Early in Baca's tenure, his deputies learned not to express reservations about his ideas — no matter how impractical they were. Eventually, the doubters retired. "Lee has surrounded himself with people who are going to say yes to everything he says," Al Scaduto, a retired chief, says.
Tanaka has become his most trusted aide. In many ways the men are opposites. Tanaka is an accountant, good with details. He's also a cop's cop — aggressive and wary. Unlike Baca, his critics do not claim to like him. In their telling, he's a full-metal asshole, a shouter, a "little Napoleon."
Ted DSoqui
Paul Tanaka presides over a Gardena City Council meeting.
Ted Soqui
The Citizens Comission on Jail Violence found a culture of abuse among Baca's guards.
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"He's got a terrible temper, and a little-man complex. If he doesn't like something he'll start yelling at you," says Chuck Jackson, a chief who retired, in large part due to Baca's increasing dependence on Tanaka. "It's really mind-boggling to understand the attachment."
In the judgment of the independent Citizens' Commission on Jail Violence, Tanaka is largely responsible for the sadism that goes on behind bars. "Tanaka should take his retirement," says Jerry Harper, who was undersheriff for Baca's predecessor, Sherman Block. "The department would be much better off if he did that."
But Baca has refused to entertain any doubts about his No. 2 man.
By now, Baca has been told he's a genius so many times that he believes it. As criticism has mounted, he has buried his head further into the sand. In a KCRW interview last week, he cited dubious statistics to contend that the problems were overblown. "Where's all this massive abuse going on?" he asked.
That doesn't bode well for the prospects of jail reform.
"Either Sheriff Baca wants to do it," says former DEA chief Rob Bonner, who served on the jails commission, "or it's not going to happen."
Baca did not get his boundless self-esteem from his parents. They split up before his first birthday. His mother, a seamstress from Mexico, had another child. That was more than she could handle, so she decided to give Leroy up for adoption when he was 7 years old. When his father's parents volunteered to take him in instead, she packed him off to his grandparents' house in East L.A.
Each day, he thought his mother would return to pick him up. Finally, his grandmother broke the news: "Mom's not coming. You might as well settle in."
Leroy shared a room with his disabled Uncle Willy, whose IQ was in the 30s, and who required constant care and attention from his young nephew.
"If I get a little off-center with some of my thinking," Baca told an audience at USC in 2010, "I probably got it from my uncle because he and I spent a lot of time together."
When he was 14, he went to live with his father, a factory worker. The old man had taken offense when his brother accused him of being a bad parent, so he told Leroy to grab his things and move in. At the time, he shared a one-bedroom apartment with his new wife, so he made space for his son to sleep in the cellar.
In high school, Leroy ran track and played backup tight end. He was not a gifted athlete, but he tried hard. He wasn't much of a student, either — he got C's and D's — but he was popular, despite his shyness. He was elected president of his senior class.
"He was not your typical, outgoing glad-hander," recalls Stan Friar, Baca's close friend since the age of 15. "He's a little reserved and shy. He has some of these thoughts and qualities that make him seem like he's on a different plane."
In the late 1950s, Highland Park was mostly white and working-class. Daryl Gates graduated about 15 years before Baca. "Franklin High didn't turn out movers and shakers," recalls Richard Nemec, a classmate of Baca's. "They turned out firemen, policemen and teachers."
No one figured Baca for a cop, but at 18 he took LAPD's cadet test. He failed. He took the bus home, where he found his father sitting on the front porch drinking a beer. "Well," the old man said, "I didn't think you'd pass it anyway."
Baca went out to the backyard, where he "had a good cry." It was, he told the audience at USC, "the lowest point in my life."
But that moment gave him something to prove. He began to get serious, to work hard and set goals. A few years later, he joined the Sheriff's Department.
He'd been recruited by a family friend, Sherman Block's brother, Mel, and that association with the future sheriff helped propel him through the ranks. In the early 1980s, Baca was given command of the Norwalk station — which made him that city's police chief.
There, Baca tried some unusual methods. A group of families had lodged a series of complaints about abusive deputies. Baca befriended them and brought them into the station to hash out their grievances with the deputies themselves.
"It was a little strange for us," recalls Richard Castro, who was a sergeant at the time. "But it calmed a lot of people down."
