Former Sheriff Villanueva agrees to testify in deputy gangs case
Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has agreed to testify before a civilian oversight panel tasked with investigating deputy gangs operating within the Sheriff’s Department, ending, for now, a years-long, back-and-forth court battle over whether the sheriff would be compelled to appear.
In a Dec. 13 letter to the county’s Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, an attorney for Villanueva said he was “very willing to testify before the COC” and would appear at their next meeting on Jan. 12.
“Former Sheriff Villanueva will attend … the COC meeting and answer any questions you have under oath,” wrote Linda Miller Savitt, an attorney for Villanueva.
Neither Savitt nor Villaneuva immediately responded to requests for comment about the letter.
That letter came less than a week after Superior Court Judge Anne Richardson granted L.A. County’s petition asking her to order both Villanueva and his former second-in-command, former undersheriff Tim Murakami, to explain why they would not answer the Civilian Oversight Commission’s subpoenas.
Richardson scheduled a hearing for Jan. 23 in her Downtown L.A. courtroom.
After receiving Villanueva’s letter, county attorneys asked Richardson to delay the hearing for the former sheriff. But they also asked the judge to keep the hearing on the calendar for Murakami, who as of Wednesday had still not responded to the commission’s subpoena.
“Former Sheriff Villanueva has agreed to appear and testify before the COC … the County will report to the Court after [the meeting] whether former Sheriff Villanueva complied fully and completely with the COC’s subpoenas,” county attorneys wrote to Richardson. “The County respectfully requests that the Court leave on calendar the show cause hearing … for Respondent Timothy K. Murakami.”
Savitt represents both Villanueva and Murakami. In 2022, Murakami refused to answer a commission subpoena stating in a letter to the court that he had “a medical issue precluding him from testifying.”
Murakami claimed in the same letter that security at the venue for the hearing, Loyola Law School, was “inadequate” and would put his “personal safety at issue.”
For years, the Civilian Oversight Commission has attempted to get Villanueva and Murakami to testify about their knowledge of secretive gangs of deputies working out of Sheriff’s stations and jail facilities.
The commission lost a previous attempt in September when the California 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled L.A. County attorneys did not follow Measure R’s two-step process for compelling Sheriff’s Department officials to testify. Measure R was the voter-backed 2020 ordinance giving the commission subpoena power over the Sheriff’s Department.
Over several decades, the gangs — with monikers like “the Banditos,” “the Executioners” and “the Cavemen” — have been accused of brutalizing inmates, arrestees and other deputies.
The commission launched its current investigation after a 2018 report of a chaotic brawl at Kennedy Hall, a banquet hall in East L.A., in which members of the Banditos allegedly targeted deputies who were not part of the gang.
That investigation peaked with a series of hearings held earlier this year at Loyola Law School, in which the commission questioned Sheriff’s commanders and deputies on the record over their knowledge of the culture of gangs in the department and violent acts their members were accused of committing.
But according to the petition to Judge Richardson, commissioners were stymied in getting to the bottom of both the Kennedy Hall fight and the internal investigations that followed when Villaneuva and Murakami refused to testify.
The commission accused Villanueva of interfering with Sheriff’s Department investigations into the Kennedy Hall incident.
“Villanueva’s testimony is necessary … because in 2018 he apparently barred the Department’s internal criminal investigators from questioning witnesses about what role a suspected deputy gang known as the ‘Banditos’ played in brutal deputy-on-deputy assaults at a Department party,” county attorneys wrote in the petition.
The commission learned of the alleged interference during testimony by Matthew Burson, a former division chief with the Sheriff’s Department. Burson testified that Villaneuva’s chief of staff twice personally told him to order investigators into the Kennedy Hall incident not to ask about potential connections to the Banditos.
Villanueva has previously denied that the gangs still operate in the department, saying he fired their members following the Kennedy Hall investigation or they left voluntarily.
“They’re all retired,” he said in 2021. “They no longer exist.”
But in their petition, the Civilian Oversight Commission said Villanueva refused to make the results of that internal investigation public and cast doubt on his claims he disciplined the deputies.
The commission wants Murakami to testify because they want to ask him whether he has a tattoo of a caveman on his ankle, which may show his affiliation with the Cavemen gang. Through their hearings, the commission learned both the Cavemen and Banditos gangs operated for years out of the Sheriff’s Department East L.A. station, where Murakami was once a patrol deputy.
Villanueva is currently running for an L.A. County Board of Supervisors seat against sitting Supervisor Janice Hahn.
While he did not immediately respond for a request for comment, Villanueva in a post Tuesday, Dec. 26 to his personal account on X, formerly Twitter, wrote about his intention to testify.
“This is going to be fun,” Villanueva wrote. “Introducing facts to the (Civilian Oversight Commission).”
Villanueva also claimed in the post that current Sheriff Robert Luna’s investigation into the gangs “can’t seem to find a single deputy gang member.”
Shortly after he defeated Villanueva in his 2022 reelection effort, Luna announced he was instituting a policy against gangs within the department to follow a new state law banning them.
Luna has previously said that policy was delayed during negotiations with the union for rank-and-file deputies.