Whistle-blowers say that a group called the Banditos functions as a shadow government within local law enforcement. The sheriff says there is no such gang in his department.

“I had always heard stories—‘Don’t go to East Los Angeles Station,’ ” Rosa Gonzalez, a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, told me. “ ‘You’re a hard worker. Go somewhere else. East L.A., it’s different from all the other stations.’ ”

But Gonzalez, who is Mexican American and was raised in what she calls “the inner city,” was drawn to East Los Angeles, a historically Latino neighborhood that has long contended with gang violence. “It’s a way to give back to my own community,” she said. In 2011, after finishing the academy and a mandatory turn through the custody division, Gonzalez reported for training at East L.A. She was one of three female trainees, working alongside approximately a hundred men.

She was naïve at first, she said. But a detective told her, “Just pay attention. You’ll find out who’s really in charge.” Officially, stations are run by captains, with the help of an operations staff. At East L.A., Gonzalez discovered, there was a shadow government: a secretive group of sheriff’s deputies known as the Banditos.

Deputy gangs, or “subgroups,” with names like the Grim Reapers, the Regulators, and the Vikings, have plagued the sheriff’s department for fifty years. Members have been accused of serious breaches of department policy and violations of constitutional rights, of terrorizing the public and harassing their fellow-deputies, and of retaliating against whistle-blowers.

According to a lawsuit filed by eight East L.A. deputies and the A.C.L.U., the Banditos gang “controls the East Los Angeles station like inmates running a prison yard.” Leaders, known as “shot-callers,” determined deputies’ hours, promotions, even days off. On patrol, they operated in the gray areas of law enforcement. Gonzalez said that they perpetuated “the code of silence, the culture of the ghetto gunslinger.” She added, “What makes East L.A. so unique is it’s embedded within the Hispanic machismo culture and the Hispanic street gangs.”

The mark of a Bandito is a secret numbered tattoo: a skeleton wearing a thick mustache, a bandolier, and a sombrero, and brandishing a smoking gun. (Deputy-gang tattoos are typically on the leg or the ankle.) Families of those killed by deputies allege that the deputies were “chasing ink”—trying to earn a tattoo. In a recent exposé on CBS News, anonymous whistle-blowers at East L.A. Station said, “If you get in a shooting, that’s a definite brownie point” with the Banditos.

Gonzalez was assigned a training officer, Noel Lopez, who went by “Crook” and who, she understood, was a Bandito. (Lopez did not respond to requests for comment.) As her T.O.—her “daddy,” in station lingo—he was meant to scrutinize her every decision, to make sure that she internalized protocols. “When somebody would ask me to do something—anything, a menial task or favor—I would first have to run it by my T.O.,” Gonzalez said. “He’d say, ‘Who asked you?’ I would tell him the name and he’d say, ‘O.K., no. They don’t matter. Don’t do it.’ If I’d say certain names, ‘O.K., yeah.’ You learn real quick that the tail wags the dog at the station.”

Gonzalez’s connection to a Bandito offered a measure of protection. “I was never forced to do any type of sexual activity to get off training, but you would hear that rumor,” she said. “I talked to a female who got hit across the head during training. Who had all her things thrown out. Who was called a bitch constantly.”

While Gonzalez was at the station, a woman named Guadalupe Lopez was training under Eric Valdez, an alleged Bandito known as the Godfather of East L.A. (Valdez could not be reached for comment.) She filed a lawsuit in 2014, claiming that his cronies had subjected her to relentless sexual harassment and innuendo. She was told that female deputies performed oral sex on Banditos and was cautioned to “submit” if she wanted to complete her training. When she refused, her suit alleged, the Banditos began a campaign of physical intimidation, and after she complained they left a dead rat by her car. The county settled for $1.5 million.

Because Gonzalez was older—in her thirties, with kids—she was known affectionately around the station as Mama G. But her T.O. indicated that she wasn’t necessarily safe from harassment. She said he warned her about another training officer, an alleged Bandito named Rafael Munoz. Years earlier, Munoz had been arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon—accused of pointing a gun at his wife, while kneeling on the hood of the car she was in. The department had fired him but, after he was found not guilty, brought him back on.

“Lopez told me, ‘Hey, if you’re ever called by Munoz, or any of the other guys, if they ever ask you, Hey, can you bring beer?, or, Hey, can you come over?—don’t do it,’ ” Gonzalez said. “ ‘Tell them you’re busy. You can’t. You have a family.’ ” When Munoz did eventually call and ask her to bring beer, she begged off.

Gonzalez managed to evade the Banditos again, when Valdez and another alleged member, Manny Navarro, summoned her to meet at a doughnut shop and asked her to join them on the early shift. Gonzalez knew that the early shift, a crew of wee-hours hunters who roamed the streets looking for troublemakers, was dominated by Banditos. Pretending to be flattered, she demurred.

Later, Gonzalez was herself put in charge of a trainee. This, she believes, is what turned the Banditos against her. Her supervisors and the station captain had approved the decision. “But, remember, they’re not really in charge,” she said. “It’s Valdez. And I never got his approval. I never would have, because of my gender. And they already had someone in mind for it, one of their male prospects.”

In a lawsuit that Gonzalez filed in 2015, she claims that a sergeant—who admitted under oath to being a tattooed Bandito—removed her trainee and threatened to sabotage her career if she objected. She filed a grievance, and then punishment began. Fellow-deputies, she alleges, refused to provide her with backup. Once, responding alone to a burglary at a grocery store, she radioed for help repeatedly, but no one came to her aid.

“I went from being a shining star at East Los Angeles Station to, less than twenty-four hours later, walking down the hall and people just turning their heads and looking the other way,” Gonzalez said. “When they’re retaliating against you, you become like the plague. You’re untouchable.” Superiors determined that her life was in danger and transferred her to another station.

The county settled Gonzalez’s lawsuit, for a million dollars, and she eventually became a sergeant. But, dismayingly, neither her suit nor Guadalupe Lopez’s weakened the Banditos. Gonzalez allowed herself a measure of hope in 2018, when Alex Villanueva won the election for sheriff. He had come up at East L.A. Station, but he was an outsider to the deputy-gang culture, and he had championed a message of reform. Throughout the campaign he told deputies, “Help is on the way.”

