Jailhouse informant probe warrants more scrutiny of Long Beach case and others, attorney argues

The attorney who uncovered the Orange County jailhouse informant scandal is arguing in new court filings that an investigation into the Long Beach Police Department shows “shocking deficiencies” with the oversight of paid civilian jailhouse informants that could implicate hundreds of criminal cases in Los Angeles County.

The internal investigation found a veteran homicide detective allowed a civilian jailhouse informant to remove his GPS tracking ankle monitor, in violation of a court order, during the 2015 Christmas holiday and then lied about it to authorities. According to internal investigators, that raised questions about why he was allowed to remove the monitor. And defense attorney Scott Sanders says the decision to not follow through with a wider inquiry casts doubt on the informant system as a whole.

Sanders would know; he’s the attorney who uncovered the Orange County jailhouse informant scandal in 2014. A subsequent Department of Justice investigation into the practice found the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and Sheriff’s Department violated the 14th Amendment by not disclosing information that could have benefited criminal defendants.

If that’s the case in L.A. County, it’s unclear how many criminal cases could be affected. In Orange County, more than 60 cases were compromised as a result of the informant evidence.

Sanders has argued in previous court motions that the Long Beach Police Department hid information about an officer who arrested his client, Lonnie Jacobs, and, in doing so, violated his rights to a fair trial established by the 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland.

In a Nov. 10 filing supporting his motion to dismiss the drug charges against Jacobs, Sanders argues the internal investigation further demonstrates that the Long Beach Police Department cannot be trusted to turn over damaging information about its officers.

The investigation exposed “shocking deficiencies” with the oversight of paid civilian jailhouse informants operating throughout Los Angeles County, “including the absence of standardized operational guidelines, inadequate coordination and recordkeeping among participating law enforcement agencies, and insufficient supervision of informants,” Sanders wrote.

Rather than fully investigate the scope of these problems, Sanders argues the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and Long Beach Police Department limited their investigation to the narrow misconduct of a single officer and informant and downplayed the findings to avoid compromising prosecutions.

The Long Beach Police Department did not respond to emailed questions from LAist in time for publication. And the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

The Long Beach Police North Station in March 2025.

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Megan Garvey

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LAist

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What are Perkins agents?

The use of what’s known as Perkins informants has faced growing questions in California recently. The U.S. Supreme Court determined in the 1990 case Illinois v. Perkins that undercover law enforcement officers don’t need to give Miranda warnings to incarcerated suspects before questioning them in a jail cell. Perkins operations can also use civilians working for law enforcement, as was the case in Long Beach.

Some judges and defense attorneys call the practice coercive — citing threats and other tactics — and say it could be used to solicit inaccurate information. They also criticize the practice for disproportionately targeting Black and Latino defendants.

Earlier this year, the California 4th District Court of Appeal overturned a conviction after finding a Perkins informant violated the defendant’s rights by essentially staging a surreptitious, coercive interrogation after he had asked for an attorney.

Several counts of misconduct were filed by the Long Beach Police Department — including one violation of state penal code for violating a court order — against veteran homicide detective Hugo Cortes in 2016 over his handling of jailhouse informants. He retired before discipline was finalized, but the department found his conduct so egregious it recommended he be terminated. No criminal charges were ever brought against Cortes.

Cortes could not be reached for comment.

According to court documents and other records, the informant at the center of the internal affairs investigation, Cortes and other officers told investigators about several gaps in the oversight and supervision of civilian jailhouse informants.

After an informant helped solve a 2012 quintuple homicide, the department started using them with greater frequency, according to a memo from the Long Beach police leadership included in the investigative files. Cortes told investigators that no one trained him on the tactic and the department used existing policy on confidential informants as guidance, according to the memo.

“We learned as we go,” Cortes said.

Cortes told investigators he paid informants in cash with no reliable paper trail.

“Every time you put (an informant) in a jail cell with somebody, you owe him a thousand dollars. If I put him in with two defendants, I owe him two thousand dollars,” another officer, whose name is redacted in the files, said. The officer was unable to locate payment records for certain periods.

Cortes became the department go-to for jailhouse informants. “There is no doubt that Detective Cortes has brought this agency to the forefront of Perkins Operations usage,” the statement added.

How the Long Beach informant case unfolded

Sometime in late December 2015, someone from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office called a Long Beach officer to report that “a Perkins agent who was on special release by the court and supposed to be under 24-hour monitoring via GPS bracelet, was out of custody and had committed a crime in another city and was being investigated.”

That call kicked off the internal affairs investigation, the files for which were posted on the Long Beach Police Department website in 2022.

The informant at the center of the investigation had been living in the jail at the Long Beach Police Station for a year when, in October 2015, he struck a plea deal to be released home on a GPS monitor under 24-hour surveillance.

The plea deal states the informant “will plead guilty” to shooting at an occupied vehicle and will “admit the truth of two prior burglary convictions.”

The agreement carried a sentence of nine years in state prison, but gave the option to serve that sentence out under house arrest while under 24/7 electronic monitoring. The agreement required the informant to cooperate with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, Long Beach and “any other law enforcement agency”.

