COUNTY/USC CHILD PORN INVESTIGATED FIFTY COMPUTERS CONFISCATED.

Byline: Troy Anderson Staff Writer

Investigators confiscated 50 computers at Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center as part of a widening investigation of child pornography, officials said Tuesday.

The county Auditor-Controller's Office seized the personal computers Feb. 22 in the hospital's facilities department, and investigators have been examining them since then.

``The reason for the confiscation and search for pornographic materials was prompted by the discovery of a website with child pornography on a county-owned computer,'' Victor Turner, a captain in the medical center's Office of Public Safety, wrote in a Feb. 23 memo that disclosed that the inquiry also focused on a manager.

``It's an ongoing criminal investigation,'' Patrick McMahon, audit division chief in the county Auditor-Controller's Office, said Tuesday.

District Attorney's Office spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons confirmed that her office is investigating the individual.

County/USC officials did not return calls for comment.

The computers were taken from the hospital's building crafts unit, which maintains the facilities and employs such workers as plumbers, painters, electricians and carpenters.

The FBI arrested an employee of the building crafts unit in 1999 on suspicion of possession of child pornography on a county-owned computer, county Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich said in a prepared statement disclosing the current investigation.

The current probe is intended to find out ``whether a child pornography ring was operating with the building crafts unit,'' Antonovich said.

Sachi Hamai, chief of the county Department of Health Services' Inspection and Audit Division, said the employee arrested in 1999 no longer works for the hospital and that the manager now under investigation is not working while the investigation is under way.

She declined to release their names.

``It's appalling,'' she said. ``We are now doing random computer tests to see if other individuals are involved in this.''

Hamai said the health department is considering taking disciplinary action against supervisors who may have been aware of the situation but did nothing.

``Obviously, I'd have to say that supervision over staff may not have been as appropriate as it should have been,'' she said.

Hamai said the man under investigation ``had a wealth of information on his computer. In other words, he had a wealth of child pornography on his computer. He had it on a hard drive. It was saved to his disks.''

As part of their investigation, Hamai said, investigators are scanning the hard disks of about three computers a day to determine whether more child pornography has been saved.

Office of Public Safety Chief Bayan Lewis said investigators haven't established the extent of the problem at County/USC.

``We have not established that there is a ring,'' Lewis said.

The revelations come at a time of upheaval at the county hospital, the nation's largest public hospital.

On March 14, county health Director Mark Finucane announced his resignation. The next day, County/USC Medical Center Executive Director Roberto Rodriguez announced his resignation.

The resignations, compounded by the forced resignation of county medical director Dr. Donald Thomas III last year and a number of other high-level vacancies, leaves the agency flailing as it faces an $884 million deficit in five years.