Keeping Justice at Bay

After a federal court denounced Pelican Bay State Prison as an instrument of wholesale brutality in 1995, state officials pledged to reform the super-maximum penitentiary.

A fresh team of state investigators was brought in with one charge: to stop the abuse of inmates and root out rogue guards.

But just a few months into the job, the internal affairs team was stripped of its investigative powers when it tried to pursue a group of officers suspected of setting up stabbings, shootings and beatings of inmates, documents and interviews show.

The team was stopped at a crucial point in its investigation after the prison guards union raised objections about the probe to state corrections officials. The powerful union, which backed the accused officers, complained repeatedly about the investigation to the warden, and to top officials in the Department of Corrections and the Wilson administration.

The warden cut short the probe, and the investigators then found themselves the subject of repeated investigations by the Corrections Department.

Instead of being allowed to finish a wider probe that might have uncovered a far-reaching conspiracy to brutalize inmates, team members say they were only able to gather enough evidence to convict one guard earlier this year.

The FBI is now investigating the same officers who were under scrutiny by the internal affairs unit.

“The department pulled our teeth,” said Capt. Dan Smith, who headed the internal affairs probe. “We were ordered not to go down certain paths, and our ability to finish the job was taken away. . . . The department let us down and it let itself down.”

Del Norte County Dist. Atty. Bill Cornell, whose office oversaw the criminal probe at the isolated North Coast prison, agreed.

“The union was able to close ranks and prevent the internal affairs unit from completing its investigative task,” he said. “It was a difficult investigation to begin with, and when you add in the political influence that the union wields, the task became incomprehensible.”

Officials with the Corrections Department, the union and the Wilson administration deny that the probe was derailed because of union pressure. Lawyers for the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. say the union did nothing more than stand up for the rights of the accused officers and point out deficiencies in a slipshod internal investigation.

“The theme that ‘the big bad union interferes with state investigation’ is a theme I reject,” said Ron Yank, a San Francisco labor lawyer representing the union. “How about another theme? ‘The Department of Corrections grows too fast and has inexperienced investigators who end up delivering a shoddy investigation.’ ”

But interviews and documents show that the investigators conducted a complex criminal and administrative probe in a professional manner. After winning the trust of key witnesses, the internal affairs unit was prohibited from pursuing several officers suspected of brutality, a Times investigation found. The team encountered some of the same roadblocks that later stymied state investigators who attempted to uncover set-up rapes and other alleged crimes at Corcoran State Prison.

The Pelican Bay case offers a window into the clout of the prison guards union, which has contributed generously to both major parties over the last decade, including nearly $1.5 million in direct and indirect donations to Gov. Pete Wilson.

The union, which has also backed Gov.-elect Gray Davis, has gained sufficient influence to emerge as an almost equal partner in the state’s $4-billion-a-year prison system. With the union looking over its shoulder, documents and interviews show, the Corrections Department has been timid in pursuing and weeding out brutal guards--even when such reforms have been mandated by a federal court.

Since 1994, the FBI has twice taken the unusual step of investigating a California prison, responding to the state’s inability to police its own penal system.

The federal civil rights probe at Pelican Bay has found evidence of an inmate murder and stabbings allegedly engineered by veteran officers seeking control over their prison yard, according to federal sources familiar with the probe.

Federal prosecutors won’t say if the union has emerged as a target in the case. The union has been under scrutiny by federal authorities examining brutality and cover-up at Corcoran.

In the summer of 1995, spurred by the federal court ruling to clean up Pelican Bay, the newly assigned internal affairs team began digging into the prison’s dark corners. The team soon uncovered evidence that a handful of officers was directing a group of inmates to stab and beat other inmates, many of them convicted child molesters. The officers, it was alleged, were rewarding their inmate cohorts with extra time outside their cells, fast-food burritos, Jack Daniels whiskey and silk underwear for conjugal visits.

But a few months into the investigation, the union began to file complaints about the honesty and work methods of the internal affairs team.