During the course of the internal affairs investigation, the informant said he had worked cases with police departments in Hawthorne, Inglewood and National City in San Diego County.

The terms of the deal are clear: The informant “may only leave his residence under the direct supervision and monitoring of law enforcement.” He was only allowed to leave to assist law enforcement with criminal investigations, to attend court for his own case or for medical appointments or a “bona fide emergency situation.” He was supposed to be in “the custody and control” of law enforcement while assisting in criminal investigations.

The internal affairs investigation would show the informant was without his monitor and unsupervised for several days in December 2015 “for no lawful purpose, in violation of the confidential informant’s court-ordered residential arrest plea agreement.”

According to a summary of the investigation, the informant was not wearing the GPS monitor when he went to a midnight movie on Christmas Day and got into a fight.

“Witnesses to the incident said (the informant) was intoxicated and started the fight with two subjects then fled,” according to the investigation summary.

The District Attorney’s Office called Long Beach police days later to ask about the incident. Initially, prosecutors were planning to investigate on their own, but later told Long Beach they could start their own investigation.

Long Beach police investigators wanted to know if Cortes had given the informant Christmas off, or permission to stop wearing the GPS monitor while he wasn’t actively working for law enforcement.

Internal affairs investigators found Cortes had sent misleading emails to the company that monitored the GPS devices for Long Beach about the informant’s whereabouts.

When investigators questioned Cortes about the emails, he said they did not reflect what he had meant to say, according to a summary of those interviews.

The informant told investigators neither Cortes nor anybody else had given him permission to go off the monitor.

When investigators told him his handlers were supposed to pick him up from home and drive him to and from the police station for operations so that he remained under supervision, he said that never happened.

The informant “said he has done 200 operations since 2013 and since the beginning; there has been nothing in writing governing the way the operations were conducted,” according to a summary of his interview.

The informant said he was “held to a different standard” because his work with law enforcement showed he could be trusted.

The informant told investigators that he sometimes had to explain the process to detectives that he worked with.

“This is all new to everyone. Not Perkins per se, but the fact that you have a confidential informant who does the volume of work that I do and the type of work that I do,” he said.

Cortes told investigators he at one point knew the informant was off his monitor because he was on “stand by” and needed to be ready to be placed in a jail cell on short notice.

Cortes also told investigators it was not his responsibility to make sure the informant got his monitor reattached, according to transcripts.

James Trott, an attorney representing Cortes in the investigative process, raised similar concerns with the Perkins system and stated there are no rules or regulations in place for handling informants.

“My pet peeve is the departments love these guys,” Trott said. “I’ll just deal with this guy, they love this guy. He gets all kinds of good juice for them. Look who you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with the devil.”

Before he retired, Cortes was removed from all criminal investigations, records show.

The findings letter sent to Cortes informed him the investigation determined he violated California Penal Code by disobeying a court order.

Cortes waived his right to a hearing to challenge the findings, but told the department he would write a letter responding to the case. The department had not received a response letter as of Jan. 11, 2017, and no such letter is included in the internal investigations file.

It appears no charges were ever filed against Cortes, and a deputy L.A. County district attorney said their office had not received a request to open a criminal investigation, according to the investigative summary.

The informant was put back into custody.

Then-Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna, now in his second term as Los Angeles County sheriff, signed the investigative report and, in a handwritten note at the bottom, instructed the department to look into the case and “identify any/all gaps in these kinds of operations to prevent them in the future.”

LAist emailed questions to Luna and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Luna didn’t respond, but in an unsigned statement, the sheriff’s department said that in March 2018, it incorporated policies and guidelines for the use of confidential sources during law enforcement operations. The statement added that the department “conducts such operations in accordance with applicable laws and legal standards.”

Far-reaching consequences

In 2014, Sanders, the defense attorney, began requesting evidentiary hearings about the jailhouse informant program in Orange County, including the use of Perkins informants.

The evidence that surfaced over three years and several hearings led the court to remove the Orange County District Attorney’s Office from the case and to take the death penalty off the table for Scott Dekraai, the Seal Beach shooter whom Sanders was representing at the time.

A lawsuit by the ACLU of Southern California and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice followed.

In the Nov. 10 court filing, Sanders argues the Orange County scandal should have prompted the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and local police departments to take a hard look at their own jailhouse informant programs.

According to Sanders, the Cortes investigation, which began in 2015, shows that didn’t happen.

An April 6, 2016, letter from the District Attorney’s Office informed Cortes he would be added to the office’s Brady alert system — which is meant to track potentially damaging information about officers who testify in court — because he was the subject of an internal affairs investigation.

The District Attorney’s Office also sent Brady notices to two defendants who had been convicted in a murder case investigated by Cortes in May 2016.

Sanders argues both descriptions by the District Attorney’s Office vastly understate what really happened.

The investigation revealed major, systemic problems with Perkins operations throughout L.A. County, Sanders wrote in his most recent filing, but the notifications don’t mention those findings at all. Instead, they focus narrowly on Cortes’ misconduct, Sanders added.

He argues those findings should have prompted significant investigations and disclosures, not just about conduct by Cortes and this specific informant, but about the countywide Perkins system in general.

It’s unclear if any of these steps were taken.