PROBES AT NASSAU JAIL FACED A DECADE-LONG ARRAY OF OBSTACLES

Derek Harris told investigators at the Nassau County jail that
corrections officers hit him in the head with his own shoes, spit in
his sandwich and menacingly asked, "So you like to rape girls?" Joseph
Barbati said corrections officers sprayed a fire extinguisher in his
face and then said, "Whoops, I'm sorry" before pummeling him. In all,
eight inmates told internal affairs investigators that corrections
officers had tormented them, hit them or tacitly encouraged other
inmates at the Nassau County Correctional Center to beat them. But in
1994, at the end of a two-year inquiry during which no jail staff were
interviewed, Sheriff Joseph Jablonsky's internal affairs unit
concluded there was not enough evidence to begin a criminal
investigation. It was a familiar ending: Over the course of a decade
in which the county struggled to find an effective way to investigate
scores of inmate complaints, no officer has ever been convicted of
mistreating an inmate. Between 1991 and January, when inmate Thomas
Pizzuto was allegedly beaten to death by officers, only six were ever
punished by jail administrators for excessive force. "Unlike with a
street crime, your witnesses were either correction officers or inmates.

When you put an accuser on the stand, oftentimes your accuser can have
a criminal record," said William Cook, a prosecutor in District
Attorney Denis Dillon's special investigation office from 1987 to
1991. "I saw cases where I thought they were credible.

But to think an inmate might be credible and to prove an inmate was
right were two different things." Efforts to investigate these cases
were further complicated by territorial disputes among Nassau's top
authorities, a never-ending backlog of cases, and union rules that
hampered investigators' efforts to find informants. Confidential case
files and interviews show that delays sometimes thwarted the jail's
investigators as they tried to track down often unreliable witnesses
who were many times in another institution or back on the street.

And Jablonsky and Dillon acted like outfielders both thinking the
other was going to catch a fly ball. While the district attorney
assumed jail administrators would follow up on cases that could not
meet the high standard of proof needed in criminal courts, the sheriff
interpreted Dillon's decisions not to prosecute as tantamount to
exonerations. "I was just surprised that in all the cases that came to
us, there wasn't one where with their reduced burden they could go
ahead and do something," Dillon said. But the sheriff said his staff
found no administrative rules were broken. "I am not second-guessing
the district attorney," Jablonsky said. "The ones that come back to us
as unsubstantiated, I believe, are unsubstantiated. They don't say,
'Well, we are going to rate it from zero to 10; zero means baloney,
and if it were a 10 we would have indicted.' " In addition, squabbling
between County Executive Thomas Gulotta and Nassau lawmakers
squandered the opportunity for a potential independent reviewer.

Gulotta and lawmakers left vacant the Board of Visitors, which Nassau
establi shed in 1990 to oversee inmate conditions, because they could
not agree on its membership. Gulotta's stewardship of the jail has
irritated the district attorney, who has advocated a number of changes
over the years. "I think the county executive should take some
responsibility for making these decisions," Dillon said. "I think that
certain conditions have developed here. It may be in hindsight to look
back and say he should have done certain things we asked him to do,
but I think if he had done it, I don't think we would have had this
situation develop." Gulotta declined to be interviewed for this story,
issuing a three-paragraph statement promising "swift and appropriate
action" if federal investigators find pervasive problems.

Nassau's scant record of taking action against officers has left many
people, from inmate lawyers to federal prosecutors who began probing
the jail after Pizzuto's death, doubting whether the East Meadow
facility is equipped to investigate itself. "Their whole philosophy
was that jails are dangerous places and people get hur t," said
Stephen Civardi, the lawyer who represented Thomas Donovan Jr., an
inmate accused of a sex offense who won a $500,000 settlement in a
lawsuit alleging a beating. "In a way, being violent toward prisoners
over time became a badge of honor." A STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL A decade
before four corrections officers were indicted in Pizzuto's death,
Dillon was dissatisfied with the way the jail investigated its own. It
was spring, 1989, and the jail's internal affairs office had been
beefed up from one officer to two, but Dillon believed that still was
too few. He also did not like that police officers were called in to
investigate only those cases that internal affairs officers believed
had merit.