Warden Steve Cambra responded to the complaints by ordering the investigators to stop tracking down any evidence that led to the suspect officers, according to interviews and documents.

Union officials went to greater lengths--even violating state codes, according to a Corrections Department probe--to have the case thrown out and the internal affairs team disbanded. The union president and vice president at Pelican Bay conducted an unauthorized inquiry into the internal affairs unit itself, trailing the team’s movements.

The union’s complaints over the next 18 months prompted the Department of Corrections to order repeated probes--half a dozen in all--of the internal affairs team.

Corrections officials ultimately determined that most of the union’s charges against the four-member team were false or unwarranted. Except for a few mistakes due to zeal and inexperience, the reviews found, the team conducted an admirable investigation under great pressure.

By that time, however, corrections officials had reined in and removed the investigators. Capt. Smith was the first to go. Warden Cambra reassigned him to a desk in a far-off storage room, where he reviewed mental health manuals for two months--Pelican Bay’s version of Siberian exile.

“There were so many investigations and audits of us, I lost track,” said Lt. Chet Miller, a member of the team that now handles inmate transport. “The department didn’t stand firm beside us. They didn’t tell the union, ‘No, we’re not going to do another investigation.’ ”

Cambra, who has been promoted to chief deputy of the Corrections Department, denies that anyone in management bowed to union pressure and cut short the investigation. Cambra said he ordered the team not to pursue certain officers after those officers--and their union reps--accused the team of rigging testimony and forging documents. He did so, he said, in order to maintain the integrity of the probe.

“I felt that the type of system we wanted at Pelican Bay was if people raised allegations, they should be looked at,” he said. “Union reps came to me frequently to complain about the investigators, their methods. They wanted them removed. I called the department’s chief investigator in Sacramento and said, ‘Give these guys an audience.’ ”

Between late 1995 and mid-1997, the union’s executive vice president raised repeated objections to the probe in meetings with Thomas Maddock, Wilson’s undersecretary for the agency overseeing prisons. Maddock said he asked department officials to take a hard look at the investigators--even though they had been cleared again and again by earlier reviews.

“I firmly believe that your internal affairs people are held to a higher standard, and if there is a complaint about the quality, you need to get on that now,” he said in an interview.

Dist. Atty. Cornell said the constant second-guessing and examinations of the internal affairs team, coupled with the order not to pursue certain officers, curtailed the investigation. He says more corrupt guards might have been charged and prosecuted by his office if the Department of Corrections had stood by the team.

“Those four investigators are extremely competent and among the most ethical I’ve ever dealt with from the state of California,” said Cornell, who has had his own battles with the union. “They weren’t given the support they needed from Sacramento, and that’s where the problem lies. . . . I know they were frustrated. They never got to the bottom of all the allegations.”

What the team did manage to piece together led to the firing of one officer and a 14-week criminal trial of another officer in Crescent City this year. Officer Jose Garcia was charged with eight felony counts in connection with a scheme to shoot and stab convicted child molesters, then reward the inmates who helped him carry out the attacks.

During the trial, prosecutors named other officers, including a sergeant and a veteran guard, as uncharged co-conspirators.

The investigation and trial, the longest in Del Norte County history, provide an unusual look into the caste system of a prison. Behind the walls, testimony showed, the gang hit man stands on top and the child molester sits at the very bottom, trying desperately to disguise his crime. Guards such as Garcia routinely use inmate “shot-callers” to keep peace and do their bidding, and gifts and debts flow back and forth across the line.

During the trial, the judge remarked that there was enough evidence for a jury to conclude that the union had tried to interfere with the investigators. That the jury ended up disregarding Garcia’s defense and believing his accusers--killers and child molesters labeled “vermin” by the prosecutor himself--became vindication for the internal affairs unit. Garcia was found guilty of four felony counts and sent to prison.

