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 individuals 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 reality from rumor. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Division ran the jails. With a each day inhabitants of 14,000 inmates or extra, it was the nation’s largest jail system, and had been recognized for years as a cauldron of violence and dysfunction.
An inmate at Males’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Occasions)
The company was within the fingers 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 unbelievable federal agent (at first, even to herself). She had been getting a grasp’s diploma in social work when somebody advised she attempt the FBI. She didn’t know they employed individuals like her.
She was new to L.A., and dwelling alone along with her canine. As she gathered inmate tales, she made it a degree to emphasise that their expenses had been irrelevant to her.
“I believe they began to consider that I used to be there to really hear what was happening,” she informed 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.
Then-Sheriff Lee Baca meets with inmates at Males’s Central Jail in Los Angeles in October 2011 to hearken to their complains and points concerning the jail.
(Los Angeles Occasions)
As she weighed the credibility of inmates in opposition to 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 fireplace in California.
In highschool, she discovered that the hearth 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 immediate credibility as a result of your place or your function.”
On this sequence, Christopher Goffard revisits previous crimes in Los Angeles and past, from the well-known to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the reminiscences of those that had been there.
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 informed her a few jailer who had provided to deliver him a contraband cellphone for the correct worth, and she or he orchestrated a sting in summer season 2011. An secret agent 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 medication, and use the compromised jailer to recruit corrupt colleagues to moonlight as guards.
However the plan was lifeless earlier than it may even get off the bottom. Nor did Brown get something helpful together 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 shakes fingers with a trainee at a 2022 commencement ceremony on the Sheriff’s Coaching Academy and Regional Providers Heart in Whittier.
(Los Angeles Occasions)
Baca didn’t speak like different lawmen. He usually appeared 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, obtained a PhD from USC and labored his method as much as turn out to be one of many state’s highest-ranking Latino legislation officers.
When he took over the Sheriff’s Division in 1998, he promised a brand new age of legislation enforcement on the huge, scandal-plagued company. By the summer season of 2011, he was nearly 70 and had run the division for 13 years. Voters had reelected him 3 times.
Baca celebrates with supporters at a Pasadena lodge in November 1998 after listening to he leads the sheriff’s race.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Occasions)
When it turned 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 check. He may cooperate absolutely with the federal investigation. As an alternative, he determined to go to battle.
His division turned Marx’s informant right into a ghost, shuttling him between services below a sequence of faux 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 lifeless.
Baca, livid concerning the intrusion onto his turf, informed the native FOX 11 morning present “Good Day L.A.” that the feds had damaged the legislation by planting a cellphone on considered one of his inmates.
“Who polices the police?” a bunch requested.
“We police ourselves,” Baca replied.
Whilst he spoke, his division had a surveillance crew on Marx. That afternoon in September 2011, as she approached her residence, two sheriff’s sergeants had been ready for her.
“I’m within the strategy of swearing out a declaration for an arrest warrant for you,” mentioned Sgt. Scott Craig. He had his jacket off, and his gun was displaying.
Marx interpreted it as an try and intimidate her. She informed him to name the FBI.
“And the primary thought I had is that if they had been keen to come back to my home and do that, what else are they able to?” she mentioned.
U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte Jr. pronounces indictments of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Division officers in 2013.
(Los Angeles Occasions)
Baca confronted U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte, who had accepted the jail investigation. Based on Birotte’s trial testimony later, Baca erupted angrily, “I’m the goddamn sheriff. These are my goddamn jails. You wish 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 battle?”
Contained in the FBI, there was an ongoing debate about whether or not to incorporate Baca within the jail investigation. He was a worthwhile legislation enforcement ally. His deputies labored with the feds on many activity forces. However the incident exterior Marx’s residence 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 potential 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 only some months into his job as a custody deputy on the downtown jail in 2009 when he discovered the value 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 legislation enforcement companies to search out him on the pc,” he mentioned. “After which all of them checked out me.”
Sexton had discovered the value 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 e-mail notifying his bosses.
“Gents,” Sexton wrote, “I’m going to deal with reserving our buddy again below his true alias.”
The e-mail would turn out to be a vital piece of proof. In it, Sexton coined the time period that may turn out 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 potential 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 turn out to be an informant for Leah Marx. He was stunned at how little she acted like a cop. “I obtained a social employee,” he mentioned. “You gotta love the calculation of the FBI. She is straightforward to speak to. I ought to have been smarter.”
The principle train yard on the roof of Males’s Central Jail.
(Los Angeles Occasions)
Sexton talked to the FBI dozens of occasions. He informed a federal grand jury how he had manipulated the jail computer systems to cover Brown from his federal handlers. This admission would harm him severely. In December 2013, he was indicted, considered one 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 exterior her house.
At trial, Sexton’s legal professional portrayed him as an “overeager child” attempting to assist the FBI, a low-ranking jailer who exaggerated his significance within the scheme. The legal professional 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 obtained an 18-month time period. He was thrown into solitary confinement. He counted the times by plucking tooth 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 all the way down to face questions from the feds, his sentences traveled winding paths by imprecise precincts to fog-filled locations.
He bragged concerning the hundreds of inmates who had been getting an training in his jails, because of applications he had established. “Nobody is a higher believer in inmate rights than I’m,” he mentioned.
His solutions had been ceaselessly long-winded, muddled and incoherent. Repeatedly, he denied having advance information of what his division had executed — 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 reality insupportable, if not incomprehensible. He appeared personally harm 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; actually, it’s useful as a result of I don’t have sufficient funds to do all of it myself.”
For Baca, this interview — which prosecutors would painting as an online of falsehoods — represented the fruits of an extended sequence of misjudgments and self-inflicted wounds.
Baca saying in January 2014 that he wouldn’t search a fifth time period.
(Los Angeles Occasions)
Baca had as soon as informed 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 exterior the division’s Monterey Park headquarters, preventing 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 at midnight about what his subordinates had been doing to foil the feds. A few of Baca’s outstanding pals, together with two former L.A. County district attorneys, testified to his law-abiding status. 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 turned 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.
Baca, flanked by attorneys David and Nathan Hochman, leaves federal courtroom in Los Angeles after he was arraigned on expenses of obstructing justice, and mendacity to the federal authorities. Nathan Hochman is now L.A. County district legal professional.
(Los Angeles Occasions)
At 77, Baca turned himself right into a low-security facility exterior El Paso. Based on 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 pals, he gave recommendation. He informed individuals 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 choice to “gun up” in opposition to the feds, they in all probability would have introduced a handful of civil rights instances in opposition to jailers — and Baca would have gained reelection.
“All the massive 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, however it was of their very own making due to what they did.”
Brown is in state jail serving his 423 years. He filed go well with 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 obtained 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 prone to eviscerate him.
In the long run, 22 members of the Sheriff’s Division had been convicted because of the probe initiated by particular agent Leah Marx. It appears possible her youth and inexperience helped her, that veteran brokers would have weighed the percentages and determined it wasn’t value pursuing.
“We don’t know what number of extra civil rights instances we may 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.”
The podcast “Crimes of the Occasions,” that includes “Pandora’s Field: The Fall of L.A.’s Sheriff,” is now accessible wherever you get your podcasts.
