Civil-rights attorney John Sweeney has built his career on exposing violent gangs within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department — ones that have been accused of hunting down Black men and framing the victims as instigators. ethanbrown72 reports
Photo: Stewart Cook/AFP via Getty Images John Sweeney, a 70-year-old civil-rights attorney from Los Angeles, doesn’t have the name recognition of Ben Crump, who has represented the families of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd and appears, Zelig-like, seemingly whenever there is a major police shooting. Nor does Sweeney much resemble Johnnie Cochran, a mentor to the young Sweeney when they worked together at the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in the late 1970s.
On that late August night, the pair spotted Donta Taylor, a 31-year-old Black man, wearing a red hat with the letter C on the front on North Wilmington Avenue, an area controlled by the Cedar Block Piru gang. Aldama and Orrego asked Taylor if he was on probation or parole. “No, I’m not,” Taylor said and then, according to the deputies, drew a semiautomatic, stainless-steel handgun and ran. The deputies radioed in a “417” — person with a gun — and gave chase on foot.
In a handheld video shot by LASD investigators that I obtained — the department didn’t begin using body cameras until the fall of 2020 — Lockett sits handcuffed in a department vehicle bruised, bloodied, and confused, repeating when questioned, “I got my ass beat.” Even though no gun was found on Lockett and he hadn’t committed any crime, he was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Unable to afford bail, Lockett was locked up in the county jail.
The evidence of Deputy Mizrain Orrego’s Executioners tattoo was a major breakthrough for Sweeney’s case. Photo: The Sweeney Firm “I asked him about tattoos,” Sweeney remembers. “He lied, said he had them on his arms only. And when he finished describing those, I said, ‘What about the one near your leg?’ He looked like he had seen a ghost.” It was, Sweeney says now, “the tattoo that shook the world and broke this whole thing open.
Sweeney graduated from the University of Southern California in 1973 and the California College of Law in 1979. After law school, Sweeney was wooed by the Los Angeles County DA’s office, where Cochran became first assistant district attorney in 1978. Although it was decades before his famous turn as O.J. Simpson’s lawyer, Cochran was already a mythological figure in the Los Angeles legal community.
It would prove to be a life-changing year for Sweeney far beyond the historic Beatty case. In 2000, the Compton City Council disbanded its police department and replaced it with an LASD contract. It was meant to be a milestone for police reform driven by high homicide rates, gang violence, and most important, rampant misconduct and corruption by the Compton police, which brought the city unwanted international attention thanks to the anti-police anthems of N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton.
Like the Cody family, the Thomases didn’t believe the law-enforcement narrative. “They’re lying, basically saying that my son pulled a gun on them. But you can’t pull a gun with your back turned from them and get shot 12 times in the back,” Robert Thomas Sr. said. The LASD admitted that Thomas did not fire a weapon but claimed a handgun was recovered at the scene. Thomas, Sweeney found out, was unarmed, and the gun at the scene didn’t have his DNA on it. In June 2013, a Compton jury awarded $7.
In the early 1990s, a group of residents in Lynwood, a city in Los Angeles County patrolled by the LASD, filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit claiming they were subject to excessive force and warrantless arrests by deputies in the Vikings deputy gang, who “engage in racially motivated, anti-black, white-supremacist hate crime activities, use racist speech, and glorify and celebrate the use of excessive force and other official misconduct by deputies.
Still, deputy gangs remained largely unknown in Los Angeles except among minority communities, their victims, and civil-rights attorneys like Sweeney. That August, Sweeney deposed Gonzalez, a Marine Corps combat veteran who worked at the Compton station five and a half years, as part of the Lockett case. Gonzalez said Vega and Hernandez were Executioners prospects. Gonzalez explained that such prospects are described as “chasing ink” and that “they get inked oftentimes after a shooting.” He said deputy gangs hold “998 parties” after a shooting.
The coroner’s inquest failed to provide any substantive movement in the Guardado case, but the revelations from Sweeney’s depositions of Gonzalez attracted the attention of national politicians — and had a radicalizing effect on Los Angeles activists. In August 2020, Villanueva moved to fire or suspend 26 people from the East Los Angeles station, including Munoz, who were involved in a 2018 brawl at an event space in which several deputies said they were attacked by Banditos members. “We did an investigation at East Los Angeles station resulting in 26 employees either disciplined or terminated,” Villanueva told CNN in September 2020. “And that means we’re taking steps forward.
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