When Leah Marx began visiting Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles in 2010, it did not immediately raise alarm among the people who ran it. Most of the time, jailers just looked at her federal ID and let her in without asking why she was there. If they did, she said she was investigating a human trafficking case. It was a good-sounding story. Believable. Perfect to deter further questions.
Marx was in her late 20s, just beyond her rookie year at the FBI. She had been sitting at her desk when her supervisor handed her a letter from an inmate alleging jailers were brutalizing people in their custody. It was different from other letters. It had details.
Now she and her FBI colleagues were at the jail conducting secret interviews, trying to separate fact from rumor. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department ran the jails. With a daily population of 14,000 inmates or more, it was the nation’s largest jail system, and had been known for years as a cauldron of violence and dysfunction.
An inmate at Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
The agency was in the hands of a would-be reformer, Sheriff Lee Baca. He’d promised transparency. He’d won praise for his ambitious inmate education program. But stories persisted of violent and corrupt jailers, of deputy gangs, of an institutional culture so entrenched it resisted all efforts to root it out.
Marx seemed an improbable federal agent (at first, even to herself). She had been getting a master’s degree in social work when someone suggested she try the FBI. She did not know they hired people like her.
She was new to L.A., and living alone with her dog. As she gathered inmate stories, she made it a point to emphasize that their charges were irrelevant to her.
“I think they started to believe that I was there to actually hear what was going on,” she told The Times.
Inmates were telling her versions of the same story. A jailer would assault an inmate while yelling “Stop resisting,” then charge the inmate with assault on a police officer.
Then-Sheriff Lee Baca meets with inmates at Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles in October 2011 to listen to their complains and issues about the jail.
(Los Angeles Times)
As she weighed the credibility of inmates against jailers, Marx was informed by a painful episode in her family history. Growing up in Wisconsin, she knew only the outlines of a tragedy too painful for the family to discuss — her grandmother and uncle had long ago died in a house fire in California.
In high school, she learned that the fire had been intentionally set, that the suspected arsonist worked at the local police department. He’d benefited from the air of impunity his position afforded.
“Someone’s position doesn’t dictate whether they are more truthful or less truthful than anyone else,” Marx would recall. “You don’t get instant credibility due to your position or your role.”
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At the jail, she found an inmate eager to help — Anthony Brown, a bank robber waiting to be transported to state prison on a 423-year prison sentence.
He told her about a jailer who had offered to bring him a contraband cellphone for the right price, and she orchestrated a sting in summer 2011. An undercover agent handed over the money, and the jailer delivered the phone to Brown.
The phone was supposed to help Brown document what he saw. And it gave the FBI leverage to launch an ambitious operation. The FBI would rent out a warehouse said to be full of drugs, and use the compromised jailer to recruit corrupt colleagues to moonlight as guards.
But the plan was dead before it could even get off the ground. Nor did Brown get anything useful with his phone during the week and a half that he had it. On Aug. 8, 2011, deputies found the phone in his cell, stashed in a Doritos bag.
Baca shakes hands with a trainee at a 2022 graduation ceremony at the Sheriff’s Training Academy and Regional Services Center in Whittier.
(Los Angeles Times)
Baca did not talk like other lawmen. He often sounded like a social worker, or a panelist at a self-improvement seminar. “I tend to be one that says, ‘All right, constant growth, constant creativity,’” he would say. “All humanity matters.”
Baca had been raised by his grandparents in a Mexican American family in L.A. He dug ditches, washed cars and hauled barley sacks. He joined the Sheriff’s Department at age 23 in 1965, got a PhD from USC and worked his way up to become one of the state’s highest-ranking Latino law officers.
When he took over the Sheriff’s Department in 1998, he promised a new age of law enforcement at the vast, scandal-plagued agency. By the summer of 2011, he was almost 70 and had run the department for 13 years. Voters had reelected him three times.
Baca celebrates with supporters at a Pasadena hotel in November 1998 after hearing he leads the sheriff’s race.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
When it became clear that the FBI had been secretly investigating his jails for a long time, the man who preached reform and accountability faced an unprecedented test. He could cooperate fully with the federal investigation. Instead, he decided to go to war.