But the significance of the Pelican Bay investigation may have more to do with the politics and relationships beyond the walls of California’s highest-security prison.

The clout of the union, documents and interviews show, has not always been exercised in the name of better wages and working conditions.

First at Pelican Bay and then at Corcoran, the union has taken on the cause of a number of guards accused of brutality and blocked state investigators from pursuing allegations of set-up murders, rapes and stabbings.

The investigators at Pelican Bay say line officers who choose to break the code of silence--or internal affairs officers who aggressively investigate brutal guards--risk the wrath of the union and retaliation by their own department.

They say the department’s decision to yield to the union and disband the team has sent a chilling message to any successors. The team that replaced them has been criticized by a federal court monitor for not being aggressive enough and allowing possible wrongdoing to go unpunished.

Brutality Behind Bars

Pelican Bay was billed as a triumph of high-tech prison architecture, a futuristic design that would maximize punishment and minimize peril to officers. Built in the state’s far northwest corner, where the redwoods meet the rocky coast, the prison turned barbarous shortly after it opened in 1989.

Testimony in the 1995 class action civil rights lawsuit showed that brutality was not only common to the prison’s Security Housing Unit, but had spilled into the general population units, the “A” and “B” yards.

Guards had shot and killed prisoners engaged in fistfights. Inmates who defied prison rules were thrown naked into outdoor cages and left in the freezing rain. Guards forced one mentally ill black inmate who had smeared his body with feces into a bath of scalding water, holding him down until clumps of his skin melted off.

Although most officers were hard-working and honest, a significant number of rogue guards had free rein, the court found. Their acts of violence weren’t for the purpose of prison security, but for the goal of inflicting pain on inmates. The abuse was being condoned by corrections officials up the ladder to Sacramento.

“Dry words on paper cannot adequately capture the senseless suffering and sometimes wretched misery that the defendants’ unconstitutional practices leave in their wake,” wrote U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson.

At the heart of the abuse and cover-up in the early 1990s, the court found, was a code of silence among officers. Henderson cited testimony from one captain that officers were discouraged by the prison guards union from revealing abuses. Internal investigations were so thoroughly corrupted that excessive force was found to have taken place just four times in three years. Only once was any discipline meted out.

Henderson’s landmark decision in 1995 forced California to reform the prison. As part of the make-over, Cambra was installed as warden and the new team of internal investigators was formed and given a free hand to pursue brutality and cover-ups.

Each member of the unit--Capt. Smith, Lts. Miller and Mark Roussopoulos and Sgt. Craig Franklin--had arrived at Pelican Bay the day it opened. Their selection to the team meant overlooking a glaring deficiency: not one of the officers had worked a single day as an investigator.

“The only training we had was a two-week course,” Roussopoulos said. “We learned by doing. You know, ‘Don’t touch that stove, it’s hot.’ ”

Superiors said the four were recruited for the investigative unit because of their smarts and integrity. But two team members acknowledge that they did carry blemishes. Franklin had forcibly restrained and injured an inmate and not disclosed the fact in an official report. Smith was reprimanded in the late 1980s for overlooking an incident at Folsom State Prison in which one of his officers shot an inmate.

Among many staffers at Pelican Bay, however, Smith had earned a different reputation: He was a bullheaded, by the book supervisor who didn’t condone brutality.

Investigation Is Launched

In the summer of 1995, under Smith’s command, the internal affairs unit got a tip that guards were smuggling drugs and weapons into the prison. The guards, it turned out, were clean. But the investigators kept tripping over the names of another clique of officers.

Inmate after inmate pointed to the clique as the reason for so much violence in the “A” yard. The group included Sgt. Mike Powers, 53, Officer David Lewis, 52, Officer Jose Garcia, 42, and others.

Powers, a charismatic veteran who had also worked at Folsom, was the alleged ringleader. Under his direction, inmates told investigators, the officers were using predatory inmates, or “hitters,” to carry out beatings, shootings and stabbings of child molesters and other prisoners.

