in jail, Sexton appeared earlier than a federal decide and mentioned, “I stand earlier than you as a damaged man.” The prosecutor agreed to let him go house.

The sheriff was not a simple man to pin down. As he sat right down to face questions from the feds, his sentences traveled winding paths by imprecise precincts to fog-filled locations.

He bragged in regards to the hundreds of inmates who had been getting an training in his jails, because of packages he had established. “Nobody is a higher believer in inmate rights than I’m,” he mentioned.

His solutions had been often long-winded, muddled and incoherent. Repeatedly, he denied having advance information of what his division had achieved — from making Brown disappear, to threatening Marx with arrest.

The FBI had not requested his permission to infiltrate his jails as a result of it had not trusted him, however Baca appeared to search out this truth insupportable, if not incomprehensible. He appeared personally damage by it.

“There’s no proof of a malicious intent on my half to undermine the mission of the FBI,” Baca mentioned. “You wanna catch all of the crooked deputies I’ve; in reality, it’s useful as a result of I don’t have sufficient price range to do all of it myself.”

For Baca, this interview — which prosecutors would painting as an internet of falsehoods — represented the fruits of a protracted collection of misjudgments and self-inflicted wounds.

Baca had as soon as advised the ACLU, “I’ll by no means, ever resign. I intend to be sheriff so long as I reside.” He had run unopposed on the final election, his fourth. However in January 2014, he stood outdoors the division’s Monterey Park headquarters, combating emotion as he introduced his resignation. He had been sheriff for 15 years and had labored on the division for practically half a century.

In late 2016, the 74-year-old Baca went to trial. His supporters wore lapel pins within the form of a badge. His protection: He had been in the dead of night about what his subordinates had been doing to foil the feds. A few of Baca’s outstanding buddies, together with two former L.A. County district attorneys, testified to his law-abiding popularity. The jury deadlocked.

On the retrial, prosecutors known as convicted high-ranking co-conspirators to the stand. A former captain mentioned Baca had personally accepted the plan to ship sergeants to Marx’s home, including: “his recommendation to us was simply to not put handcuffs on her.”

In March 2017, Baca grew to become the tenth and highest-ranking participant within the obstruction scheme to be convicted. His lawyer pleaded with the decide, saying Baca had Alzheimer’s illness that amounted to its personal horrible punishment, “a sentence that may go away him a mere shell of his former self.” However the decide gave Baca three years, excoriating him for abusing the general public belief.

At 77, Baca turned himself right into a low-security facility outdoors El Paso. In response to a pleasant biography, he reorganized the jail library and renovated the jail pond, and cleared brush from the grounds. He impressed different inmates by his instance. He made buddies, he gave recommendation. He advised folks to utilize their time.

He went house in 2021. Three years later, at age 82, he wandered away from house in San Marino. He turned up six miles away at a Denny’s, badly confused.

If not for Baca’s determination to “gun up” towards the feds, they most likely would have introduced a handful of civil rights circumstances towards jailers — and Baca would have gained reelection.

“All the large prosecutions we did was due to how they reacted,” says Brandon Fox, the previous prosecutor. “This was an existential risk to the Sheriff’s Division, nevertheless it was of their very own making due to what they did.”

Brown is in state jail serving his 423 years. He filed swimsuit claiming the Sheriff’s Division had successfully kidnapped him throughout these 18 days, and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors accepted a $1-million payout to settle the declare. Among the many ironies: He acquired nothing of worth on the cellphone that so enraged the sheriff, and prosecutors by no means known as him to testify at trial, figuring out the protection was more likely to eviscerate him.

Ultimately, 22 members of the Sheriff’s Division had been convicted on account of the probe initiated by particular agent Leah Marx. It appears probably her youth and inexperience helped her, that veteran brokers would have weighed the chances and determined it wasn’t price pursuing.

“We don’t know what number of extra civil rights circumstances we might have introduced as a result of the division got here in and disrupted our investigation,” Marx says. “They tried to deliberately cease what we had been doing. And so, sadly, we don’t know the place it will’ve gone. And that’s slightly irritating.”
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