Villanueva’s victory was an upset. It had been a century since an incumbent sheriff was unseated, and even longer since a Democrat had won the office. He’d positioned himself as a whistle-blower, emphasizing his history of holding the sheriff’s department to account. The incumbent, Jim McDonnell, was a Republican turned Independent, who had spent most of his career with the L.A.P.D.

Mark Gonzalez, the chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, told me that Villanueva met all his members’ criteria. “Everyone felt he was thinking and preaching the word of the Party,” he said. “He was about reforming the sheriff’s department, cleaning house, raising standards, doing community policing, and restoring trust.”

The sheriff’s department polices unincorporated L.A. County, forty-two contract cities, and the country’s largest jail system. With more than fifteen thousand employees and an annual budget of $3.6 billion, the sheriff runs one of the largest law-enforcement agencies in the United States.

The deputy gangs were an embarrassment and, increasingly, a matter of urgent concern to civilian leadership. “L.A. is ground zero of all things gang. The street gangs themselves. Gang injunctions. Punitive gang enforcement. And law-enforcement gangs,” Sean Kennedy, a former public defender who teaches law and chairs the Civilian Oversight Commission, a county watchdog organization, told me. According to a report that Kennedy and his students published last year, roughly one deputy in six is in a gang. The problem is so deeply entrenched that it may exceed any sheriff’s capacity to eradicate it—if he even wanted to.

In 2020, Villanueva announced a policy of zero tolerance on “deputy cliques,” and he also supported legislation that prohibits gangs in law-enforcement agencies. But, Kennedy and other critics say, the department has made no systematic attempt to determine which of its members have tattoos, and has yet to fire anyone for connection to a deputy gang. Instead, according to people who know the department well, the Banditos are thriving under Villanueva. The East L.A. deputies’ lawsuit claims that Villanueva put an alleged Bandito in charge of the department’s communications office; he was subsequently promoted to captain of the Homicide Bureau and then made a commander of the Detective Division. Manny Navarro, who had invited Rosa Gonzalez onto the early shift, became Villanueva’s driver. (The department says any suggestion that Navarro and the commander are gang members is “false and defamatory.”)

Villanueva’s time in office has been marked by a string of scandals and lawsuits implicating him—and his wife, Vivian, a retired deputy—in abuses of power. He has responded by attacking whistle-blowers and refusing to submit to oversight. The state attorney general opened a review of Villanueva’s pattern of investigating critics and rivals. The Los Angeles County Democratic Party and the local chapter of the A.C.L.U. have called on him to resign. Andrés Dae Keun Kwon, a human-rights attorney with the A.C.L.U., told me that Villanueva, who campaigned as a reformer, “really pulled a bait and switch.”

As a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, railing against “the woke left,” Villanueva has been called the Donald Trump of L.A. This year, he is running for reëlection in a crowded field: eight opponents, all claiming that they will address deputy gangs. The primary is on June 7th.

In March, I went to see Villanueva at his office, on the eighth floor of the Hall of Justice, in downtown Los Angeles. Villanueva, who is part Polish and part Puerto Rican, has light eyes and slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a corduroy jacket, a chambray shirt, pressed jeans, no tie. He walks stiffly, with a slight limp from old injuries. (For years, he was a cycling and CrossFit buff, and he and Vivian have co-owned a gym.) We sat down in his conference room just after lunch. Leaning back in his chair, he took a swig from a bottle of Dr Pepper and told me that the era of tattooed deputies dominating stations was over. “They want to combine fifty years of department history into my three years, and now suddenly I’m responsible for something that was happening when I was in second grade,” he said.

There are no deputy gangs in his department, Villanueva insisted. “A gang is three or more people united with a common name or tattoo or any kind of thing who engage in criminal acts,” he said. According to him, the Banditos are not a gang, because it has not been demonstrated in court that they have engaged in criminal activity on the group’s behalf. “You can allege all you want, but we operate in the world of what you can prove or not prove,” he said. There is no correlation between wearing a deputy tattoo and bad behavior, he argued: “People engage in misconduct without the tattoo, and people have the tattoo and they walk on water. Because they have the tattoo, are they a gang member?”

A few weeks earlier, Villanueva had sent the county Board of Supervisors, five elected officials who control the county budget, a “cease and desist” letter, demanding that they stop using the term “deputy gangs.” “As the first fluently Spanish speaking Latino Sheriff in over a hundred years, who supervises a majority Latino workforce, I hope you can see the blatant racial inferences your conscious bias displays every time you choose to attack our Department with this derogatory term,” he wrote. On Facebook Live, a forum he uses regularly to address the public, he compared the inked deputies to a group of Covid nurses who got tattoos to commemorate their efforts to save lives.

Villanueva characterized the outcry over deputy gangs as cynical political maneuvering. “Remember, the crowd that is pushing for the deputy gang is the very same crowd that’s trying to defund the sheriff’s department,” he said. “They’re using the deputy gangs as their vehicle.” I asked him if, as the leader of the department, he would denounce the Banditos. He said, “I don’t have a group to denounce.”

East L.A. Station, a low-slung mid-century structure in Belvedere Park, faces a lake populated with ducks and migrating birds. The oldest station in the county, it is also home to the earliest known tattoo clique, the Little Red Devils.

The Red Devils started in the nineteen-seventies, when East L.A. deputies, most of them white men, called the station Fort Apache, after the John Wayne movie about a mostly white cavalry unit at war with Native Americans. It was a period marked by civil unrest and police violence. During a particularly heated protest, a journalist named Ruben Salazar was fatally struck by a tear-gas cannister fired by a deputy. Hoping to ease tensions, the sheriff ordered East L.A. deputies to adopt a “low profile,” an instruction they resented.

These ideas—East L.A. Station as an outpost in enemy territory, defended by seething, subversive deputies—soon took graphic form. The words “Fort Apache” were laid in tile on the station floor, along with the image of a helmet sitting on a boot (the lowest possible profile) and the motto “Siempre una patada en los pantalones” (“Always a kick in the pants”). According to Sean Kennedy, of the Civilian Oversight Commission, the ethos of East L.A. Station is steeped in “the us-against-them narrative.” The dynamic has persisted, even as the demographics of the station personnel have shifted from majority white to Latino.

