The lawfulness of Johnson’s purported investigation was questionable the moment he arrived in Tucson earlier that day.
As a private investigator licensed in California but not in Arizona, Johnson is required by law to notify the Arizona Department of Public Safety before conducting an investigation in that state. However, according to the Licensing Investigation Unit, there is no record that Johnson sought a reciprocal license agreement in Arizona.
Johnson spends the afternoon with the woman. Together, they visit potential witnesses regarding civil litigation involving Kyle Rittenhouse. In the evening, Johnson invites her to drink with him in the hotel bar. He takes her back to his room, ostensibly to eat nachos.
The woman tries to leave Johnson’s room several times. The first time, Johnson taunts her: “You’re a big girl. You know who you are.”
“I’m worried that you’re thinking I’m somebody that I’m not,” she says.
At the door, Johnson asks her to prove she’s not a federal agent. He puts his hands under her clothes and touches her breasts — she claims — as he searches for a wire.
She laughs as if Johnson is tickling her. “Is this a part of the cavity search?” she asks.
“You work for the feds?” Johnson asks again and again. She says no.
Later, she tells a journalist that during this exchange Johnson pushes her against the door. She sprains her wrist pushing him away.
“You dumb ass,” she exclaims. “Why you gotta pull all cop shit on me?”
“Stay the night with me,” he says. “Stay the night or I’m done.”
She later tells the police that she stays to “talk him down.” Johnson has consumed a lot of alcohol. He has shown violent flashes of temper. He has a gun.
Fuckin’ DOJ
Also, the woman spent the entire afternoon in Johnson’s company answering his questions. Johnson told her that he knows her social security number and sensitive details about her life. She fears retaliation if she leaves.
She stays to placate him. But he won’t stop bullying. Soon, she’s in tears, exhausted by Johnson’s bizarre interrogation. She’s leaving.
“No, you can’t drive,” Johnson says. “You’re buzzed.”
“I thought we were just talking about stuff,” she sobs.
“Oh, I thought so, too,” he says. “Here’s the deal. I gotta deal with the FBI. Fuckin’ DOJ. Are you part of the FBI? I don’t know.”
As if Johnson’s dealings with the FBI and DOJ — whatever they may be — entitle him to browbeat her.
Later, he asks, “Are you leaving?”
“Yeah,” she says, “because you wanted me to.”
If you’re not such a fed…
“That means you got a camera setup somewhere. I don’t trust you. So tell me why you would leave right now.”
Another time, he taunts her: “You are such a fed. …Then if you’re not such a fed, let’s go fuck. …Oh, if you’re gonna leave, then you’re a fed.”
Johnson is in a position of authority in this situation. He is a legal investigator hired to interview the woman as a potential witness. Johnson is a former LBPD homicide detective.
Johnson knows that the woman is intoxicated. On the recording, she recounts that she’s had four or five drinks, to which Johnson replies sarcastically, “So you’re sober.”
Touch it. Rub it.
On the recording Johnson can be heard kissing her and demanding more physical contact. At one point, he whispers to her, “Touch it. Rub it.”
Johnson’s behavior is inappropriate at the very least.
If Johnson were an ordinary private citizen, his fear of the feds could be considered paranoid delusion. But Johnson is a retired LEO. He sounds convinced that the federal government has probable cause to warrant cameras and listening devices in his hotel room.
Why such a guilty mind?
Maybe because of his time at LBPD. A recent lawsuit exposed lies and corruption at the heart of Johnson’s former agency. In response to the revelations, some people are calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Long Beach police.
Some speculate that such an investigation is already underway.
Famously, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department was investigated by the feds. The highly publicized investigation resulted in disgraced Sheriff Lee Baca’s 2017 conviction for felony obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI.
In that case, sheriff deputies harassed a female federal agent. They threatened to arrest her as a felony suspect.
Now, Todd Johnson’s former boss — former Long Beach Chief of Police Robert Luna — is campaigning for the job of L.A. Sheriff. Under Luna, LBPD shredded 23 years of internal affairs records. Luna is hardly a champion of cracking down on police misconduct.
