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Guard brutality called rampant
By Thomas Farragher and Francie Latour, Globe Staff, 5/24/2001
Second of three parts
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Gibson, then an 18-year-old detainee at the Nashua Street Jail awaiting trial in a stolen car case, was in a medical unit because he has Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary movements and uncontrollable outbursts. Of the dozens of detainees and inmates who claim to have been beaten in Suffolk County, Gibson was among the youngest and most vulnerable.
''Usually Lenny was quiet,'' said Rosario in a recent interview at a prison visitors room in Bridgewater where he is now being held. ''But then I started noticing weird things about him. Like he would always jump.''
That October day, those outbursts allegedly enraged two guards on the 3-to-11 shift, Lieutenant Eric J. Donnelly and Officer William R. Benson. Donnelly and Benson have been indicted for allegedly assaulting Gibson in an FBI probe of the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department that began in 1999 and is ongoing.
''Donnelly came in and Lenny starts having his problem and the officer yells, `Shut up!,''' Rosario said. ''And Lenny said, `I'm sorry. I can't help it. This is a disease.' Then they promised to slap the Tourette's out of him.''
Rosario, who said he testified twice before the federal grand jury that indicted seven officers last week on brutality charges, recalled watching in horror directly across from Gibson's cell as Benson and Donnelly moved in on the teenager.
''He was screaming,'' Rosario said. ''He was pleading, `Please don't hit me! Stop! I can't help it!' But all you could hear was the pounding. The pounding. He was really hurt.''
Donnelly and Benson, as well as a third guard and a male nurse, were fired or banned from the Nashua Street Jail in connection with Gibson's alleged beating. And last year, another officer, Daniel Hickey, was fired after DNA tests and other evidence showed that he beat an inmate and spit on him inside a transport van.
Gibson's alleged beating is among the most prominent pieces of evidence of what critics call a Suffolk County correction system in disarray - a department dogged by charges that some of its officers not only carried out vicious beatings of male detainees, but coerced sex from female prisoners.
In addition to the mounting criminal and civil suit charges alleging brutality by officers, questions linger about an inmate who died while in custody, allegedly after guards gave him drugs laced with poison, according to a lawsuit.
The revelations, spanning three years, have unfolded under the stewardship of Suffolk County Sheriff Richard J. Rouse, whose response to the scandals has been assailed by critics as largely cosmetic. Two years after alleged wrongdoing first surfaced at the House of Correction, where convicts are held, and at Nashua Street, for detainees, advocates and lawyers for inmates say that the two facilities run by Rouse still inspire fear and hatred, even among hard-core convicts who have done time in state prison.
''When you have this widespread pattern of abuse, the responsibility for it - besides the people who break the bones - lies with management,'' said Peter Costanza, an attorney with Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, an inmate advocacy group. ''And there is no way for management to attempt to put that aside.''
Despite at least 12 firings for serious misconduct in two years, a string of suspensions and demotions, and fresh allegations of sexual misconduct and excessive force as recently as February, Rouse says he still believes the problem lies not with his leadership, but with a select number of rogue guards.
''We have tried to investigate and weed out any problems that we might have in this department. And we do it day in, day out,'' Rouse said in an interview earlier this week at the House of Correction. ''We try to maintain high standards and most of the people participate and live up to the high standards,'' he continued, saying that the sheer number of guards fired or suspended proves his committment to rooting out misconduct.
Jack Sullivan, a union leader for officers at the House of Correction, said this week that the barrage of criticism over official misconduct ignores the majority of Suffolk County correction officers who do honorable work - including saving the lives of inmates or detainees who attempt suicide while in custody.
''In the past six months we've had two inmates who were clinically dead,'' Sullivan said. ''They were blue, and they were brought back to life by officers at South Bay. I'm not going to support people who break the law. But you never, ever hear about the officers who are doing their duty.''
Still, lawyers for more than 50 inmates or former inmates at the House of Correction allege that groups of Rouse's guards brazenly assaulted their clients from 1997 to 1999.
''I don't think a group of people can sit and listen to the facts of this case and not come to the determination that these individuals have had the stuffing knocked out of them in a totally inappropriate manner,'' said attorney Joseph M. Mahaney, who represents 52 current and former inmates in a civil rights lawsuit against Rouse, his top administrators, and scores of guards.
Officials at the FBI and the US Attorney's office said their investigation into brutality continues, but would not comment on whether indictments of the seven jail guards would be followed by more charges out of the House of Correction at South Bay.