During my meeting with Villanueva, he invited me to see his private office. It was decorated with East L.A. memorabilia. A trophy case displayed a Fort Apache mug and a statue of the boot and helmet. Villanueva’s predecessor had banned references to Fort Apache, which infuriated deputies, who saw the symbol as an expression of station pride. Villanueva seized on this conflict, and shortly before winning the election was photographed wearing a Fort Apache T-shirt. Since then, the symbol has been added to a station door, and a Fort Apache flag has flown from the flagpole outside.

As Villanueva showed me framed photographs of station gatherings and reunions, he said that the place held deep significance for him. “This is where I cut my teeth in patrol,” he told me. “There’s a lot of rich, rich history there.”

By the time he got to East L.A., in 1991, the Red Devils were in decline, and a new group, the Cavemen, had taken shape. A retired deputy who worked at the station in the nineties told me that back then the clique was relatively innocuous, a social club with a cartoonish mascot. “The Caveman was the station’s symbol,” he said. “They had a big one in the briefing room. There were a few guys with tattoos. It was a popularity contest more than anything else. Some of the guys earned tattoos because they bought beer for everyone.”

Villanueva, who wore thick glasses and had a studious demeanor, was known as a flecha derecha, a straight arrow. In his first position, at inmate reception, he helped get smoking banned in county jails. “He pushed the envelope,” a former insider told me. “He’d take stuff on, regardless of the consequences.”

According to the investigative Web site Knock LA, Villanueva once said publicly that, back in the nineties, “we were all Cavemen.” But contemporaries say he was a wannabe, definitely not tattoo material. “He’s a goober,” the retired East L.A. deputy told me. “He wasn’t hated or anything—they just kind of laughed at him.”

In the aftermath of the L.A. riots, Villanueva announced that he was running for sheriff, but didn’t pursue it. As part of the Clinton Administration’s community-policing initiatives, he became a bicycle cop, assigned to a large housing project. He saw it as an opportunity to engage. “Get out of the car,” he told me. “Talk to people—business owners, residents. Understand the context in which we enforce the law.”

In 1993, Villanueva met his wife, Vivian, at East L.A. Station. One day, he told me, he was alone on patrol: “I see a van rush into a parking lot, following another car, and then guys with beards jump out, with guns, and they’re in civvies. I pull in behind them, draw my gun, then I recognize one of them. Oh, it’s the narco crew. They’re supposed to tell us, the dispatch, but they just kind of forgot that part.”

Vivian, it turned out, was on a ride-along with the cops. A student at Cal State L.A., she had grown up a few blocks from the station and was volunteering with the narcotics unit. “She tells them, ‘Hey, who’s that nerd with the glasses? He’s going to ruin our operation,’ ” Villanueva recalled. “ ’Course, no one told her, ‘That’s your future husband.’ ” They were married in 1997. Villanueva has a son, Jared, from a previous marriage. He and Vivian don’t have children; they rescue Labradors. He calls her Sweetpea.

Vivian is small, with a tough affect and weary eyes. Online, she is a dogged supporter of victims’ rights and police causes, and posts pictures of her yellow Lab with the words “Got your six”—cop lingo for “Got your back.” Her family still lives in East L.A., and she identifies closely with the neighborhood. For a time, her Facebook profile picture was the Fort Apache logo.

According to several deputies, Vivian suffered from her husband’s failure to gain acceptance at the station. A deputy who worked with Alex Villanueva told me, “She always wanted to be East L.A.—that bravado, ‘We’re here doing the Lord’s work, everyone be damned.’ But throughout his career he never got the attention he was seeking from them. Neither did she.” (That deputy, like others I spoke to, requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.) Vivian retired from the department in 2018, never having been promoted above the rank of deputy. The former insider said, “She felt once people knew she was married to Alex she had no chance.”

As Villanueva sought to advance, he earned a doctorate in public administration, writing a dissertation that addressed underrepresentation of Latinos in the upper ranks. He told me, “The department was the ultimate good-old-boys club. It doesn’t matter how many degrees you have, how well you did on a test. I was the living proof.”

In 2005, Villanueva sued the department, claiming that he was being passed over because of his race. “I smoked every promotional exam, and I could not get promoted to save my life,” he said. The county eventually settled with him, and he made lieutenant, but he went no further. He became sheriff having never run a station or served in an executive role. He told the press, “That’s the one job they forgot to safeguard against.”

Villanueva entered politics idealistic, largely friendless, and naïve. “The Sheriff and Vivian did not have a following,” a mid-career deputy told me. “They didn’t leave a footprint of relationships with their co-workers.”

When he announced his candidacy, standing outside East L.A. Station, the former insider told me, “the joke was that there were more ducks than reporters.” The East L.A. deputies were dismissive, too. Eli Vera, a former adviser to Villanueva who is now running against him, said, “The deputies from that station and the deputies that he worked with wouldn’t even throw him a fund-raiser. They had no respect for him.”

During the campaign, Villanueva and Vivian became close to a political operative named Caren Carl Mandoyan. Known around the department as Creepy Carl, Mandoyan was a former deputy who had been fired in 2016. According to documents related to his dismissal obtained by the L.A. Times, Mandoyan admitted to being a tattooed member of the Grim Reapers, a deputy gang whose emblem is a death’s head. His tattoo was not a deciding factor in his termination, though. The case centered on domestic violence, stalking, and lying about his conduct in an internal investigation.

Mandoyan, who had been a training officer, had dated one of his former trainees. In the course of a two-year relationship, the woman alleged, he grew increasingly abusive and controlling, threatening to derail her career and that of her father, who also worked for the department. In a taped phone call, he harangued her for attending a station briefing, in defiance of his instructions.

“It’s gonna be real funny when you fuckin’ see just how much influence I have,” Mandoyan said, according to a transcript of the call. The woman said mockingly: “ ‘I’m a Reaper, they’re all afraid of me, they’ll do whatever I want them to do.’ ”

“Yeah, you’re absolutely right,” Mandoyan responded. “This is what happens to fucking disrespectful fucking bitches. You’ll see.”

In September of 2014, the woman said, Mandoyan attacked her, choking her and tearing her clothing. Twice, he attempted to break into her home. Mandoyan told a department investigator that he was trying to retrieve his backpack and keys, and then trying to apologize to her. Both times, she made videos, and can be heard yelling, “Get the fuck out of my house.”

The district attorney’s office declined to file charges against Mandoyan, citing insufficient evidence. He appealed his termination to the Civil Service Commission, an appellate body for government employees. Addressing the allegation that he used his gang status to intimidate the woman, Mandoyan’s appeal referred to his death’s-head tattoo as “innocuous skin art.” He denied any domestic abuse or stalking. The woman, he insisted, was conning the department.

