Anthony Reyes Vazquez received no salary for the six years he served as chief of police on a rural East County tribal reservation. Instead, unbeknownst to tribal leaders, Vazquez, who ran a department with no legitimate law enforcement authority, accepted more than $300,000 in bribes in exchange for handing out police badges that gave his wealthy benefactors certain perks, such as the ability to obtain hard-to-acquire guns and concealed-carry licenses.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel sentenced Vazquez to 12 consecutive weekends in federal custody, 10 months of home confinement and three years of probation for stealing from the Manzanita Band of the Kumeyaay Nation. Curiel also ordered Vazquez to pay the tribe $328,795 in restitution.
“Shamelessly, you used this position to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Curiel told Vazquez. “The breach of trust, the seriousness of the offense is great.”
Two other defendants have pleaded guilty in related cases in Los Angeles federal court. Akiva Grunewald admitted in a plea agreement last year that he paid Vazquez $20,000 in exchange for a badge. Grunewald admitted to being addicted to drugs and twice presenting the badge and identifying himself as a police officer while being arrested — including one time while he was nude and repeatedly hitting himself outside a Los Angeles gas station. Grunewald is scheduled to be sentenced next week; prosecutors wrote in sentencing documents that they’ll recommend a term of probation and a $20,000 fine.
Colin Gilbert admitted last year that he recruited wealthy individuals on behalf of Vazquez and Vazquez’s unnamed successor, and then lied about it when confronted by FBI investigators. He was sentenced in April to one year of probation and ordered to pay $20,000 in fines.
Curiel said Monday that Vazquez was “far more culpable” than the other two defendants, and that he crafted the sentence the way he did so Vazquez can remain employed and pay the tribe the restitution he owes.
Vazquez, a 52-year-old resident of Camarillo in Ventura County, apologized to the tribe and the law enforcement community during Monday’s sentencing, repeatedly stating that he supports law enforcement and will continue to do so. His defense attorney and prosecutors said Vazquez immediately cooperated with federal investigators when they arrived at his home with a search warrant nearly five years ago and continued to cooperate long after his October 2021 guilty plea.
“I apologize to law enforcement and the courts for wasting their resources,” Vazquez, who is not a member of the tribe, told the judge Monday.
According to his plea agreement, Vazquez formed the Manzanita Tribal Police Department and became its chief in September 2012 after drafting a memorandum of understanding between the tribe and an unincorporated association known as the Manzanita Tribal Police Officer Association. The agreement was signed by the tribe’s chairman, a tribal council member and Vazquez, and stated the department would have responsibility for enforcing all federal, state and tribal laws on the reservation, located north of Boulevard and the Golden Acorn Casino off Interstate 8.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Hill said Monday that the deal stipulated Vazquez was supposed to be paid through the federal government, but that never happened since the department was not legitimate.
Prosecutors also said Vazquez concealed from the tribe that he had prior criminal convictions. Curiel said Monday that those convictions, one a misdemeanor assault charge and one a felony drug possession charge, were from the 1980s and ’90s and occurred during Vazquez’s seven-year stint with the Marine Corps.
Those convictions, according to the judge, should have precluded Vazquez from owning or possessing firearms or working in law enforcement. But he did both as the tribe’s chief of police until October 2018. In that role, according to his plea agreement, he recruited unpaid volunteers as officers, and beginning in 2016 he and others began recruiting members of a “VIP Group” who paid large sums of money for badges but were not expected to perform any law enforcement services.
“Many never visited the Manzanita Band reservation at all,” according to the plea agreement.
Hill said Monday that on some occasions, Vazquez provided security services on the reservation. But his organization was never officially recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the state of California as an actual police department, and neither Vazquez nor the other officers had the authority to enforce federal or state laws or identify themselves as peace officers.
What the department did have, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum, was the ability “to mint badges.” According to the plea agreement, most of those badges were given to wealthy individuals in the Los Angeles area who had no law enforcement experience but wanted the privileges typically reserved for police officers. The payments for the badges ranged from $5,000 up to $100,000. Prosecutors have never outlined how many payments were made or how many others were involved.
According to Grunewald’s plea, he learned about the scheme in July 2018 and paid for a badge with a $20,000 check made out directly to Vazquez. In the ensuing months, he presented that badge and claimed to be a cop during two arrests by police in Culver City and Los Angeles.
According to his plea agreement, his Manzanita police badge was confiscated after his first arrest, but he asked Vazquez for, and received, a new badge. He used it to buy four new guns, including one that was not on the state’s roster of publicly available guns and only available to him because of his purported employment as a cop.
Though it’s unclear exactly how or why the FBI began to investigate the Manzanita Tribal Police Department and its chief, Vazquez left as chief in October 2018, between Grunewald’s arrests. Gilbert’s plea agreement indicates he worked on the same bribes-for-badges scheme with the chief who took over after Vazquez. Authorities have not identified or charged that person.
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