His department turned Marx’s informant into a ghost, shuttling him between facilities under a series of fake names, as Marx tried doggedly to find him. Even a federal writ failed to produce him. When Marx finally found him 18 days later, at Lancaster State Prison, he met her with hostile silence — he believed the FBI had left him for dead.
Baca, furious about the intrusion onto his turf, told the local FOX 11 morning show “Good Day L.A.” that the feds had broken the law by planting a phone on one of his inmates.
“Who polices the police?” a host asked.
“We police ourselves,” Baca replied.
Even as he spoke, his department had a surveillance team on Marx. That afternoon in September 2011, as she approached her apartment, two sheriff’s sergeants were waiting for her.
“I’m in the process of swearing out a declaration for an arrest warrant for you,” said Sgt. Scott Craig. He had his jacket off, and his gun was showing.
Marx interpreted it as an attempt to intimidate her. She told him to call the FBI.
“And the first thought I had is if they were willing to come to my house and do this, what else are they capable of?” she said.
U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte Jr. announces indictments of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials in 2013.
(Los Angeles Times)
Baca confronted U.S. Atty. Andre Birotte, who had approved the jail investigation. According to Birotte’s trial testimony later, Baca erupted angrily, “I’m the goddamn sheriff. These are my goddamn jails. You want to gun up in here? Is that what you want?” Birotte took the phrase to mean, “Do you want our agencies to go to war?”
Inside the FBI, there was an ongoing debate about whether to include Baca in the jail investigation. He was a valuable law enforcement ally. His deputies worked with the feds on many task forces. But the incident outside Marx’s apartment largely ended that debate.
“If that isn’t a clear indication that we cannot work with them, I don’t know what is,” said Carlos Narro, who was the FBI’s public corruption supervisor in L.A. at the time.
The sheriff had catastrophically misjudged his adversary. Instead of quashing the probe, his heavy-handed tactics had only fueled it. Was it possible to expand the case beyond civil rights violations to an obstruction of justice case? How exactly was Brown made to vanish inside the jail system?
James Sexton had some answers. The son of a Southern sheriff, he had joined the LASD hoping to make his name. He was only a few months into his job as a custody deputy at the downtown jail in 2009 when he learned the price of nonconformity. A robbery suspect sucker-punched him, he says, and his colleagues ostracized him for failing to retaliate with a beating.
Still, Sexton’s tech prowess and other skills began to win him some attention, and ultimately earned him a job with an elite intelligence unit. In August 2011, his expertise with the jail computer system made him useful. The brass had an unusual request. They wanted him to make an informant disappear.
“We were going to make it difficult for other law enforcement agencies to find him on the computer,” he said. “And then they all looked at me.”
Sexton had learned the price of defiance. He helped to change Brown’s name. The aliases included John Rodriguez, Kevin King, Chris Johnson and Robin Banks.
When sheriff’s officials decided to unload Brown on the state prison system, Sexton wrote an email notifying his bosses.
“Gents,” Sexton wrote, “I’m going to handle booking our friend back under his true alias.”
The email would become a crucial piece of evidence. In it, Sexton coined the term that would become inseparable from the whole scheme. The subject line: Operation Pandora’s Box.
Sexton thought the Brown episode was behind him. But in early 2012, he said, he was scared. He had reported misconduct on an unrelated case, involving another jailer’s possible association with a skinhead gang.
He knew he would never be trusted again. Co-workers were calling him a rat.
He decided to become an informant for Leah Marx. He was surprised at how little she acted like a cop. “I got a social worker,” he said. “You gotta love the calculation of the FBI. She is easy to talk to. I should have been smarter.”
The main exercise yard on the roof of Men’s Central Jail.
(Los Angeles Times)
Sexton talked to the FBI dozens of times. He told a federal grand jury how he had manipulated the jail computers to hide Brown from his federal handlers. This admission would hurt him severely. In December 2013, he was indicted, one of 18 current or former sworn members charged with civil rights violations, corruption, inmate abuse or obstruction. Among them were the two sergeants who had confronted Marx outside her home.
At trial, Sexton’s attorney portrayed him as an “overeager kid” trying to help the FBI, a low-ranking jailer who exaggerated his importance in the scheme. The attorney compared him to Walter Mitty, the character with the boring office job who escapes into elaborate imaginative worlds — a defense Sexton hated. He was convicted and received an 18-month term. He was thrown into solitary confinement. He counted the days by plucking teeth off a comb.