In our meeting, Villanueva vehemently amplified Mandoyan’s arguments. The woman, he said, “has a prior history of making outrageous allegations not supported by facts. Kind of a—what’s that, the lacrosse players that were accused?” He was referring to the case at Duke in which three lacrosse players were accused of rape, in 2006, and later exonerated. “Kind of like that. She needs help.” Regardless, he said, “it’s not a termination case. It’s a toxic relationship between two deputies. Not suitable for each other, for sure. But, as an employer, at what point can I intervene?”

Villanueva said that the videos were missing large segments, which he had not seen. “They’re trying to execute a guy they know is innocent,” he said. “But they don’t care, because they have people like you who say, ‘Oh, my God, I saw the video, what a horrendous thing to do. That Villanueva, he’s such an anti, woman-hater, hashtag MeToo hashtag cancel culture hashtag whatever.’ They’re playing it very, very well.”

In May of 2018, the Civil Service Commission upheld the decision to fire Mandoyan. Two weeks later, Villanueva advanced from the primary to the general election, and Mandoyan, who had been working for another candidate, offered his services. That summer, he became Villanueva’s driver, accompanying him on long days of campaign events. Mandoyan was in the midst of suing over his termination, and he harped on his situation constantly. “You know how they say ‘Misery loves company’?” the former insider told me. “Carl saw himself as a victim. Sheriff saw himself as a victim, too—the thumb put on him, his career being held back by various people for various reasons. Vivian saw herself as a victim, by sheer association with Alex. I call it the triangle of misery. And they bonded over that.”

During the 2018 campaign, as Villanueva was impressing liberal Democrats with talk of reform, he also began signalling deputies that he would preside over a restoration. He talked about creating a Truth and Reconciliation Panel, through which fired deputies could have their cases reviewed. The union that represents rank-and-file deputies endorsed him, and contributed $1.3 million to his campaign. In its publication, the vice-president explained why the union supported Villanueva. One reason, he wrote, was that “Alex said tattoos are not a big deal, they are a cultural norm.”

The first fired deputy Villanueva wanted to rehire was Mandoyan. The process began quietly, on the day McDonnell conceded the election. Alicia Ault, a former chief, testified in a sworn deposition that reinstating Mandoyan was Villanueva’s “No. 1 priority.” She believed that her job depended on it, but, she said, she felt that it was unethical. Aside from Mandoyan’s misconduct, he was technically ineligible, because more than two years had passed since his termination. Uncertain how to extricate herself from the situation, Ault retired.

Mandoyan boasted about manipulating Villanueva by exploiting his sense of loyalty and making himself pathetic. “He’d say, ‘It’s better if I’m not around. Better if I go away and no one ever hears from me again,’ ” the deputy who worked with Villanueva told me. At the same time, he played to Villanueva’s insecurities. The former insider said, “Carl made Alex believe, ‘You’re a rock star, you’re the sheriff, you can do whatever you want. You can wave your magic wand and I’ll have my job back.’ ”

Several former Villanueva advisers told me that they had been deeply uncomfortable with Mandoyan’s influence, and they were aghast when Villanueva invited him to the swearing-in, to help pin on his new insignia. “We’re, like, what?” Eli Vera, the former Villanueva adviser who’s now running against him, told me. “Anybody knows that’s a horrible look. What message are you sending?” Vera went on, “He said, ‘Well, he should be exonerated—there’s nothing here.’ I remember telling him specifically, ‘Alex, you’ve just heard his side of the story. None of us has read the case. We have no idea what’s in this investigation.’ ” At the ceremony, Mandoyan held the box for the insignia, while others pinned them on.

As the Truth and Reconciliation Panel got under way, Mandoyan became the test case. According to Vera, who participated, it was a sloppy process, whose rules were rewritten to insure the outcome Villanueva wanted.

Mandoyan was reinstated, with back pay, in December, 2018. He had his badge and his gun back, and soon a job in logistics, but his main role, insiders say, was helping the Villanuevas adjust to a life in politics. Mandoyan started calling Vivian the First Lady and the Queen. According to the deputy who worked with Villanueva, Alex and Vivian would binge-watch “House of Cards” and “Designated Survivor” with Mandoyan. “They took a lot from those shows,” he said. “They learned how to be political, how ruthless politics are. Their whole mind-set was, Wow, look at how the Kevin Spacey character was able to coördinate certain things and still come out on top.”

Some who once supported Villanueva trace his present troubles to Mandoyan. The former insider said, “He may have had a little of this evil in him before, but Carl has ruined him.”

The Banditos emerged at East L.A. Station some twenty years ago. If the Caveman symbol had fostered camaraderie, the new clique thrived on exclusion and intimidation. Recalling the first time he saw the Bandito tattoo, the retired East L.A. deputy said, “I thought, Dude, that looks like shit—that looks like a prison tattoo. I didn’t want to be associated with it.” In the time of the Cavemen, deputy nicknames were lighthearted, he said; under the Banditos, they seemed menacing, hinting at aggressive or illegal behavior.

By the time Villanueva was elected, in 2018, the station was embroiled in a civil war, between the Banditos and the “rats” who resisted them. According to the lawsuit brought by eight deputies and the A.C.L.U., the station’s shot-callers conducted a campaign of bullying and harassment against deputies they didn’t consider “East L.A. material.”

Rafael Munoz, the deputy Rosa Gonzalez was warned about, had allegedly become the Banditos’ top shot-caller. He was aided by Gregory Rodriguez, who, in 2016, was tried for perjury and filing a false police report. The jury deadlocked and the case was dismissed; Rodriguez, who had been suspended, returned to work. He and Munoz had a history—they’d been in a shooting together in 2013—and they shared a reputation for unruly behavior. A county report says that they each had “numerous suspensions” for violating department policies. (A lawyer representing Munoz and Rodriguez acknowledged that the two have Bandito tattoos, but said that they were marks of professional pride, not of gang membership.)

One of the plaintiffs in the suit was a training officer named Benjamin Zaredini. A former Bandito prospect, he had become disillusioned and would no longer take orders. He alleges that members of the gang routinely withheld backup, endangering his life. Finally, the lawsuit says, Zaredini complained to a lieutenant, who recommended an investigation, but it was never carried out. The hazing included confrontations of noncompliant deputies behind the station or at a nearby bar. The suit claims that the Banditos were focussed on ousting Zaredini’s trainee, Alfred Gonzalez. (He’s not related to Rosa.)

