Paul Tanaka is found guilty of corruption charges

A federal jury on Wednesday found Paul Tanaka, the former second-in-command of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department guilty of corruption charges.

Jurors began deliberating Monday afteoon.

The trial in a downtown Los Angeles federal courtroom lasted 10 days.

U.S. District Court Judge Percy Anderson will determine Tanaka’s sentence. The maximum penalty for conspiracy and obstruction of justice convictions is 15 years in federal prison.

Nine other Sheriff’s Department officials, including former Sheriff Lee Baca, have pleaded guilty or been convicted in the corruption scheme. Tanaka is the highest-ranking executive to be tried. He was indicted in May along with a former captain, who pleaded guilty to lying on the witness stand.

Baca pleaded guilty in February to lying to federal investigators during an interview. He will be sentenced next month.

•RELATED STORY: Paul Tanaka trial gives a peek inside LA sheriff’s culture of corruption

Prosecutors said Tanaka led a group of co-conspirators who conspired to thwart a federal investigation into civil rights violations in county jails. Tanaka and the others leaed of the investigation once they discovered a cell phone that was smuggled into the Men’s Central Jail was used to call the FBI’s civil rights division office. An undercover FBI agent bribed a deputy to smuggle the phone to inmate, Anthony Brown, who was an informant. Prosecutors said deputies hid Brown from the FBI, tampered with witnesses by telling deputies not to cooperate with federal investigators and threatened to arrest an FBI special agent.

Assistant U.S. Attoey Brandon Fox said the scheme was dubbed “Operation Pandora’s Box” because if the allegations of deputy abuse and corruption were revealed through the investigation, Pandora’s Box would be opened and the “evils” that were going on inside the jail would be revealed.

Fox called two dozen witnesses to testify against Tanaka, many were former Sheriff’s Department employees. He showed the jury dozens of emails, Sheriff’s Department memos, summaries of phone records and played audio and video recordings, including surveillance footage of two sergeants confronting and threatening an FBI special agent at her home.

•RELATED STORY: Paul Tanaka admits he has tattoo associated with violent deputy gang

Several retired Sheriff’s Department officials testified that they waed Tanaka years ago about problems with deputies using excessive force inside the jails. Former Men’s Central Jail Capt. John Clark had come up with a plan to rotate assignments for deputies to break up deputy cliques. That plan, was vetoed by Tanaka. Some testified that they were soon transferred from their positions once they crossed Tanaka.

Fox referred to these men as the “reformers.”

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Tanaka’s attoey H. Dean Steward told the jury during closing arguments that these men were “Caucasians” who “seemed angry” and that they were jealous of Tanaka’s rise through the ranks.

Fox said the case had nothing to do with race.

Fox said Tanaka fostered a corrupt culture inside the jails and protected deputies who misbehaved. Once Tanaka leaed that deputies were abusing inmates, instead of recommending those deputies be investigated, Tanaka ordered an investigation of the FBI agents who were trying to uncover illegal behavior, Fox said in his closing argument.

Tanaka took the stand for nearly two days in his own defense.

Under questioning from his attoey, he denied his involvement and said he held himself and deputies he supervised to a high code of conduct.

During the prosecution’s cross-examination, which at times became tense, Tanaka admitted he has a tattoo associated with a deputy gang that a federal judge called a “neo-nazi, white supremacist gang.”

Tanaka, who was a sergeant at the Sheriff’s Department’s patrol station in Lynwood from 1987 to 1991, said the tattoo of a Viking merely represented the mascot of the station when the deputies played intramural sports.

“I was not a Viking in the sense that you are trying to infer,” Tanaka told Fox on Monday.

Tanaka’s attoeys wanted Baca to testify. They were hoping to show the jury that the former sheriff admitted some guilt in the case. Baca’s attoey told Tanaka’s lawyers that the former sheriff would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if he was called to testify.

The judge denied the defense’s request to compel Baca to testify and grant him immunity. The defense also tried to admit some of Baca’s statements to investigators into evidence, a request the judge also denied.

In his closing argument to the jury, Steward pointed to Baca as the mastermind.

“The driving force in everything that you’ve seen was Leroy Baca, not Paul Tanaka,” Steward said.

One witness was a convicted as a co-conspirator in the case, former Deputy Mickey Manzo. Manzo was compelled to testify and received limited immunity. He said that Tanaka was “visibly upset” when he leaed the FBI was investigating the Sheriff’s Department.

“He said, ‘Those motherf------. Who do they think they are?” Manzo testified, saying that Tanaka was referring to the FBI.

Manzo said that Baca gave orders and said that “Everything that came out of the investigation would be run through Mr. Tanaka.”

Jurors heard from another witness, Tara Adams, a former deputy sheriff in the records bureau at the Inmate Reception Center, which processes inmates into the county jails, who was ordered by deputies to remove inmate Brown from the department’s computer system.

When Adams told the deputies Brown did not have the proper paperwork to be released from the system, she said the deputies told her that they had orders from Tanaka.

Fox played jurors a recording of a phone call that an FBI supervisor made to one of the sergeants who approached FBI Special Agent Leah Marx outside her home.

The supervisor asked what the charges were against Marx.

“You’re going to have to speak to the undersheriff and that’s Paul Tanaka,” Sgt. Maricela Long told Marx’s supervisor, according to the audio recording of a phone call.

Anderson has overseen all of the trials of deputies convicted in the corruption scheme. In 2014, Anderson sentenced two lieutenants, two sergeants and three deputies to federal prison terms ranging from 18 months to three-and-a-half years. The defendants have appealed their sentences.

Baca, who was sheriff for 15 years, stepped down in 2014, a month after 18 of his deputies were arrested as a result of the FBI’s probe.

Baca promoted Tanaka to undersheriff in 2011. Tanaka retired in 2013.

Tanaka, who has been the mayor of Gardena since 2005, ran for sheriff in 2014. Sheriff Jim McDoell, then Long Beach police chief, handily defeated Tanaka, who all but abandoned his campaign.