After four months in prison, Sexton appeared before a federal judge and said, “I stand before you as a broken man.” The prosecutor agreed to let him go home.
The sheriff was not an easy man to pin down. As he sat down to face questions from the feds, his sentences traveled winding paths through vague precincts to fog-filled destinations.
He bragged about the thousands of inmates who were getting an education in his jails, thanks to programs he had established. “No one is a greater believer in inmate rights than I am,” he said.
His answers were frequently long-winded, muddled and incoherent. Again and again, he denied having advance knowledge of what his department had done — from making Brown disappear, to threatening Marx with arrest.
The FBI had not asked his permission to infiltrate his jails because it had not trusted him, but Baca seemed to find this fact intolerable, if not incomprehensible. He seemed personally hurt by it.
“There’s no evidence of a malicious intent on my part to undermine the mission of the FBI,” Baca said. “You wanna catch all the crooked deputies I have; in fact, it’s helpful because I don’t have enough budget to do it all myself.”
For Baca, this interview — which prosecutors would portray as a web of falsehoods — represented the culmination of a long series of misjudgments and self-inflicted wounds.
Baca announcing in January 2014 that he would not seek a fifth term.
(Los Angeles Times)
Baca had once told the ACLU, “I will never, ever resign. I intend to be sheriff as long as I live.” He had run unopposed at the last election, his fourth. But in January 2014, he stood outside the department’s Monterey Park headquarters, fighting emotion as he announced his resignation. He had been sheriff for 15 years and had worked at the department for nearly half a century.
In late 2016, the 74-year-old Baca went to trial. His supporters wore lapel pins in the shape of a badge. His defense: He had been in the dark about what his subordinates were doing to foil the feds. Some of Baca’s prominent friends, including two former L.A. County district attorneys, testified to his law-abiding reputation. The jury deadlocked.
At the retrial, prosecutors called convicted high-ranking co-conspirators to the stand. A former captain said Baca had personally approved the plan to send sergeants to Marx’s house, adding: “his advice to us was just not to put handcuffs on her.”
In March 2017, Baca became the 10th and highest-ranking participant in the obstruction scheme to be convicted. His lawyer pleaded with the judge, saying Baca had Alzheimer’s disease that amounted to its own terrible punishment, “a sentence that will leave him a mere shell of his former self.” But the judge gave Baca three years, excoriating him for abusing the public trust.
Baca, flanked by attorneys David and Nathan Hochman, leaves federal court in Los Angeles after he was arraigned on charges of obstructing justice, and lying to the federal government. Nathan Hochman is now L.A. County district attorney.
(Los Angeles Times)
At 77, Baca turned himself into a low-security facility outside El Paso. According to a friendly biography, he reorganized the prison library and renovated the prison pond, and cleared brush from the grounds. He inspired other inmates by his example. He made friends, he gave advice. He told people to make use of their time.
He went home in 2021. Three years later, at age 82, he wandered away from home in San Marino. He turned up six miles away at a Denny’s, badly confused.
If not for Baca’s decision to “gun up” against the feds, they probably would have brought a handful of civil rights cases against jailers — and Baca would have won reelection.
“All the big prosecutions we did was because of how they reacted,” says Brandon Fox, the former prosecutor. “This was an existential threat to the Sheriff’s Department, but it was of their own making because of what they did.”
Brown is in state prison serving his 423 years. He filed suit claiming the Sheriff’s Department had effectively kidnapped him during those 18 days, and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors approved a $1-million payout to settle the claim. Among the ironies: He got nothing of value on the cellphone that so enraged the sheriff, and prosecutors never called him to testify at trial, knowing the defense was likely to eviscerate him.
In the end, 22 members of the Sheriff’s Department were convicted as a result of the probe initiated by special agent Leah Marx. It seems likely her youth and inexperience helped her, that veteran agents would have weighed the odds and decided it wasn’t worth pursuing.
“We don’t know how many more civil rights cases we could have brought because the department came in and disrupted our investigation,” Marx says. “They tried to intentionally stop what we were doing. And so, sadly, we don’t know where it would’ve gone. And that’s a little frustrating.”
The podcast “Crimes of the Times,” featuring “Pandora’s Box: The Fall of L.A.’s Sheriff,” is now available wherever you get your podcasts.
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