In September, 2018, the East L.A. deputies threw a party at Kennedy Hall, a venue near the station, to celebrate deputies who had finished training. The Villanuevas made an appearance, and Alex delivered his campaign reassurance: “Help is on the way.”

After the Villanuevas left, the Banditos started picking on Gonzalez, calling him a “pussy” and a “rat.” In what the lawsuit characterizes as a premeditated gang assault, Rodriguez confronted him in the parking lot, at around 3:30 A.M., after the hall had closed. When other deputies tried to intervene, Munoz body-slammed Gonzalez, the lawsuit says. A melee ensued, with Munoz knocking another deputy he disliked to the ground and pummelling him in the face. When the deputy got to his feet, Rodriguez struck him again, knocking him unconscious, and then began kicking him, while others cheered or stood by. At one point, Rodriguez allegedly reached for his gun. According to the lawsuit, “a female deputy yelled at G-Rod to stop, ‘Are you serious?! You just got your job back!’ ”

In the months that followed, the Banditos’ intimidation campaign continued, the lawsuit says. Dead rats were left outside Zaredini’s house, and the ammunition was removed from his shotgun. During the same period, administrative retaliation began, the suit maintains; Zaredini got a seven-day suspension for an unsubstantiated complaint that he had used a homophobic slur against another deputy. He was also denied an earned promotion to sergeant. Munoz and Rodriguez, conversely, were put on paid leave. (Their lawyer disputed the plaintiffs’ claims of harassment and bullying, and said that their descriptions of the brawl were “fabrications.”)

When Villanueva took office, two months after the incident at Kennedy Hall, he made a show of reforming East L.A. Station. On his first day, he replaced the captain, telling the L.A. Times that the Banditos “ran roughshod” over him. But, according to Eli Vera, Villanueva’s first idea was to bring Daniel (Batman) Batanero—an alleged founder of the Banditos, whom the Sheriff had served with at East L.A.—out of retirement, advance him two ranks, and make him station captain. When advisers dissuaded him, they say, he instead put Batanero in charge of his personal security. (The department denied that Batanero led the security team, and said that when he served with Villanueva “there was no talk of Banditos.”)

At a press conference in the spring of 2019, Villanueva addressed misbehavior at the station, saying, “We’re taking a very aggressive role in tamping this down.” He went on to fire the shot-callers who had instigated the violence at Kennedy Hall, including Munoz and Rodriguez. In Facebook Live addresses, he enumerated reforms that he had made, including the transfers of Banditos and those who had failed to stand up to them—thirty-six deputies in all.

But, in a sworn deposition, Ernie Chavez, the new station captain, said that these were “general transfers,” unconnected to any investigation of the Banditos. Vera, who was part of the discussions, told me that the transfers were not a radical purge; the deputies moved voluntarily or were promoted. “How did we move thirty-six people without a grievance?” Vera said. “ ’Cause they all agreed to it.”

To rid East L.A. Station of Banditos, the department would have needed to know who belonged to the gang—which, a spokesperson told me recently, it was largely unable to do. “It is very difficult for anyone, including the Sheriff, to know who members of these alleged ‘secret societies’ are, since they are not open about their group membership,” the spokesperson explained. “We are prohibited by the law from compelling deputies to show or identify any personal markings without probable cause.” But the Kennedy Hall incident had provided an unusual opportunity. Within hours of the fight, an internal criminal investigation was launched. The first interview took place in the hospital, where one of the deputies who had been beaten was recovering.

At the beginning, the investigators seemed intent on gathering information about the Banditos. In mid-November, 2018, the lead investigator questioned a deputy. Had she seen a Bandito tattoo? Were Banditos sexually harassing women? Were Munoz and Rodriguez Banditos? The deputy claimed ignorance on all counts, saying that the women at the station stayed out of it.

As the inquiry continued, and Villanueva was sworn in as sheriff, the investigators seemed to lose interest in the Banditos. According to a county report, they identified seventy-three witnesses, but they didn’t compel testimony, and twenty-seven, including some alleged Banditos, declined to participate. In only one instance did investigators ask about the Banditos without the witness bringing it up first. The district attorney, guided by the internal investigation, decided not to file charges, citing the drunkenness of the brawlers and a lack of video footage, among other factors.

Last week, at a public hearing, the Civilian Oversight Commission presented new evidence to suggest that the investigators’ diminishing focus on the Banditos was directed from above. (Villanueva denies giving any orders that discouraged investigation.) Throughout the inquiry, the lead investigator kept a detailed log of his work. While votes in the election for sheriff were still being counted, in early November, he wrote that he was told to ask witnesses “additional questions about subcultures at East LA.” In a deposition for the case of the eight deputies, parts of which were read into evidence at the hearing, the investigator said that, after Villanueva’s victory, his supervisor had mentioned needing to “check with the sheriff” about the Banditos inquiry. Ten days later, the investigator noted a new instruction from his supervisor: “I do not need to ask about subculture groups at ELA Station.” He explained in his deposition, “We’re a paramilitary organization. He gives me an order; I follow through.”

Villanueva has already seen a sheriff taken down over protecting problematic deputies. In 2014, Lee Baca resigned, after sixteen years in office, and was subsequently charged in a federal obstruction case. He and his under-sheriff, Paul Tanaka, had conspired to block the F.B.I. from investigating deputy abuses and gang behavior in the county jails. In the process, they had confronted the lead agent at her home and threatened her with arrest. Baca was given a sentence of three years, Tanaka five. During Tanaka’s trial, he revealed that he had a tattoo associated with the Vikings, a deputy clique once described by a federal judge as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang.”

In response, the Board of Supervisors created the Office of the Inspector General to “promote constitutional policing and the fair and impartial administration of justice.” In late February, I met with Max Huntsman, a career public-corruption prosecutor, who has served as inspector general since the role’s inception. Huntsman is lanky, with sharp blue eyes and a pair of fierce dachshunds. He told me that his office is intended to be an “early-warning system” if the sheriff’s department is going out of control. In Huntsman’s view, it is.

