Agent Is Indicted on Theft Charges : Drugs: DEA supervisor is the fourth officer who worked in Los Angeles to be charged in two years.

A Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was a supervisor in the agency’s Los Angeles office, and who currently holds a management post in the DEA’s Washington headquarters, was indicted Thursday on charges of stealing money from a drug trafficker.

Eddie B. Hill, 49, of Upper Marlboro, Md., was charged with embezzling $1,780 possessed by the drug trafficker and lying to federal investigators to cover up the theft, according to the indictment.

Hill was in charge of 15 agents in Los Angeles who investigated Colombian and Mexican cocaine dealers before being transferred to Washington in August, 1988, according to Assistant U.S. Atty. William F. Fahey, chief of the federal prosecutor’s public corruption and government fraud unit.

“He’s got a significant management responsibility at the DEA,” Fahey said.

Hill, a supervisory special agent, was immediately suspended Thursday from his Washington position, where he works on the agency’s cocaine desk overseeing investigations of crack cocaine trafficking and drug activity involving street gangs, Fahey said.

Hill, a 15-year DEA veteran, could not be reached for comment.

The DEA’s administrator, Robert C. Bonner, said in a statement from Washington that “without question, the vast majority of DEA personnel are above reproach in their integrity. Criminal violations by personnel . . . are rare.”

Hill is the fourth DEA agent to be indicted in the last two years who worked in the agency’s Los Angeles office. The other three agents--Darnell Garcia, 43, of Rancho Palos Verdes, John Jackson 41, of Claremont and Wayne Countryman, 47, of Walnut--were charged with participating in a narcotics trafficking conspiracy which included stealing drugs from the agency’s evidence vault in Los Angeles and secretly depositing millions of dollars in drug profits in foreign bank accounts.

Jackson and Countryman pleaded guilty last August. Garcia’s federal court trial is scheduled for Oct. 23.

Hill was in charge of a Los Angeles DEA unit called “Group 2” which, before he joined the unit, also included Garcia and Countryman, Fahey said. He declined to comment on whether there was any connection between the indictment of Hill and the other three agents.

According to the indictment, Hill was supervising the investigation of a suspected cocaine trafficker, John M. Lopez, who was arrested in Los Angeles in 1985. At that time, $1,780 was seized from Lopez.

The cash was introduced as evidence the next year at Lopez’s trial and he was ultimately convicted of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute the drug.

On June 3, 1987, the $1,780 was transferred to Hill by the U.S. attorney’s office. The indictment alleges that Hill then “embezzled and wrongfully converted” the cash “to his own use.”

In 1988, Lopez, while in jail, filed a motion for the return of his money and this action initiated the investigation, Fahey said.

According to the indictment, in February and March of 1989, Hill lied twice about his intentions to return the cash--the first time to an assistant U.S. attorney, the second to an assistant special agent in charge of the Los Angeles DEA office. In both instances, Hill “falsely told” the investigators that he had asked another DEA agent to return the $1,780 to Lopez, the indictment said.