As Todd Johnson harasses a female “federal agent” on tape in Tucson, it’s easy to hear echoes of other corrupt cops in L.A. County, past and present.
Todd Johnson became infamous because he got away with misconduct for years while working as a homicide detective for the Long Beach Police Department in Los Angeles County, California. His misdeeds would not have been possible without extraordinary help and support from many superiors, fellow officers, and friends.
As Beachcomber reporter Stephen Downing put it: “Johnson has a reputation for heavy alcohol consumption and enjoys an unusual level of protection by department brass from disciplinary action because of his elite assignment and attachment to what department insiders call the favored ‘Boys ‘n’ Girls Club.'”
DUI Incident in 2017
Beachcomber reported that, on the night of December 26, 2017, Homicide Detective Todd Johnson had been drinking at Crow’s Cocktail in Long Beach. About 10 minutes after leaving the bar, Johnson was behind the wheel of a plain-colored, on-call LBPD police sedan when he collided with another car. The other motorist smelled alcohol on Johnson’s breath and called 911.
Lloyd Cox, the LBPD duty chief at the time, covered up the incident by ordering that no Breathalyzer be administered, and that Johnson be allowed to drive the city vehicle from the scene.
Beachcomber reported that a former employee at Crow’s Cocktail said: “Todd Johnson was a regular. He spends a lot of time in the bar. His drink of choice is a pint glass full of straight vodka with a soda side. He would often have four or five drinks. He always got past the point of being served, but we said nothing because he’s a big guy with anger issues. We didn’t want him or the LBPD vice squad coming down on us.”
According to Beachcomber, a LBPD source said of Johnson: “He definitely has anger issues. I’m sure it comes from his drinking. He’d regularly blow up in the office at his partners, peers, the sergeant and lieutenant and nothing would happen to him. Everyone in the office who sat near him knew he was a powder keg.”
Complaint and retaliation
Earlier in 2017, Homicide Detective Mark Bigel complained to LBPD supervisors that Johnson had arrived at the scene of an Officer Involved Shooting incident and took part in the investigation while smelling of alcohol and possibly being intoxicated. Johnson was not disciplined. Rather, Bigel was transferred out of homicide in retaliation for reporting Johnson.
Johnson in 2021
A source at LBPD told Beachcomber: “Todd Johnson was drunk or under the influence at work most of the time and everybody knew it. When Bigel stepped up and reported him for being liquored up at the OIS scene he didn’t get any backup because the guys knew the brass would turn it around on them for not reporting it earlier. So, [Lloyd] Cox saved Johnson and got rid of Bigel. That’s the way it works here, if you’re a favorite in the Boys ‘n’ Girls Club you’re protected. If you’re not, they find a way to get rid of you.”
After Beachcomber published details about Johnson’s alleged DUI and drinking on the job, LBPD representatives paid a personal visit to the paper. LBPD representatives wanted Beachcomber to produce the names of its sources and police insiders. Reporter Stephen Downing wrote that LBPD seemed “more interested in challenging the quality of information in the column rather than getting to the real truth of Detective Johnson’s alcohol problem and the LBPD’s broken organizational culture of cover-ups, cronyism and retaliation.”
Also during this time, Johnson was one of several “favored” LBPD officers who communicated with one another using a disappearing-text app called TigerText, which became a focus of controversy.
Botched murder investigation
In 2018, Johnson was at the center of a murder case that fell apart in court due to his mistakes. Johnson and his partner repeatedly misspelled the name of one defendant, and were accused of coaching a witness to identify another defendant in a photo lineup. The judge in the case, Judith L. Meyer, said from the bench: “The behavior of the detectives is appalling and unethical and inappropriate.”
The deputy district attorney in the case complained to her supervisors that Johnson ought to be on a list of officers whose testimony should not be relied on in court. Johnson and LBPD retaliated by blaming the attorney. LBPD brass sat for an interview with a local paper to defend Johnson and his partner. One police official called the botched case a “comedy of errors.”
