Popular L.A. sheriff touted reforms. Then a young FBI agent showed up

He promised transparency, but stories of corruption persisted

- By Christopher Goffard

SHERIFF LEE BACA addresses allegations of jail misconduct at a Monterey Park news conference in 2013.

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.

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.