According to corrections investigative reports and court exhibits, Lewis, Garcia and others were sneaking into confidential prison files and retrieving paperwork that identified inmates as child molesters, or “chesters.” They were then passing the secret files to inmate shot-callers, demanding that something be done.

“Why aren’t the white inmates taking care of the chesters? Why do we have to keep shooting them?” Lewis asked one inmate leader, according to statements in the investigative reports.

Lewis and Garcia also shared a deep hatred for black prisoners, according to the reports. Lewis openly addressed black inmates as “Hey, you in the black gorilla suit.”

When it came to dealing with the white inmates who carried out the attacks, Garcia showed a more generous side. The rewards he parceled out may have seemed scant in the outside world, but they were gifts of gold in prison: extra time wandering the halls, shrimp cocktails, roast beef sandwiches, tattoo ink, sewing needles, a $100 bill, chocolates filled with liquors and containers of whiskey for New Year’s Eve.

The allegations were hard to fathom for some members of the internal affairs team. They found it hard to believe that such abuses were still taking place in 1994 and late 1995--even as the federal court was scrutinizing Pelican Bay. And then there was Garcia, a decorated officer with a reputation for extreme politeness who talked in barely audible “Yes sirs” and “No sirs.”

Garcia was well known in the close-knit logging and prison communities along the California-Oregon border. A holder of nine black belts in three fighting styles, he taught martial arts to children.

Inmates told the internal affairs team that Garcia freely shared his martial arts knowledge with them too. According to official documents and later court testimony, Garcia advised two inmates that they stood a far better chance of killing a child molester if they stabbed him from the side. Garcia then instructed his cohorts to raise the child molester’s arm and plunge the knife under his armpit, ensuring a strike to the back of the heart.

During the subsequent attack, however, the assailant decided instead to slash the victim’s throat with a razor, wounding him.

The allegations, disturbing as they were, didn’t surprise Capt. Smith. He had long wondered if the Powers-Garcia clique was behind a dramatic increase in assaults in the yard. Only months earlier, an investigator from Sacramento had pursued the same allegations before hitting a wall of silence.

Smith knew he had to take extra care with the case. He and Powers didn’t get along, hard feelings that dated to when both worked at Folsom.

Attorneys for Garcia and the other officers say the bad blood blinded Smith and fueled an out-of-control investigation. They say Smith mistakenly saw something evil in the close ties between the officers and inmates. In reality, the gifts were part of the long-standing give-and-take relationships that govern prisons, they say. Guards often dole out perks to inmates who help keep peace and provide useful intelligence.

“These guys are straight, honorable cops who became victims of a doctored investigation,” said Bob Noel, a San Francisco attorney who represented Garcia and Powers.

“This whole investigation was motivated by the personal bile of Dan Smith,” he said. “The first words out of Smith’s mouth when he took over the unit was, ‘Powers is dirty and now I’m going to get him and his buddies.’ ”

The three investigators under Smith deny ever hearing such a vow. They say they stumbled, almost by accident, onto the alleged plot. The allegations were given credence only because the accounts of inmates--victims and assailants--were strikingly consistent. Even so, one member of the team, Lt. Miller, remained skeptical throughout the early probe.

“You know how you can tell when an inmate is lying?’ ” Miller explained. “His lips are moving.”

But everything changed when Tommy Branscum’s lips began to move.

Crucial Information

Branscum had arrived at Pelican Bay in 1992 to serve a 15-year-to-life sentence for second degree murder in Yolo County. He bench-pressed 515 pounds and quickly assumed leadership status in the “A” yard.

In December 1994, according to internal reports and later court testimony, he was working in the dining hall when Officer Garcia pointed to a window and instructed him to watch. Branscum said he watched as one inmate approached another inmate and stabbed him. He knew then that Garcia was privy to the secrets of inmates.

