A former Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy said he was fired after refusing to participate in law enforcement gang activity, according to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Federico Carlo, the former lawman behind the lawsuit, claims he was wrongly accused of giving a Nazi salute and sharing a sexually explicit photo, then was “suddenly fired” by a “tattooed gang member deputy” who is now the acting leader supervising the training. And employees.
The acting commander, Capt. John Pat McDonald, did not respond to a request for comment, and the department did not respond to questions about whether he had a regulatory tattoo.
“The department has not formally received this allegation but strives to provide a fair and equitable work environment for all employees,” officials wrote in an emailed statement to The Times. “Any act of retaliation, harassment, or discrimination will not be tolerated and is a violation of department policy and values.”
Neither Carlo nor his lawyer commented on this story. Carlo has filed a lawsuit against the county and is seeking unspecified damages.
The Los Angeles County Police Department has long been plagued by allegations that some of its top officials wear tattoos representing exclusionary subgroups of deputies. Last month, former undersheriff Tim Murakami admitted under oath that he had a tattoo associated with the East Los Angeles station group known as the Cave Men.
Last year, the news site Capital & Main reported that current Undersheriff April Tardy admitted to having a tattoo at the station that some in the department said signified a V Boys gang vice. In 2022, Larry Del Messi, former Chief of Staff to Sheriff Alex Villanueva, publicly admitted his membership in the Grim Reapers.
However, sheriff's officials told the Times last week that this case “does not reflect the affairs of the entire department,” and noted that there are “multiple deputy gang investigations” currently underway, and that a new anti-gang policy is being negotiated with the city's deputy sheriffs. Trade unions.
For decades, the Sheriff's Department has been plagued by allegations about gangs of deputies raiding certain stations and floors of the jail. The groups are known by nicknames such as Executioners, Vikings, and Regulators, and their members often bear the same sequentially numbered tattoos.
The group at the center of Carlo's lawsuit, the Organizers, is typically affiliated with the Century Sheriff's Station in Lynwood. It is one of the department's oldest subgroups of deputies, and is typically represented by the symbol of a skeleton in a cowboy hat. In recent years, there have been some indications — including in a RAND Corporation study commissioned by the district attorney — that the group is no longer actively adding new members. However, late last year, oversight officials spotted a poster for the organizers outside the Horn Regional Detention Facility next to the station.
The lawsuit filed in late February traces Carlo's problems back to 2005, when a lawmaker, then the leader of the organizers, called him a “rat” because he refused to lie in probable cause reports.
A few years later, the lawsuit says, two more alleged organizers kicked Carlo out of training in the Airborne Division, which, it alleges, “had something to do with” the fact that he “was not a member of a vice gang and refused to violate the law.”
By mid-2019, Carlo was working as an instructor at the department's Emergency Vehicle Operations Center in Pomona. He clashed with some other coaches who he said were risking safety by cutting corners to save time. After he complained and asked to be transferred to another shift, tensions began to escalate between him and some of the other trainers, one of whom challenged him to a fight, according to the lawsuit. Later, that same deputy allegedly caused disturbances, once by disrupting a class Carlo was teaching, and again by crashing his patrol car into another deputy.
Eventually, Carlo reported the problems to his superiors. During a meeting with his lieutenant in 2022, Carlo allegedly told him that there had been “several vehicle collisions” caused by coaches, and that he himself had been injured in one of these accidents. According to the lawsuit, when Carlo questioned why the lieutenant wasn't doing more to supervise the training, the lieutenant ordered him to rewrite the unit's safety guidelines and brief the entire unit on them.
In March of that year, according to the lawsuit, Carlo discovered that a complaint had been filed against him alleging that he had given a Nazi salute when talking about a sergeant with a German-sounding name.
A few weeks later, the suit says, Carlo was temporarily transferred from the unit while officials investigated the complaint. Near the end of the summer, Carlo's lieutenant called to tell him he was returning to the training center — but reversed course a few days later because another complaint was filed against him, this time for sexual harassment.
It turns out that after a unit briefing that Carlo's lieutenant had ordered him to do earlier that year, two of the deputies who attended started talking and realized that Carlo had shown them an explicit photo on his phone. They said he implied it was a photo of him with a female sergeant, according to the lawsuit. One of the deputies was the trainer who had previously challenged Carlo to a fight.
“This was false,” the lawsuit said. “There is no such picture at all.”
Although in 2022, officials closed the complaint about the Nazi salute — an accusation Carlo also denied — they continued to investigate the sexual harassment complaint, according to the lawsuit. In 2023, after what the lawsuit described as “years of retaliation and harassment.” [and] “Discrimination”, Carlo was fired.
“On April 13, 2023, Plaintiff’s employment was terminated under false pretenses,” the lawsuit says. “Captain Butt [Macdonald]“The supervisor who made the decision to terminate Plaintiff’s employment is a tattooed gang member’s deputy.”
Ministry officials confirmed to The Times that Carlo “separated from the ministry” last April after an internal investigation. But they did not comment on the accusations about McDonald's alleged organizational tattoo, nor did they answer questions about whether he was still believed to have one.
Regulators have long been the subject of misconduct allegations. Nearly two decades ago, The Times published allegations that members of the group extorted money from other deputies, acted like gang members and controlled shift scheduling and administration at the station.
At the time, some in the department compared the Regulators to the former Lynwood Vikings, a now-defunct group that a federal judge once described as a “neo-Nazi white supremacist gang.”
The deputies with the organizers' tattoos told the Times they did nothing inappropriate and were unfairly insulted. They said their ink represented a close-knit group of MPs who worked hard.
“It's like the stars of a baseball team,” one tattooed deputy said at the time. “You get the best.”