Douglas I. Louison, an attorney for the Nashua Street officers under indictment, said any implication that there are systemic beatings at South Bay cannot be supported by the facts.
''One person's beatings is another person's view of appropriate force,'' Louison said. ''The mere fact that the feds are involved doesn't make it more legitimate. It makes it more serious, but not more legitimate.''
After last week's indictments, the guards, through Louison, depicted themselves as hard-working professionals. They denied the allegations and vowed to fight them vigorously at trial. ''[The grand jury] appears to be taking the words of inmates who have every reason to fabricate and attack correction officers,'' Louison said.
The disciplined guards are fighting back on the civil service front as well. Earlier this year, for example, arbitrators reversed either all or part of the punishments handed down by Rouse in the Gibson case. The department is appealing all four arbitration rulings in court.
One former officer at the House of Correction, who is suing Rouse and his department alleging civil rights violations that Suffolk officials deny, said he witnessed guard-on-inmate violence that was widespread. During the time he worked at the prison from late 1995 to the fall of 1998 he said he saw it happen ''more than 20 times.''
''Ninety-five percent of the time it was because a guard didn't like an inmate,'' not because there was a problem with the inmate, said Bruce Baron, who resigned from the department as a deputy sheriff and now lives in New Hampshire.
''They would try to provoke the inmates and then call in the SERT (Sheriff's Emergency Response Team) or try to take care of it themselves,'' said Baron. ''It was a macho thing.''
Portrait of brutality
Baron's allegation would be familiar to the grand jurors to whom the FBI and federal prosecutors made their case earlier this year, sketching a chilling portrait of brutality by officers who - rather than showing restraint when inmates taunted or disobeyed them - meted out beatings to handcuffed prisoners, conspired to cover up the assaults, and lied to investigators.
Among the allegations from last week's indictment:
In June 1998, prosecutors say detainee Reginald Roscoe paid dearly for refusing to have his bag searched. After struggling with an officer over the order, a sheriff's emergency response team led by Lieutenant Randall R. Sutherland responded and handcuffed Roscoe behind his back. As they led Roscoe to another unit, Sutherland talked about ''taking him the hard way.''
Moments later, according to the indictment, Deputy Sheriff Thomas M. Bethune Jr. shoved Roscoe's head into a wall, splitting the skin on his forehead. Roscoe needed five stitches to close the wound.
With the supervising Sutherland still watching, Roscoe was taken to a new cell in the jail's segregation unit, where Bethune is charged with continuing the beating, allegedly slapping and punching his victim in the nose and face until Sutherland gave the word: ''That's enough.''
The indictment charges both Sutherland and Bethune with filing false reports to hide how Roscoe was injured.
Brutality became so routine, the indictment says, that prison officers developed their own lexicon around it. When one officer declared that a detainee needed a ''tickle,'' others knew instinctively what it meant.
In that incident, the indictment alleges that one officer, Lieutenant Donnelly, punctuated the beating of one detainee's ribs, back, legs, and shoulders by exulting: ''This is my jail.''
When the federal probe into the sheriff's department began in October 1999, investigators said they would examine a range of misconduct by officers, including four who allegedly had sex with female inmates, and others charged with beating male inmates. Rouse met with FBI officials at the time and pledged his full cooperation.
Last week, after the indictments of Sutherland, 43, of Randolph, Bethune, 49, of West Peabody, Donnelly, 34, of Brighton, Benson, 49, of Kingston and three others - Deputy Sheriff Anthony Nuzzo, 30, of East Boston, Jail Officer Brian Bailey, 29, of South Boston, and Deputy Sheriff Melvin J. Massucco III, 37, of Revere - Rouse applauded federal investigators for exposing the misconduct.
Yet through his attorneys, Rouse has denied every allegation in the separate lawsuit that alleges systemic brutality a few miles away at the House of Correction.
That lawsuit was triggered in September 1999 when one of the plaintiffs, Anthony Bova, appeared before a judge who was so stunned by Bova's bruises that he instructed a court officer to take photographs. He ordered that Bova not be returned to South Bay, where guards allegedly had beat him while he was handcuffed behind his back, kneeling on the floor, and facing away from the guards who entered his cell.
According to the lawsuit, the officer-on-inmate violence was ''presided over'' by Rouse and carried out with relative impunity by his sworn officers. The allegations range from coarse verbal abuse to jailhouse terrorism, including denying prisoners medication and then beating them for the behavior that resulted from the lack of medication.
''I would say the guard-on-prisoner violence at South Bay for a long time was clearly the worst in the state,'' said Costanza, of Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services. ''We've had less complaints since the federal investigation, but it was a very bad story for a long while.''