Over the next several weeks, according to investigative reports and court testimony, Garcia approached Branscum again and again, each time carrying confidential paperwork revealing another child molester in the unit. Branscum said that Garcia’s instructions to him were simple: “Handle it.” In at least one instance, according to court testimony, Garcia and Sgt. Powers recruited Branscum to beat an inmate who wasn’t a child molester.

Like other inmate witnesses implicated in the plot, Branscum agreed to talk only after investigators assured him that measures would be taken to protect his safety. The team knew that the most difficult and dangerous step for an inmate wasn’t betraying another inmate, but informing on a guard.

It was late in the interview when Branscum thought to give investigators the single piece of information that would break open the case. He told them Officer Garcia had brought him gifts--Southern Comfort whiskey, silk boxer shorts, a men’s cosmetic set with Eternity cologne--for conjugal visits. Branscum’s wife had taken the gifts home.

Branscum told investigators that he had become so tight with Garcia that the officer even gave him a photo. It was a picture of a burly Garcia in a black Batman T-shirt surrounded by his beloved Dobermans. It, too, had gone home with his wife.

“We drove to see his wife and she brings out this picture and I secure it in the evidence envelope and put it in the trunk of the car, and I felt nauseous,” Lt. Miller recalled. “I wanted to throw up because, with that picture in my hand, I knew that a fellow peace officer was dirty.”

Over the next two months, the internal affairs team gathered evidence and firsthand accounts from two dozen child molesters, inmate hitters and officers corroborating a series of beatings, stabbings and throat slashings tied to the same conspiracy. Allegations about a set-up murder and two attempted murders were yet to come.

In one assault, the investigators would find, Garcia went so far as to release a young, muscular inmate and an older child molester into the same room. Garcia directed the child molester to a specific seat and told him to wait.

A few seconds later, the 250-pound inmate struck the child molester in the head, knocking him across the room. Garcia then took aim with a 37-millimeter gas gun and fired three rounds of rubber blocks at the child molester, who was curled in a fetal position. None of the blocks hit him.

Guards Union Fights Back

An investigator and prosecutor from Del Norte County, who had been working with the internal affairs team, confronted Garcia in September 1995. Garcia, accompanied by a union attorney, refused to talk.

Then the prison investigators, with their insiders’ knowledge of the case, sat down to interview Garcia.

He insisted that he knew nothing about smuggling alcohol or setting up assaults on child molesters. The investigators said they tried playing on his “Ninja honor.” They tried shoving the physical evidence in his face. Garcia kept changing his story, according to interviews and internal affairs reports. At first he denied knowing inmate Branscum, but Garcia eventually admitted that he and Branscum were friends because “Branscum is a warrior and I’m a warrior.”

“We walked him [Garcia] off the prison grounds and two hours later, he called and apologized for lying,” Capt. Smith recalled. “The next day, he leveled an allegation against me, and by Monday, I was under investigation.”

Garcia, with the backing of the union, called a special corrections agent in Sacramento and alleged that Capt. Smith was dirty. Two years earlier, he claimed, Smith had covered up for an officer who manhandled an inmate.

Corrections officials dispatched two special agents to Pelican Bay to investigate the allegations against Smith. He was cleared of any wrongdoing, but a week later he was facing a new allegation brought by another officer under investigation. This time, Smith and Miller were accused of covering up a brutality incident four years earlier.

Corrections officials sent another pair of special agents to Pelican Bay to investigate the charges. Again, Smith and Miller were cleared. But the counterattack was only beginning, documents show.

In October 1995, as the internal affairs team began to track down even more serious allegations of a set-up murder by staff, the investigators ran into a union buzz saw. First came letters to Warden Cambra from union attorneys alleging that the team was threatening and coercing officers into talking.

Then the union’s president and vice president at Pelican Bay, Charles Alexander and Richard Newton, began their own probe--an investigation into the investigation. The department would later find that Alexander and Newton had engaged in “inappropriate and questionable activity” by conducting an unauthorized probe and obtaining confidential documents under the guise of union business.

