Paul Tanaka, former Los Angeles County Undersheriff and second in command of the beleaguered L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, was recently arraigned on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The charges grew out of a federal investigation into brutality and corruption in the L.A. County Jail.
The four-year federal investigation by the Justice Department and the FBI, which earlier had produced convictions of a number of Sheriff’s Jail Deputies, has now moved onto the higher ups. The Feds claim that Tanaka and retired Capt. William “Tom” Carey played major roles in the undermining of an FBI investigation into abuse in L.A. jails. It’s unclear if former Sheriff Lee Baca is being investigated.
In the fall of 2013, in the midst of the abuse allegations leveled against Baca, Paul Tanaka was then campaigning to replace Baca as Sheriff. Tanaka came to speak with The Malibu Times at its offices in Las Flores Canyon and defended himself against allegations of corruption.
“If you go back and read all the testimony, you’ll see that if you did not like Paul Tanaka, you went in there and you made all these allegations,” Tanaka told The Times in 2013. “You never got questioned on your credibility, or your sources, or whether or not you were telling the truth.”
Tanaka’s attorneys H. Dean Steward and Jerome J. Haig said in a statement released last Thursday, “We will aggressively defend these baseless charges filed against [Tanaka] today in United States District Court.”
Tanaka and former Capt. Tom Carey, a co-defendant in the case, have both pled not guilty.
According to the grand jury, Tanaka and Carey orchestrated a conspiracy to hide an informant the FBI placed within the L.A. County jail system, in order that he not inform the Federal government about issues going on in the jails, including inmate abuse. Some of those same allegations of inmate abuse also caused the ouster of former Sheriff Lee Baca, who resigned in 2014.
Tanaka defended the actions of deputies working in county jails, and suggested a stronger policy for use of force should be implemented.
“There’s a policy … that’s very restrictive on their ability to handle situations that might require hands-on in a lawful manner,” Tanaka said. “Deputies will tell you that their ability to maintain safety and security not only of themselves but of the inmates has been hindered.”
Coincidentally, the use of force in jails is just one of several counts against Tanaka that were delivered in last week’s indictment, which alleged that Tanaka and Carey were aware of the abuse allegations but did not investigate them.
As news of alleged abuses in L.A. County jails spread, Tanaka and Carey, together with co-conspirators, went to great lengths to thwart an FBI investigation into the department, the grand jury alleges. These lengths include the erasure of files and database entries that tracked the FBI informant, the changing of the informant’s name within the system and the shuffling of the informant between various cells on different floors and in different jails.
The alleged misconduct was said to have taken place in 2011, but in 2013, Tanaka told The Malibu Times if he was elected, he would try to clean up the department.
“I would take a look at the entire operation because what happens is [disorganization] spreads. You have confusion, you have uncertainty,” he said. “And pretty soon you have people that don’t want to make decisions.”
Melissa Caskey contributed to an earlier report.