Ex-Guard Tells of Brutality, Code of Silence at Corcoran

It’s been two years since guard Roscoe Pondexter walked the cellblocks of Corcoran, two years since he wrapped his big basketball hands around the neck of an inmate and squeezed until the air nearly went out.

“Now don’t you go passing out on me, you hear?” he would whisper as he squeezed a little more, until he heard that tiny gurgle and the inmate had the eyes of someone drowning. That’s when a partner would yank on the inmate’s testicles while two higher-ranking officers stood outside the cell, pretending all was fine and blocking any view inside.

Welcome to a counseling session at Corcoran State Prison, a little attitude adjustment for inmates who needed reminding of the rules. And no guard did it better than 6-foot-7-inch, 270-pound Pondexter.

“We called it Deep Six. It’s like taking a dive underwater and not coming up. You give the prisoner only enough air to hear your message. . . . It wasn’t in the manual. It wasn’t part of the official training. It was grandfathered into me by my sergeant and the sergeant before him.

“It was brutality, but we never left a mark.”

He was once one of California’s most celebrated prep basketball players, a college all-American at Cal State Long Beach drafted by the Boston Celtics. His playing days over, he found himself walking the line inside Corcoran’s Security Housing Unit, staring across bars at some of the most-feared killers in the state.

Like in his hoop game, he didn’t give a damn who was on the other side.

“I’ll be honest with you. I was known as the Bonecrusher. I was used as an intimidation factor. When brute force was needed to get an inmate to comply, they called me in. ‘Pondexter, take care of it.’ ”

Today, two years after being forced to resign for a counseling session that turned into a fight, the 45-year-old Pondexter is a different man. His three children refer to him as Dad One and Dad Two: the father who came home each day but could never leave Corcoran behind, and the father who was stripped of his job only to rediscover the values that his parents, Dust Bowl cotton pickers, had passed on to him.

As part of that awakening, he has decided to expose Corcoran’s brutality, talking to The Times and testifying before a federal grand jury, pointing the finger not only at himself but at those above him who he says sanctioned the violence.

The grand jury has charged eight officers with setting up inmate fights for blood sport at Corcoran, where 50 inmates were wounded or shot dead by guards since 1989. As the FBI expands its probe into alleged brutality and cover-up at the San Joaquin Valley prison, Pondexter has joined the handful of officers who have broken rank and come forward.

“A lot of things I did then I would never do now. But that’s the mentality of the place. That’s the socialization. I didn’t care if someone got raped or if someone got killed by staff. It was just another day’s work. Pushing paper and we’re off again. . . . Bit by bit, I lost my conscience.”

One of a Thousand Crips and Bloods

Pondexter had seen a thousand Eddie Dillards come and go, Crips and Bloods from Compton and Watts, small in stature and big in mouth, punks who gave hard-working black people like himself a bad name.

Dillard was a lightweight by Corcoran standards, a 23-year-old first-timer with a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon. He could have chosen to do his time hassle-free but he made one mistake: He kicked a female officer at Calipatria State Prison and now he found himself inside the Corcoran SHU, where such transgressions did not go unpunished.

Dillard was a marked man. Pondexter said he surmised this as soon as he learned about the transfer form sent down by his sergeant. Dillard, who looked like a skinny teenager, was to be moved into the cell of Wayne Robertson, a big, buffed-up prison enforcer who boasted in official reports that he raped unruly inmates as a favor to Corcoran staff.

Robertson, a murderer serving a life term, wasn’t shy about being called the “Booty Bandit.” He told corrections investigators that any time the SHU supervisors needed an inmate to be “checked,” they could call on him. Depending on his mood, he said, he would either rape or beat them. He got extra food and tennis shoes in return.

“I didn’t know what wrong Dillard had done, but my superiors obviously wanted him punished,” Pondexter said. “Everyone knew about Robertson. He had raped inmates before and he’s raped inmates since.

“He would always tell us, ‘If you have any loudmouths or any inmates you can’t control and need to be taught a lesson, put them in the house with me.’ The Booty Bandit was just one of the tools of punishment that we used.”

If Pondexter had a pang of doubt or pity as he and other officers directed Dillard toward Robertson’s cell that day in March 1993, he does not remember it. He said he was just a grunt following the orders of his commanding officer, Sgt. Alan Decker. Questioning a superior was like questioning a coach. It wasn’t something he had ever done.

“To stand up for Dillard would have meant betraying the code of silence and putting my sergeant on the spot. And I wasn’t going to give up my sergeant.”