But at the time, top corrections officials did almost nothing to stop the two union leaders, state documents and interviews show.

While Cambra denied a union grievance against the investigators, he agreed to a series of union demands that handcuffed the internal affairs team. First, he allowed Newton and Alexander to be present while the team interviewed officer witnesses. Investigators said the presence of the union leaders stifled the flow of information, muzzling witnesses who didn’t want to talk in front of a union rep.

“We would be interviewing a witness about an accused officer and Newton and Alexander would be acting like lawyers not for the witness, but for the accused,” Miller said. “It was a tremendous restriction.”

Attorneys for the union say Newton and Alexander had every reason to safeguard the rights of officers and second-guess the internal affairs team. “I just find it laughable that Capt. Smith and his crew claim they couldn’t investigate because the union was representing its members and filed some charges against them,” said labor lawyer Yank.

Barely two months into the investigation, as the team was tracking down important leads on the prime suspects, Cambra called Smith into his office. Responding to complaints by officers and union reps, he ordered the team not to pursue any more leads on the officers.

The investigation was curtailed at a critical juncture, investigators say. They had persuaded a few prisoners and staff to talk about two inmate stabbings in 1992--one of them fatal--and a 1994 shooting in which Officer Lewis nearly killed a child molester.

The back-to-back stabbings were carried out by a black inmate named Cedric Davis. Davis had used a sharpened metal clip from a clipboard to stab both victims, one of whom was a child molester. The internal affairs team received information that Garcia and possibly one other officer had helped set up the slaying and the other stabbing.

The investigators also interviewed officers who raised questions about a June 1994 shooting in the “A” yard in which Lewis nearly killed a child molester. The victim, who had been assaulted by an inmate wielding a razor, was bleeding badly. Though the molester was not the aggressor in the fight, Lewis fired a round that struck him in the chest.

The shooting review board cleared Lewis of any wrongdoing, but several other prison guards told the internal affairs team that the shooting was not justified. In addition, one bystander told investigators that he overheard a discussion about the assault and shooting before it happened. He said he distinctly heard the attacker being told by another inmate to hit the child molester and then back off, so an officer could then shoot the molester.

Lewis, in an interview with The Times, said he has been unfairly implicated in the case. “If I was a co-conspirator, why wasn’t I charged with anything?” He denied any plot to shoot the molester. “If I’ve done something, tell me the charges, show me the evidence. There was never anything. . . . I just happened to be there on overtime that day.”

The two Davis stabbings and the molester shooting are now part of the FBI probe, according to sources close to the federal investigation.

However tantalizing the leads on Garcia and Lewis, Cambra told the internal affairs team that it couldn’t pursue them. Cambra said the complaints by the accused officers and the union gave him little choice but to curtail the investigators. By doing so, he hoped to keep the investigation clean of any taint.

Important leads weren’t ignored but passed on to special corrections investigators in Sacramento, he said. These investigators were able to uncover enough evidence for him to fire Lewis and suspend Garcia.

Cambra said the department remains committed to finding the full truth. Two state agents--including one from the old internal affairs team--are now assisting the FBI in its civil rights probe.

“I believe what Rick [Newton] and Chuck [Alexander] were doing was making it very difficult for the investigators,” Cambra said. “Clearly, it turned into a counter assault. Initially the investigation was impeded. . . . But if their motive was to shut it down, it didn’t work.”

The internal affairs investigators and prosecutors in Del Norte County disagree. They said the special agents sent in from the outside couldn’t do the allegations justice. The agents didn’t know the turf, didn’t have the sources and spent most of their time investigating union allegations against the internal affairs unit.

“Nothing against [the special agents], but we were the ones breaking open this case,” Smith said. “We were blocked, thwarted, whatever word you want to use. The union interfered with our job and the department caved in. When all got said and done here, we had one person [Garcia] arraigned.”