After Judge Meyer blasted the detectives in court, LBPD supervisors paid her a personal visit, saying they were investigating a complaint by the deputy district attorney. A year later, Johnson and his partner, too, visited the judge privately. Immediately after this visit, Judge Meyer wrote an unusual letter retracting her courtroom criticisms and seeking Johnson’s approval. After this letter was shared with LBPD brass, the DA’s office, and the public defender’s office, Judge Meyer wrote a second letter trying to walk back some of what she had written in the first letter.
LBPost reported about the letters: “In the first one, a draft of which Meyer emailed directly to the detectives, she not only vouched for their integrity but hinted that she had erred in the ruling that led to the dismissal of the murder charges. She spent most of the second letter defending her own integrity.”
Johnson was the lead investigator on another botched homicide case in which a man claimed that his wife sustained massive head injuries while doing yoga at home. Hospital personnel reported to police that the woman had been assaulted. The victim’s family alleges that Johnson improperly closed the case without investigating, and lied about the facts to hide his omissions and failures. Despite multiple complaints and pleas from the victim’s family, LBPD refused to reopen the investigation. Johnson’s friend Judge Meyer authorized the initial search warrant in the case.
Silent demotion
Johnson and son
LBPD removed Johnson from the homicide detail in 2018, but the department refused to say why. Some LBPD insiders speculated that Johnson was removed at the request of the Los Angeles District Attorney because of a conflict of interest. Allegedly, Johnson had hired lawyer Henry Salcido, whom he knew from a homicide case, to defend his own son regarding two alleged sexual assaults.
While some insiders say Johnson retired from LBPD under a cloud in 2019, LBPD has consistently said they have no records regarding sustained findings of misconduct against Johnson. According to public records, Johnson was allowed to retire honorably with pension and benefits.
Rittenhouse case
Johnson in courtroom.
After retirement from LBPD, Johnson was hired as a legal investigator by the Kyle Rittenhouse defense team. It was a high-profile case, and a prestige assignment for Johnson.
On August 25, 2020, Rittenhouse fatally shot Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz. The shootings happened during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse was charged with homicide. During the trial in November 2021, his lawyer successfully argued that Rittenhouse’s actions were in self-defense. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
A woman who once lived near Joseph Rosenbaum and his family contacted the Rittenhouse defense team after the trial. She talked to Rittenhouse spokesman David Hancock, who determined that her testimony would be important in a civil case. Hancock dispatched Todd Johnson to Tucson, Arizona, to investigate the information offered by the woman.
As a private investigator licensed in California but not in Arizona, Johnson was required by law to notify the Arizona Department of Public Safety before conducting an investigation in that state. According to the Licensing Investigation Unit, there is no record that Johnson sought a reciprocal license agreement in Arizona before this visit to Tucson.
On December 8, 2021, Johnson interviewed the witness and drove her to locations in Tucson to interview other potential witnesses. After spending more than five hours with her, Johnson invited the woman to drink with him in the bar of his hotel. She alleges that she and Johnson drank heavily, and that Johnson assaulted her in his hotel room.
The responding Tucson Police officer declined to arrest Johnson, as he wrote in his report, because he wasn’t sure a crime had been committed. Weeks later, the officer amended his police report to assert his own opinion that Johnson’s accuser must be mentally ill.
Johnson again escaped accountability for his choices and actions. That’s why he’s infamous.
KENOSHA, WISCONSIN – NOVEMBER 03: Lead defense attorney Mark Richards (C) and potential defense witnesses Todd Johnson (L) and Steve Spignola attend the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse at the Kenosha County Courthouse on November 3, 2021 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse shot three demonstrators, killing two of them, during a night of unrest that erupted in Kenosha after a police officer shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back while police attempted to arrest him in August 2020. Rittenhouse, from Antioch, Illinois, was 17 at the time of the shooting and armed with an assault rifle. He faces counts of felony homicide and felony attempted homicide. (Photo by Mark Hertzberg-Pool/Getty Images)