Death questioned
In perhaps the most serious allegation of the civil suit, lawyers charge that guards are implicated in the July 1999 death of Alexander Cintron, who died while in the sheriff department's custody.
In the days before Cintron's death, the suit alleges that an unnamed officer ''provided [Cintron] with narcotics or permitted narcotics to be taken by [Cintron]. On information and belief, this was a regular occurrence because [Cintron], when not in prison, had provided certain correctional officers with narcotics.''
According to the suit, the drugs taken by Cintron immediately before his death were ''laced with a certain poison in order to cause his death.''
Cintron was 26 when he died. His death certificate, at the top of a heaping file of records his mother keeps about her son's death, lists the cause of death as ''narcotics intoxication.'' But a few lines down, the report says the manner in which Cintron died remains undetermined.
For Aida Vasquez, Cintron's mother, ''undetermined'' is the word that fills her nightmares. In the living room of her West Quincy home, she keeps a music box with a rose encased in glass, Cintron's last gift to her on Mother's Day 1999. She visits his Hyde Park grave monthly.
''I say the rosary.... That gives me some comfort,'' Vasquez said. ''But you know, I just cannot understand. I ask myself the same question again and again and again. How in the hell could this happen?''
Later, she points to a fading newspaper photograph of Rouse. ''This is the guy who runs that place. Why is he there?
''I put my son in the hands of the Commonwealth,'' she said of her son, who was convicted on drug charges. ''If my son is going to be doing drugs in there, he might as well have been doing it in the street, right?''
According to the medical examiner's report, Cintron did not get up for breakfast on July 25, 1999. He was found lying in his bunk, with no pulse. The previous evening, the report shows, Cintron nodded off repeatedly as he and some other inmates played cards.
''I don't care how many excuses they give me,'' Vasquez said. ''You'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb to not be able to prevent something like this. What happened to procedures?''
The department denies any wrongdoing in the Cintron case.
Vasquez's words echo that of former inmates and even current employees, who say low standards and lax security have increased the chances of drugs entering the department's facilities.
Rosario, in a jailhouse interview at Bridgewater with his attorney James P. Brady of Hingham, said he once witnessed Cintron receiving heroin from a correction officer at South Bay - an exchange Rosario said he reported to the FBI.
Rosario charged that he, too, has suffered at the hands of Suffolk County guards who, he asserted, do not hesitate to use violence. Rosario, who has a history of substance abuse, said he was attacked after guards realized that he had witnessed Gibson's alleged beating on Oct. 16, 1999. Rosario said he was told to keep quiet about what he saw.
''Benson said to me, `Do you want to leave here in a body bag?''' Rosario said. ''I said, `I don't want any problem.'''
Two days later, Assistant Deputy Superintendent Gregory Haugh came to visit Rosario, the inmate said.
''He locked himself into my room. I told him nothing happened and he said to me, `We know you saw something.' He said, `If we say we're going to protect you, we're going to protect you.' He said, `We're not going to allow this to happen.'''
Within hours of Haugh's visit, Rosario said he was being assailed as a snitch by his guards. ''There's a rat in the unit,'' Rosario said, recounting what some correction officers said in his presence.
On Oct. 25, 1999, Rosario, in an affidavit filed with the state Parole Board and supplied by his lawyer to the FBI, described what happened next. He said he was standing in his cell doorway, waiting for a guard to ''turn the electric switch so it would close. That officer walked up beside me and, when I turned, he slammed the metal plate of the door against my head. I saw blood pour out of my forehead.''
Then, Rosario said, an unknown guard ''slapped me and pushed me into my cell.''
Rosario, whose robbery outside a Back Bay ATM machine on Christmas Eve 1997 led to his incarceration, said most of the sheriff's department guards are law-abiding officers ''who will come in and put in eight hours and go home.
''And then there's the others who will come in and put you through eight hours of hell,'' he said. ''The officers should know that this will not be tolerated. I wish more people would come forward instead of worrying about their parole. They shouldn't be silent.''
Matt Carroll of the Globe Staff contributed to this report. Thomas Farragher's e-mail address is farragher@globe.com; Francie Latour can be reached by e-mail at f-latour@globe.com.
Tomorrow: Sheriff Richard J. Rouse.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 5/24/2001.
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rom the gathering darkness of his cell late on a mid-October day in 1999, Rene Rosario says, he saw - and heard - what Suffolk County correction officers did to Leonard Gibson.