When Villanueva reinstated Carl Mandoyan, the Board of Supervisors claimed that he’d exceeded his authority, and the county sued him. In the course of a legal battle that has cost taxpayers more than three million dollars, Mandoyan lost his job again. He is contesting the decision; meanwhile, a state filing from 2021 lists him as the C.F.O. of a cannabis business.

The Mandoyan affair turned Villanueva into an enemy of the board, and of anyone he sees as doing its bidding. He has refused to coöperate with the Civilian Oversight Commission. Huntsman says that, from his first inquiries about deputy gangs and about Mandoyan’s rehiring, Villanueva has rebuffed and thwarted him. The inspector general is supposed to have access to all sheriff’s department documents, but he says that Villanueva has restricted his viewing of personnel records. Huntsman was forced to sue Villanueva to get him to answer questions about deputy gangs under oath. “If you have the military in control, and you don’t have civilian control of them, you’ve got a problem,” Huntsman told me. “We’ve got a problem.” The A.C.L.U. lawyer Andrés Dae Keun Kwon said, of Villanueva, “We do think he’s worse than Baca, and that’s saying something. There’s an imminent threat to civil liberties.”

Villanueva has assembled his own team of special investigators, directed by his under-sheriff, Timothy Murakami. A veteran of East L.A. Station, Murakami has been said to have a Caveman tattoo, which he denies. According to a deputy who saw Murakami’s tattoo, this is technically true: the tattoo, now inked over, was of a Red Devil. (The department says that Murakami does not belong to any deputy gang.) The team also includes a former homicide detective who, the L.A. Times reported, was temporarily banned from county jails for sneaking contraband to an inmate while working on an investigation for the D.A.’s office. Officially named the Civil Rights and Public Integrity Detail, the team is colloquially known as Villanueva’s secret police. Though the department says that Villanueva is “walled off” from the unit, it has opened multiple investigations of his perceived enemies, starting with Huntsman.

In response to Villanueva’s public complaint that Mandoyan had been treated unfairly, Huntsman produced a report analyzing the attempts to return him to the department. Before publishing it, Huntsman met with Villanueva to share a draft. “He used that meeting to say, ‘Max, you’re a political hack, you’re an attack dog for the board—if you release that report there will be consequences,’ ” Huntsman told me. “And after I did release it is when he publicly announced that I was under criminal investigation and sent a letter to the board asking that I be removed.” Officially, Villanueva accused Huntsman of illegally accessing his personnel files before he took office. No charges have been filed against Huntsman, and he was not removed. But, under the California penal code, intimidating a public officer into an official act would constitute extortion. Huntsman told me, “The system is not designed to deal with the head of law enforcement committing a crime.” (The department did not comment, except to note that the case has been passed on to the state attorney general.)

Villanueva has started referring to Huntsman, insinuatingly, by his birth name, Max-Gustaf Huntsman. In April, he announced that he had information that Huntsman is a Holocaust denier—an unfounded accusation that appeared connected to Huntsman’s father, a German, who did not raise him.

Villanueva has also targeted other public officials, searching the offices of a domestic-violence-prevention nonprofit, whose executive director served on the Civilian Oversight Commission, and pushing for an inquiry into Sachi Hamai, the county C.E.O., to determine if her pro-bono service on the board of the local United Way had been a conflict of interest, because the organization backed a county ballot initiative to fund social services. She filed a defamation claim, and won a settlement that included money for personal security.

Failing to eradicate the deputy gangs creates financial liability for the county. Since 1990, according to the Office of the Inspector General, settlements involving deputies with gang affiliations have cost taxpayers at least fifty-four million dollars. There may also be a less visible cost. Sean Kennedy, of the Civilian Oversight Commission, told me that deputy gangs threaten the integrity of the criminal courts. “If nearly twenty per cent of the department is gang-affiliated, that means that every day there are investigating officers and gang experts testifying in L.A. Superior Court against accused people who are gang members,” he said. “And yet no one is telling the accused or the public defender representing them that this person testifying is known to be, or believed to be by the department, a Bandito.” When he was in private practice, Kennedy represented at-risk juveniles with “gang enhancement” charges, which can add ten to fifteen years to a sentence for anyone convicted of committing a crime while in a gang. Kennedy’s teen-age clients pointed out the absurdity of the situation, he said: “They’d be, like, ‘The gang expert against me is in a gang himself!’ ”

Last year, the mid-career deputy told me, Carl Mandoyan approached her as she was coming due for a promotion to explain how she could gain advancement. Though he was no longer employed there, he was lingering around the sheriff’s department, trading on his relationship with the Villanuevas. “He said I needed to call Vivian, take her to lunch, buy her a nice gift, and ask her for career advice,” she said. “He told me about other people getting her expensive tequila, ’cause she likes tequila, and also getting her personalized gifts about their dog, Alvin, that had died—shadow boxes with the dog’s picture and all kinds of memorabilia.” (Mandoyan’s lawyer says that he has not been involved with the department since he was removed in 2019, and claimed that complaints about him were motivated by professional rivalries, adding, “There should be no doubt, Carl Mandoyan was seen as a threat by some.”)

In a recent story, the L.A. Times described Vivian as a power broker, working outside traditional channels to influence transfers and promotions. Several sources with direct knowledge of the situation told me that she makes critical personnel decisions, according to her sense of political expediency and personal loyalty.

The deputy who worked with Villanueva said that in the early days of the administration a promotion list was sent out to the department, according to protocol. “Alex was livid,” the deputy told me. “He said, ‘From now on, every list has to come through me.’ We soon realized that it was something that had to be taken home and vetted, and Carl was part of that discussion.” At times, the deputy said, these informal consultations could upend normal decision-making: “You can have the top five people in the department in the room, and they’ll convince him one way, and then he goes home and he’ll come back and completely reverse it.” Before long, the deputy said, Villanueva started calling Vivian from meetings and giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down based on her opinion: “He’d say, ‘Hey, babe, we’re talking about this.’ You could hear her voice on the phone.”

The deputy who worked with Villanueva said that he tried to protect the Sheriff from incriminating himself. “They didn’t want to hear it,” he said. “They were the rainmakers and they wanted to be involved in every decision.” When Vivian was angry at someone, the deputy said, she’d demand that Alex “send them to Siberia!” The deputy was tasked with explaining the constraints. “I’d say, ‘Ma’am, I get you’re upset, but we’re not going to do that,’ ” he told me. “She finally said, ‘Get him out of here.’ ” The deputy was removed from his position.

