Los Angeles police officers recently searched the Eagle Rock home of two people who worked for the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor as part of their investigation into a classified audio recording that dramatically upended City Hall politics last year.

Earlier this month, a search warrant was issued at the home of Santos Leon and Karla Vasquez, who are married and employed by the federation when the recording was made, according to a source familiar with the investigation who is aware of the warrant but is not authorized to speak publicly.

Leon’s computers were taken by the police, the person said.

Recording conversations without a person’s consent is illegal in California, with rare exceptions, and can be prosecuted as a felony. The warrant cited criminal laws for wiretapping and destroying or concealing evidence, the source said.

Three neighbors said Monday they saw police enter the Eagle Rock home in the early morning of July 13, with officers entering from both the street and the back alley. Police were on the property for about two hours and appeared to have searched both the main house and a back house, two of those neighbors said.

A fourth neighbor

Hillary Maxwell

, she said saw a police van parked on the street and about eight officers in and around the house. She said the officers told her they were executing a search warrant.

Leon, who has worked as an accountant for the federation, declined to comment through his lawyer. Vasquez, his wife, had no comment on the investigation when she was reached at her home. Her lawyer also declined to comment.

Neither Leon nor Vasquez

to have

has been publicly identified as suspects in the case.

Leon, 43, was first mentioned last week in connection with the investigation by Los Angeles Magazine, which reported that he had been questioned by police officers assigned to the case. The recordings sparked widespread denunciation and led to the resignation of two key political figures, then City Council President Nury Martinez and Ron Herrera, who was in charge of the union at the time.

Vasquez, 46, left the federation in March, according to her LinkedIn page, serving as Herrera’s executive assistant.

Last Tuesday, the federation called an emergency meeting to update its board of directors on the findings of the organization’s internal investigation into the shooting, a person familiar with that investigation said.

Yvonne Wheeler, the federation’s president, told the board of directors about the work of the group’s forensic investigator, who interviewed federation personnel and examined each staff’s laptop computer in the wake of the audio leak, said the source, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the federation’s internal investigation.

During that investigation, the forensic investigator found sound editing software on Leon’s computer and turned his findings over to the LAPD, the source said. Leon was placed on unpaid leave and remains an employee of the federation, according to the source.

Federation leaders had previously dismissed the idea that any of its staffers could be responsible for the secret recording, saying last fall that the group has “the best staff in the country.”

We reject any allegation that any member of our staff is responsible for these recordings as absolutely false and utterly outrageous, the federation said on Twitter last year.

Wheeler declined to comment on the internal investigation through a spokesperson, saying the investigation is ongoing. The LAPD refused

Unpleasant

remark

on the research

.

The leaked conversation was recorded during an October 2021 meeting between Herrera, Martinez and two other city council members Gil Cedillo and Kevin de Len at the federation’s headquarters in Westlake.

Including the conversation

featured

Racist and derogatory remarks led to widespread calls for the resignation of all four participants. Cedillo, who had lost his reelection prior to the recording’s release, left office in December. De Len remains on the council and has not yet announced whether he will seek re-election.

The four participants in the conversation spent much of the meeting discussing the redistribution of the city’s creative process

new

politics

new

maps for each of the council’s 15 districts and efforts to draw those boundaries in a way that would consolidate their political power.

The LAPD announced in mid-October that it had opened a criminal investigation into the making of the recording, with the department’s Major Crimes Division taking the lead. At the time, police chief Michel Moore said the investigation was launched at the request of people who attended that taped meeting.

Times staff writers James Queally and Laura J. Nelson contributed to this report.