Deputy Acquitted After Inquiry Remains Bitter

For three years, Steven Gibbs was under investigation as a dirty cop, accused of siphoning cash from a drug dealer, as other Los Angeles County narcotics deputies had admitted doing.

But when the U.S. attorney’s office declined to prosecute his case, Gibbs was not home free. The day before the statute of limitations expired, the county district attorney’s office charged him with stealing about $60,000 from a drug dealer and lying on a search warrant.

The perjury complaint was eventually dropped and, after an eight-day trial, Gibbs was acquitted of a grand theft charge last March. Today, he remains bitter about being swept up in the drug money-skimming scandal.

“This investigation has ruined people’s lives. It ruined my career, and it has cost me physically, emotionally and financially,” said Gibbs, 45, who retired before his indictment and now lives in Huntington Beach on his $1,000-a-month pension.

Gibbs spent 21 years with the Sheriff’s Department before he and a partner, Roger Garcia, were accused of stealing cash out of a drug trafficker’s storage shed. Although both men were acquitted, Gibbs said the allegation against him and the ongoing money-skimming scandal still haunt him.

“People like me who had done nothing wrong were caught up in this thing,” he said. Gibbs is the only indicted officer to be acquitted who is not facing a retrial.

His co-defendant, Garcia, was involved in a federal court case along with five other former narcotics officers. That trial ended in a mixture of acquittals and deadlocked juries. Prosecutors will retry the case in June.

Gibbs said his law enforcement career is over. “That’s the only thing I wanted to do in my life,” he added. “That’s what I’ve been trained to do. But who’s going to hire me now?”