At some point, the East L.A. deputies figured out that Vivian was accessible. “She started building her network,” the mid-career deputy told me. “People associated with East L.A. have gotten promotions multiple times.” The deputy who worked with Villanueva said, “I call it the secret formula—get an introduction from someone in the inner circle, text her, and tell her your sob story.” The arrangement helps Vivian advance loyalists. According to the former insider, Vivian boasts, “I’ve got spies everywhere,” keeping tabs on those who might undermine her husband.

In a recent civil complaint about retaliation and workplace harassment, a recruit-training officer alleges that, when she dismissed an unqualified friend of Vivian’s, Vivian verbally abused her and sullied her reputation, saying, “I will go off on that bitch.” (The department disputes this account, and denies that Vivian has improper influence, noting, “Her input is always welcomed and taken from the perspective of a devoted wife supporting her husband in defending their community.”)

One particular friend of Vivian’s, Carrie Robles-Placencia, seems to have had her career saved by her proximity to power. One evening in November of 2017, Robles-Placencia, a trainee at East L.A. Station who reportedly had previously worked under Vivian, was driving a department S.U.V. to a call. Without turning on her siren, she ran a red light and collided with another car. In the resulting multi-car accident, Robles-Placencia accelerated onto the sidewalk, where she struck and killed two children, aged seven and nine, who were standing with their mother.

The L.A.P.D., which responded to the accident, found Robles-Placencia at fault, and the county has paid out more than $22 million in settlements. But the district attorney declined to file criminal charges, and Robles-Placencia has reportedly received no discipline. After Villanueva took office, he made her part of his Executive Projects Team, a group, made up largely of Vivian’s friends, that plans town-hall meetings and other events. Robles-Placencia still drives a county car and has often been seen with Vivian, whom she calls Mom.

Some deputies are discouraged by what they see as the corruption of Villanueva’s administration. The sheriff’s department is not “a criminal organization,” the retired East L.A. deputy said. “I’m not a crook. And it does a disservice to me and all the other good men and women. At East L.A., you’ve got a group of people there who need to be rooted out, and he’s an executive who won’t do it.”

At the recent Civilian Oversight Commission hearing, a current deputy from East L.A. testified under oath that the Banditos continue to disrupt the operations of the station. Fearing retribution, the witness called in, using voice alteration. Ten deputies, the witness said, had received Bandito tattoos eighteen months ago. Unprofessional and illegal behavior was going unpunished: Banditos and their associates loosened lug nuts on unpopular deputies’ vehicles; one associate pointed a gun at another deputy’s head in the locker room. After the hearing, Villanueva released a statement describing talk of deputy gangs as a “racist dog whistle” and the hearing as a “kangaroo court.”

At this point, Villanueva’s critics say, he is no longer an outsider to gang culture. “His conduct protects the gang, and in that sense he now has a gang affiliation,” Huntsman told me. “Anybody who believes in democracy or the rule of law should be very scared. Having a shadow government that actually controls what happens on the street can cause all the laws you write to have no impact on whether you get shot dead.”

Not long ago, I went to a rally outside Villanueva’s office at the Hall of Justice—or, as the organizers of the event call it, the Hall of Injustice. Operating under the banner of the Check the Sheriff Coalition, the activists were calling on the Board of Supervisors to introduce an amendment to the county charter that would allow them to impeach Villanueva. People filled the sidewalk, wearing buttons with slogans like “Cancel the Sheriff” and “Google LASD gangs.”

One woman, slight and pale, with neat center-parted hair, wore a jacket with large lettering on the back that read “Fuck the East L.A. Sheriff’s Department.” As she approached the microphone, she was introduced as Stephanie Luna.

“I am the aunt of Anthony Vargas, who was murdered in August of 2018,” she said. “My nephew was murdered by two deputies that were chasing ink, from the East L.A. sheriff’s station.”

The deputies, looking for an armed robber, had come across Vargas, who was twenty-one, walking through the Nueva Maravilla housing community. He ran away, stumbling; when they tackled him, they said, he refused to show his hands. One of the deputies said he saw a gun in Vargas’s hand and thought that he was about to kill them. They shot him twelve times in the back and the head, and once in the arm. A semi-automatic handgun was reported found under Vargas’s body. According to the district attorney, who ruled the shooting lawful, “the gun was registered to an unknown party in the state of Arizona.” DNA analysis of the gun was inconclusive: there were fragments from two men, one of whom could have been, but was not definitely, Vargas. The gun, which the deputies maintained he’d held in his hand, had no prints on it.

At the rally Luna said, “Villanueva has failed, he has failed miserably, to hold the two deputies that murdered my nephew accountable.” Afterward, she explained to me what she thought had happened. “We had begun looking up how many settlements the county had paid out to families within the East L.A. community for similar shootings like what happened to Anthony—kid shot in the back, kid running,” she said. “And we had pieced it together that maybe Anthony was killed in a deputy-gang initiation.”

In the CBS exposé, the whistle-blowers from East L.A. Station confirmed that the deputies who killed Vargas were aspiring Banditos, and said that there are methods for making shootings appear justified. “There’s been multiple occasions where they say, ‘Hey, we got a guy that’s got a gun and he’s running from us,” one says. “In reality, that person never had a gun. And they would say, ‘Oh, it was a phantom gun.’ It was something that really wasn’t there.”

Luna believes that the deputies planted the gun on her nephew. “Banditos are known to do that out of East L.A.,” she said. “They go around confiscating guns from people. . . . They’re known to take them to the station and clean them so they have weapons to plant on individuals that they’re shooting and killing. The fact that this gun has no fingerprints on it and has none of Anthony’s blood on it, that speaks for itself.” Lisa Vargas, Anthony’s mother, has filed a civil claim against the county for his death. The two deputies, Luna said, have been denied qualified immunity. “That will allow us to have a day in court with them,” she said. (The two deputies could not be reached for comment. They have denied any connection with the Banditos.)

Luna told me that she continued to encounter the deputies on the street. “We see them at the local 7-Eleven when we take the kids for slushies,” she said. “We see them at the hamburger stand. We see them every day.” Luna, who lives a few blocks from the station, said that officers had pulled into the driveway and waved to her kids. “I don’t understand how they’re still employed,” she said. “I don’t understand how they’re able to intimidate my family when we’re in pending litigation.”

