FBI Discrimination Worsening, Latino Agents Charge : Civil rights: A House panel is told a suit against the bureau changed nothing. Sessions orders remedial steps at eight offices, including L.A.

WASHINGTON —  Two former veteran FBI agents and a current agent charged Thursday that discrimination against Latinos in the bureau has worsened since Latino agents won a class-action suit in 1988 that found the FBI had systematically discriminated against them.

“In the FBI, nobody is punished for discrimination,” Gil Mireles, a San Antonio-based agent, told the House Judiciary subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights.

Paul P. Magallanes, a 21-year Los Angeles agent who retired last year, testified that retaliation even followed him into retirement. He said an FBI official “slandered” him in discussing his qualifications to become Pomona’s police chief--an allegation that was denied by a Pomona city councilman.

As the subcommittee opened a series of hearings on allegations of retaliation against some agents who took part in the unprecedented lawsuit, FBI Director William S. Sessions directed his chief of equal employment opportunity to meet with agents in eight field offices, including Los Angeles, who were plaintiffs in the suit.

He instructed his chief to detail any reprisals the agents may have suffered and to report the results personally to him. He also ordered sensitivity training for management and all agents in offices where allegations of discrimination have been made, including Los Angeles.

At the House hearing, Mireles, who joined the FBI in 1972, told of his career turning downhill after he gave testimony in the discrimination suit. Until then, “I had been involved in everything the FBI did,” Mireles said. He cited 17 collateral duties he had been assigned to, including the SWAT team, defense-tactics instruction and arms instruction.

But Mireles said that after he testified, he was turned down for a police coordinator position and was denied a bureau car.

“I tried to do my job, but everywhere I turned I ran into a roadblock,” Mireles said. He filed a series of equal employment opportunity complaints, but made clear he has little faith in the process.

“There’s just no power in the EEO process,” Mireles said. “It’s still as bankrupt a system as the day we went to court.”

Asked by Rep. Robert W. Kastenmeier (D-Wis.) if the discrimination had grown worse since the suit, Mireles said: “Definitely worse--not only me, but other agents.”

Magallanes said he was offered the police chief’s job in Pomona last October, four months after he retired from the FBI. But he charged he later learned that an FBI official, whom he did not identify, had slandered him in discussing his qualifications with Pomona City Councilman Mark Nymeyer.

He said he regarded the incident as “retaliation against me for my participation in the lawsuit.”

Magallanes contended that the FBI official described him as a “mediocre administrator” who “would promote every Hispanic in the police department.”

Nymeyer, in a telephone interview, said he had attempted to question Lawrence G. Lawler, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles division, about Magallanes. However, Lawler “never said one negative thing about him. He said it was against the FBI’s code of ethics to make any comment about any employee” or former employee, Nymeyer said.

Nymeyer, interim minister of the Central Baptist Church in Pomona, said Magallanes turned down the chief’s job after the Pomona Police Department conducted a background check of him, and Magallanes concluded “the situation had become politicized.”

Lawler could not be reached, and both office spokesmen were off for the day, Lawler’s office said.