‘They Took Something Away From Me’

Eddie Dillard sits in the sparse living room of his tidy apartment in Northridge, not far from the junior college he now attends. His wife, studying to get her master’s degree in psychology, works at a good-paying job. During the day, he tends to their toddler son born a year after his release from prison. He wonders if he is up to the task, wonders if he will ever stop running from that night in Robertson’s cell.

“They took something away from me that I can never replace. I’ve tried so many nights to forget about it, but the feeling just doesn’t go away. Every time I’m with my wife, it comes back what he did to me. I want a close to the story. I want some salvation. But it keeps going on and on.”

His words tumble out in a strong voice, and he is not past anger and tears. He said he has committed the names of each of the officers, what they did and failed to do, to memory.

He has named four officers as defendants in a lawsuit against the state set for trial this fall. His account is backed up by Pondexter, corrections investigative reports, state agents and the statements Robertson made to investigators.

With the exception of Pondexter, none of the named officers, including Decker, responded to requests for interviews. But in court papers, they deny any wrongdoing and their attorney in the civil case said he would wait until the trial to tell their side.

Dillard had been at Corcoran about a week when he was told: “Roll up your crap, you’re moving.” Officer Anthony Sylva and another officer escorted him from one section of the SHU to the other, he said.

Along the way, they informed him that his new cellmate would be Robertson.

“I told them, ‘You can’t put me in there. This guy’s my enemy. He’s a sexual predator.’ ”

A few years earlier, at another prison, Dillard had spurned Robertson’s sexual advances, and this led to a fight. Dillard so feared Robertson that he listed him as an enemy in his personal file. Under prison policy, this alone should have precluded any move into Robertson’s cell.

Dillard said Sylva responded: “It’s happening. Since you like hitting women, we’ve got somebody for you.”

During the move, they were met by Pondexter and Sgt. Decker. Dillard said he lodged more protests, but no one would listen, and he was led to Robertson’s cell. As soon as the door clanged shut, Robertson began to lecture him. He was there because Decker thought he needed to be “taught a lesson on how to do your time,” Robertson told him, according to internal reports. You know better than to be kicking a female officer, he said.

Dillard tried to appeal to Robertson’s street loyalties, reminding him that they came from the same neighborhood. But he said Robertson would hear none of it.

The lights went out and the 230-pound Robertson grabbed at him. Dillard, who weighed 120 pounds, fought back but Robertson was too powerful. He said he pounded on the cell door, banged at it in a way that the guards surely must have heard, but nobody ever came as he was raped.

“It’s not something you can forget. That shame kind of holds you. It’s not like going out and getting hit by a car or something and then a couple of days later you can say, ‘Yeah, I got hit by a car and survived.’ This is kind of something different. It’s like your life is on the line. It feels like you’re being killed. Just slowly.”

When the guards finally did arrive, it was hours too late. Dillard said he told them his life was in danger and hinted that he had been sexually assaulted. He was not more explicit because that would have been snitching, grounds for Robertson to kill him.

He said Officer Joe Sanchez laughed in his face and told him, “You can hit a woman but you can’t fight him back?”

Over the next two days, Dillard said, he was raped again and again. When the cell door later opened, Dillard ran out and refused to go back in.

Officer Michael Coziahr was the only one who showed any interest in what had happened to him, Dillard said. Coziahr got Dillard to admit that he had been raped and called a medical technician to examine him, according to investigative reports.

Coziahr walked up to Robertson’s cell, noticed him smiling, took down his admission. “Yeah, I punked him,” he said Robertson told him. Robertson later marveled how Dillard kept his pride during the assault and didn’t snitch. Of course, he had no choice. “I could have broke his neck,” Robertson told investigators.

Coziahr was angry and hand-carried his report to Sgt. Jeff Jones, but no internal inquiry was ever done, according to investigative reports. Coziahr said a frustrated Jones told him, “What do you want me to do with this? Nobody wants to do anything about it.”

Dillard was supposed to be transferred to an outside hospital for a full rape examination, but the orders were canceled by an unknown officer, the reports show.

Moved to a different cell, Dillard began scrawling out on a sheet of paper the germ of his lawsuit. He said Decker came by and told him to stop making noise or he would be sent back to Robertson’s cell. “No one cared because I was a convicted criminal,” Dillard said. “I somehow deserved it. Society don’t care what happens behind bars.”

Dillard said he understands the impulse to conceal. He said he learned from six years in prison that guards were their own gang, with a peculiar language and walk and code. “They have that same camaraderie as street gangs, the same silence.”

But the tall black officer named Pondexter, who came up to his cell after that first night and politely listened to his complaints but did nothing, somehow troubles him even more than those who laughed in his face.