A week later, I went to East L.A. to see another grieving family, Leah Garcia and her daughters Jaylene and Janae, who are twenty-four and seventeen. We met on the sunbaked median of a major avenue, where, in June of 2019, Garcia’s son Paul Rea was shot and killed during a traffic stop. Garcia was wearing a T-shirt that said “Warriors 4 Our Children.” On her neck was a fresh tattoo that read “Forever my son Paulie.” By the curb was a small shrine: a row of saint’s candles, a deflated foil balloon, and some carnations Garcia had placed there the night before. “This is very sacred to me,” she said. “This is where he took his last breath.”

On the night of Rea’s death, Garcia told me, he was in the passenger seat of a friend’s Audi when they were stopped by a deputy named Hector Saavedra-Soto and his partner, for failing to observe a stop sign. Across the street, at a pale-yellow stucco house, I could see a security camera. It had captured footage of Rea trying to run away, while Saavedra-Soto held him. Seconds later, there were muzzle flashes, as Saavedra-Soto fired his gun.

Rea was eighteen, about five feet two and a hundred and fifteen pounds. In a statement to the Homicide Bureau, Saavedra-Soto said that Rea punched him in the head, causing him to black out briefly. As he struggled to keep Rea from running, he said, he felt a weapon in his waistband.

Saavedra-Soto told the homicide investigator that, in the tussle, Rea turned, reaching for his waistband. “He looked at me, and that look in his eyes. I could just tell,” he said. “He was gonna fucking kill me.” The district attorney, while conceding that much of this was not visible in the footage, decided that the shooting was justified.

In testimony, Saavedra-Soto gave a pointed description of grasping a gun in Rea’s waistband. “The grip was distinct,” he said. “It was a lot of detail into it. There’s a lot—it’s like a thick grip.” According to the police report, though, investigators found the weapon not in Rea’s waistband but tucked into his pants cuff. There were no fingerprints—neither Rea’s nor Saavedra-Soto’s—on it. Rea’s family believes that someone planted the gun.

According to the lawsuit brought by the eight East L.A. deputies, Saavedra-Soto was a protégé of Rafael Munoz, the station’s top shot-caller. The suit refers to the two men cruising the neighborhood, looking for civilians to beat. (Their lawyer denied this.) By 2019, when Saavedra-Soto killed Rea, he may have had an even greater measure of protection. Munoz’s training officer from East L.A. Station back in the nineties, Alex Villanueva, had become sheriff.

Saavedra-Soto is back on patrol in East L.A. “They don’t have no heart out here,” Jaylene said. “When have you heard them getting any discipline? They could get terminated, but what’s Villanueva gonna do? Rehire them!”

Jaylene believes that Saavedra-Soto killed her brother to earn a Bandito tattoo. Saavedra-Soto’s lawyer denies this, and says that he has no affiliation with the gang. Jaylene wants proof. “What we’re trying to get in court is for us to see, does he have any tattoos?” she said. “Just like they would if they’re putting a gang enhancement on a gang member in court. They’re going to ask to see that damn tattoo. So we need the tattoo. Just like those guys would hold anybody else accountable, they need to hold him accountable.”

In Villanueva’s office, I asked if he still considered himself a progressive. He said, “I didn’t change. I think the progressive wing of the Democratic Party changed, and they rebranded themselves as social-justice warriors.” The Party decided not to endorse anyone for sheriff in the forthcoming election; Villanueva didn’t even make it to its second round.

With homelessness, homicides, and armed robberies on the rise, he is betting that the electorate will vote their anxieties. In a recent campaign ad, he presents an image of Los Angelenos oblivious of the dystopia they are living in—a woman in a halter top and cutoffs rollerblading past a tent encampment, a mother and child playing with hypodermic needles in a sandbox. “I fear for my home’s future,” Villanueva says in a voice-over. “The California Dream has turned to a nightmare.”

In recent weeks, Villanueva has faced a new crisis. In late March, the L.A. Times published a video showing a deputy at a county courthouse kneeling on an inmate’s neck for more than three minutes, after the inmate started a physical altercation. (The deputy, Douglas Johnson, who could not be reached for comment, was previously investigated for taking and sharing photographs of Kobe Bryant’s remains after his helicopter crashed.) The kneeling incident had taken place the previous March—two days into the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd, using the same method. The inmate wasn’t seriously injured, but the Times reported that Villanueva’s administration, fearing an outcry, had orchestrated a coverup.

Since the leak, a series of whistle-blowers have come forward. According to a spate of new claims, a commander saw the video shortly after the event and grew concerned. He shared it with the assistant sheriff, Robin Limon, who was also disturbed. She alleges that, five days after the incident, she showed the video to Villanueva, who bemoaned the timing, saying, “We do not need bad media.” He said he would “handle the matter.” But, Limon maintains, he did not release the video or start an inquiry, nor did he seek to charge the inmate, which could have opened the video to discovery.

Months later, according to the claims, a captain came upon the video, and was surprised to learn that it had never been turned over to the department’s internal criminal investigators. Finally, in November, 2021, they began looking into the case; the district attorney is currently reviewing it.

When the video was leaked this spring, Villanueva moved to defend himself. He claimed that he had seen the footage last November and had immediately called for a criminal investigation. Under pressure to explain the delay, he placed blame elsewhere. He announced that he was changing out his senior command, including Limon, who held the third-highest rank in the department. She is suing for retaliation. Max Huntsman, the inspector general, has issued a subpoena, seeking all documentation of the event and communication surrounding it.

Villanueva denied the allegations of a coverup, and, citing a grand political conspiracy, threatened to investigate his opponent Eli Vera, Huntsman, and the L.A. Times reporter, Alene Tchekmedyian. To many observers both inside and outside the department, the scramble to contain the crisis is reminiscent of the Baca and Tanaka affair, nearly a decade ago.

The former insider said, “We’re at 2014 all over again”—the moment that Baca’s scheme to obstruct the F.B.I. probe of deputies’ mistreatment of inmates was exposed. “I think Alex is going to be forced to resign. But his pride is not going to allow him to.”

Rosa Gonzalez, who is still employed by the sheriff’s department, sees a different peril ahead. Her attorney said that she worries about further retaliation, and believes she will never stop being victimized by the Banditos. She has never felt more vulnerable. If Villanueva gets reëlected, she fears, the Banditos will have won.