Police investigating City Hall audio leak search home of two labor federation staffers

Los Angeles police officers recently searched the Eagle Rock home of two people who have worked at the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, as part of their investigation into a secret audio recording that dramatically upended City Hall politics last year.

A search warrant was served earlier this month at the home of Santos Leon and Karla Vasquez, who are married and were employed by the federation when the recording was made, according to a source familiar with the probe, who has knowledge of the warrant but is not authorized to speak publicly. Leon’s computers were taken by police, the person said.

Recording conversations without a person’s consent is illegal in California, with rare exceptions, and can be pursued as a felony. The warrant cited the penal codes for eavesdropping and destroying or concealing evidence, the source said.

Leon, 43, was first named last week in connection with the investigation by Los Angeles Magazine, which reported that he had been questioned by police officers assigned to the case.

Three neighbors said Monday they saw police go into the Eagle Rock home early on the morning of July 13, with officers entering from both the street and from the alley behind the house. Police were on the property for about two hours and appeared to have searched both the main house and a back house, two of those neighbors said.

A fourth neighbor, Hilary Maxwell, said she saw a police van parked on the street and about eight officers in and around the house. She said the officers told her they were executing a search warrant.

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Leon, who has been working for the federation as an accountant, declined to comment through his lawyer. Vasquez, his wife, had no comment on the inquiry when reached at her home. Her lawyer also declined to comment.

Neither Leon nor Vasquez has been publicly identified as suspects in the case.

The recordings sparked widespread denunciation and led to the resignation of two major political figures — then-City Council President Nury Martinez and Ron Herrera, who was in charge of the labor federation at that time.

Vasquez, 46, left the federation in March, according to her LinkedIn page, and had been serving as Herrera’s executive assistant.

Last Tuesday, the federation called an emergency meeting to update its executive board on the findings of the organization’s internal investigation into the recording, according to a person familiar with that inquiry.

Yvonne Wheeler, the federation’s president, told the executive board about the work of the group’s forensic investigator, who interviewed federation staff and examined each staffer’s laptop computer in the wake of the audio leak, said the source, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the federation’s internal investigation.

During that inquiry, the forensic investigator found sound-editing software on Leon’s computer and turned its findings over to the LAPD, the source said. Leon was placed on leave and remains a federation employee, according to the source.

Federation leaders had previously dismissed the idea that one of its staffers could be responsible for the secret recording, saying last fall that the group has “the best staff in the nation.”

“We reject any accusation that a member of our staff would be responsible for these recordings as absolutely false and completely outrageous,” the federation said on Twitter last year.

Wheeler declined through a spokesperson to comment on the internal inquiry, saying the investigation is still ongoing. The LAPD declined to comment on the investigation.

The leaked conversation was recorded during an October 2021 meeting between Herrera, Martinez and two other City Council members — Gil Cedillo and Kevin de León — at the federation’s Westlake headquarters.

The conversation included racist and derogatory comments and spurred widespread calls for the resignation of all four participants. Cedillo, who had lost his reelection prior to the release of the recording, left office in December. De León remains on the council and has not yet disclosed whether he will seek reelection.

The four participants in the conversation spent much of the meeting discussing redistricting — the city’s process of creating new political maps for each of the council’s 15 districts — and efforts to draw those boundaries in ways that would consolidate their political power.

The LAPD announced in mid-October that it had opened a criminal investigation into the making of the recording, with the department’s Major Crimes Division taking the lead. At the time, Police Chief Michel Moore said the investigation was initiated at the request of people who had been in that recorded meeting.

Times staff writers James Queally and Laura J. Nelson contributed to this report.