Smith and the others say they have high regard for Cambra, but that he didn’t stand firm in the toughest hour. At the time, Cambra was still facing state Senate confirmation and the prison was rife with speculation that the union was threatening to oppose him if he didn’t restrict the investigation.

“When the union says it can stop your confirmation, that’s not blowing smoke,” Miller said. “That’s a viable threat.”

Miller, a union member, and the others said the investigation underscored the power that the union has managed to accrue over the past decade, as California has undertaken the most massive prison buildup in the nation’s history.

The union, which has grown to 28,000 members, has been fairly blessed. In addition to a 12% pay hike this year, it has won approval for several correctional officers to get paid full time while doing nothing but union work.

Chapter President Alexander, a taxpayer-funded union rep, along with Newton violated state codes by copying and removing inmate records without authorization, according to a Corrections Department probe and local prosecutors.

The department undertook the probe of Newton and Alexander after the internal affairs team filed formal complaints against union officials for impeding its criminal investigation. The department also found that the two union leaders had maliciously filed false complaints against the investigators and misused their authority as union reps.

But Cal Terhune, state director of corrections, disagreed with his staff and sided with the union, declining to discipline the two reps. “I just did not feel it was a clear-cut case,” he said, “and I felt the quicker we could put this whole controversy at Pelican Bay to bed, the quicker we could move on.”

Alexander and Newton declined repeated requests for interviews.

County prosecutors considered filing criminal charges against the pair. “But given all the hell they gave us on Garcia, we decided against it,” said Jim Fallman, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted Garcia. “But that doesn’t excuse the department from not disciplining them.”

Relentless Scrutiny

By the time the internal affairs team was disbanded in 1997, the investigators had faced three more probes of their work. In one complaint, the union told Maddock, the governor’s prison undersecretary, that the team was buying the cooperation of witnesses by promising inmates soft landings at other prisons.

Maddock asked corrections officials to look into the union’s charges, and special agents were dispatched to Pelican Bay once again. Corrections officials found that the team had made some rookie mistakes, lying to one inmate about being tape-recorded and omitting positive information about one accused officer. But they determined that none of the mistakes were salient.

“I think they did a thorough job,” said Brian Parry, head of the Corrections Department’s Special Security Unit, who reviewed the team’s work. “The allegation was that they were coercing inmates to lie about staff. And my review did not substantiate that.”

Last January, a Del Norte County jury found Garcia guilty of participating in an assault on one child molester, conspiring to arrange further beatings and two counts of possessing alcohol on state grounds. He was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison.

But the charges and counter-charges continue to fly. The union, upset with the district attorney for prosecuting the case, this spring poured $18,000--a county record--into the campaign to unseat Cornell from office. Cornell attacked the union as carpetbaggers trying to dictate local politics, and won resoundingly.

Now Garcia and the other officers are suing the district attorney, the internal affairs team and the Department of Corrections, alleging civil rights violations. The members of the internal affairs team, who claim their careers have stalled, sued the union for defamation. The case was dismissed and the investigators were ordered to pay the union’s legal bills. They are now appealing.

For the past nine months, the FBI has been tracking down inmate witnesses as part of the civil rights investigation into the actions of Garcia, Powers, Lewis and others, according to sources. Branscum and fellow inmate witnesses, moved to other prisons for protection, say they have been assaulted by officers and inmates--retaliation for cooperating with the internal affairs team.

“We won’t know the full extent of the conspiracy until the FBI has finished,” said Smith, who remains a captain at the prison. “The work we weren’t allowed to do, they’re now doing. Thank goodness.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

BACKGROUND

This is the latest installment in a continuing look into abuses of inmates in California’s high-tech prison system. Times reporters Mark Arax and Mark Gladstone based this story on dozens of interviews with corrections officials, union attorneys, inmates and investigators and the review of thousands of pages of court documents, trial testimony and internal corrections memos. Previous stories documented brutality by guards at Corcoran State Prison and a practice of questionable shootings statewide. The stories are available on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/prison