“I felt like this man is black and he knows what these officers are doing and he is condoning it just by saying nothing,” he said. “I try to rationalize it. He probably needs that job. He don’t need the pressure from his peers. I ask all these questions but I can never find the answers.”

A Conscience Turned Numb

Roscoe Pondexter says Dillard does not know what he knows or where he has been. Not even his own wife, a prison guard herself, fully understands the four years he spent inside the twisted world of the Corcoran SHU, how his conscience turned numb over time, almost imperceptibly, bit by bit.

“You let your conscience take a walk, Roscoe,” his wife, Doris, tries to explain for him. “You did that to survive. You were a foot soldier. It was the guys above, the Hitlers, who were the architects and sent down the orders.”

“I didn’t have a conscience, Doris,” he says, shaking his head.

He was a company man. When he joined up at Corcoran, he said, his superiors confronted him with a choice. You’ll never be trusted until you give us something we can hold over your head. You bleed and we’ll bleed. They taught him pressure points and control holds. How to administer pain and straighten out an inmate without a bruise left behind.

When an inmate rubbed feces all over his body or masturbated in front of a female officer, Pondexter would be called in to counsel.

“The counseling session was all about context, what will be tolerated and what will not be tolerated. It was all about control.”

By his way of thinking, he drew a line and never crossed it. Not once, he said, did he ever beat an inmate or use anything but the force necessary to secure a situation. Once the handcuffs were on, it was over. He said he saw too many officers who got a kick out of gratuitously beating or torturing inmates.

He remembers no turning point, no epiphanies where his eyes suddenly opened and he saw the light. But a few incidents in 1994 and 1995 do stand out. He recalled the inmates who had just arrived from Calipatria Prison, where they had cut an officer’s face. Pondexter said their introduction to Corcoran was being forced to stand barefooted on the scorching asphalt until they collapsed from third-degree burns. Like all the abuse he witnessed, he said, this one was covered up too.

Officers told the medical staff that the injuries occurred while the inmates were playing handball. “One of the guys had no bottoms of his feet left,” Pondexter said. “It was the biggest lie ever told.”

He recalled one beating that a group of officers administered to a convicted child killer in front of several supervisors. The beating was provoked by one supervisor who displayed photographs of the young murder victim--the inmate’s own son.

“He kicked him to death with steel-toed boots and threw his body in a dumpster,” Pondexter said. “The first photo was of the boy smiling and riding a horse at some party. The second photo was his autopsy. The guys went nuts and beat him down right there in the committee room.

“I watched the whole thing. I wasn’t swinging on the guy, but I was right there. I did nothing to stop it because I thought the guy deserved it. I kept my mouth shut. I knew how to keep my mouth shut.”

And then there was the rape of Dillard.

Last year, a special team of corrections investigators tried to make a case against seven officers and supervisors for aiding and covering up the attack. They had the statements of Dillard and Officer Coziahr and an admission from Robertson, who had a dozen prior rapes documented in his prison file.

But Pondexter was among those officers who refused to talk, and the local prosecutor declined to take the case to the grand jury.

Two of the officers were later promoted. Now the FBI is investigating, and Pondexter has agreed to cooperate, recently telling his account of the rape and cover-up to a federal grand jury in Fresno.

“Pondexter is probably the most stand-up officer to come forward,” said a federal source involved in the case.

Lessons of Character

It is Father’s Day 1998, and the pastor at a Baptist church in northeast Fresno is delivering a stemwinder about the value of a good name and how to redeem the reputation tarnished.

“I’d rather be poor with a good name than rich with no name at all,” Pastor Chester McGensy booms. “The character of your name. What you do when your family isn’t watching. It’s worth more than gold.”

He asks those who have strayed to come to the front of the cavernous hall, and Pondexter stands high above them, head bowed and shaven, polished clean.

After the service, he is greeted by those who remember him as one of the finest basketball players to ever come out of Fresno. A few of them know about his time at Corcoran, how it ended with him being fired for what Pondexter describes as little more than a sanctioned counseling session, something he had done a hundred times.

“Roscoe has rebuilt his good family name,” the pastor says. “He’s made his wife, his parents and his children proud of him.”

Back at home, Pondexter is asked what he would do if the clock was turned back five years and Eddie Dillard was pleading with him again from the other side of the bars. There’s a long pause.

“That’s a hard question to answer. First, I believe God has forgiven me, and I forgave myself. I did what I had to do at the time to be a good correctional officer. What do you do to stop it? You’re part of it, man. I probably would have talked to Dillard straight. And I probably would have never let them put him in that cell in the first place.”

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Times staff writer Mark Gladstone contributed to this report.