On top of that, the unit also was responsible for investigating every
noncriminal allegation against any of the jail's more than 1,100 employees.

Dillon proposed the Nassau County Police Department take over the
responsibility for investigating any case where an inmate was injured
and blamed it on a guard.

When both Jablonsky and Samuel Rozzi, the police commis sioner at the
time, turned him down, he appealed to their boss. "Such an improvement
would also eliminate the danger of a backlog of unresolved complaints,
and reduce the potential for unwarranted lawsuits," Dillon wrote to
Gulotta in an April 4, 1989, letter.

Dillon repeated his proposal the next year, again to no
avail.

Gulotta again sided with the sheriff, who said the system was working
effectively and that he was planning to boost the number of
investigators, which he had just increased to three, even higher.

By 1991, the district attorney's office and the jail administrators
had compromised: The jail's investigators would immediately notify
prosecutors of any complaint that qualified as a potential criminal
matter, and the district attorney's office would then direct the
jail's internal affairs investigators as if they were the prosecutor's
own employees. "They call the shots.

The tell us what they want us to do," Jablonsky said. He said he liked
the arrangement because the district attorney's office would be
considered an impartial agency. "I thought to have the district
attorney, that sent a message." But Dillon said the arrangement
continued to trouble him. "The people in internal affairs, once
they're out of internal affairs, they have to go back and work with
the same people they're investigating," he said. "So even more so than
in the police department, the investigation should really be done by
an outside, independent, authority." ROADBLOCKS, OLD AND NEW In
practice, the new arrangement could not erase the seemingly
intractable challenges of jailhouse investigations. First, inmates
often could not identify the officer or officers who they said
attacked them. Many said they could not remember, and a few said
officers covered their badges.

Out of 143 inmates who sued the jail alleging they were hit by
officers in the past 10 years, 87 inmates listed officers by name, a
review of lawsuits found. Second, there were only two kinds of
potential witnesses in most cases: jail employees, unlikely to testify
against their colleagues, and inmates, who wer e not only considered
unreliable, but also left the jail sometimes before the overworked
investigators could talk to them. "The average stay here is only 44
days," Jablonsky said. "You get to a point when the DA wants to come
here and interview an inmate.

Well, the inmate left and we can't find him, the address he gave us
was bogus. That's a problem." In one case jail investigators waited
four days to talk to an inmate who said he had been beaten, internal
affairs files show. By the time they tried to contact the inmate,
Ronald Bower, he had been moved to a jail in New York City and they
were unable to reach him. Investigators said they attempted to reach
Bower repeatedly but his lawyers would not cooperate.

They closed the case nearly two years later in July, 1993, saying they
could neither prove nor disprove his charge. But jail critics say the
jail should have been more aggressive. "They would not have the same
problem of locating an inmate who beat up a guard," said Robert
Summerville of the Moving Toward Justice Coalition, which monitors the
jail. "In fact, they have no problem prosecuting them." Some obstacles
were of the county's own making.

Overcoming the backlog of complaints was not helped by administrators'
reluctance to dramatically increase the size of the internal affairs
unit or to regularly allow investigators to work overtime pursuing
leads.

Though it was not a coveted job, investigators were dedicated to
aggressively pursuing cases, said Paul Delle, the assistant district
attorney in charge of most of the jail cases from 1991 to 1993. "These
guys became very good investigators," he said of Richard Plantamura
and John Covais. "They knew the players, they knew the layout, they
knew the system.

You want to know the neighborhood, you ask the mailman or the cop on
the beat. They are there all the time." The trio tried to persuade
other staff members at the jail to provide them with information.
"That was the key to making those cases, getting a correction officer
to turn, changing the atmosphere there," Delle said. They started to
comprehensively track complaints against officers to see who r eceived
the most, Delle said. As they intermittently called jail staff down to
the district attorney's office for interviews in different cases,
Delle thought they were making some progress. "Names started coming up
that were familiar," he said. But Delle said all that ended when the
union then representing the corrections officers, Civil Service
Employees Association, protested to Dillon that investigators had
talked to an officer without a union official present.

Under the union contract, any member could ask for a union
representative to be present at a hearing that could lead to
disciplinary punishments. Delle said that after union officials
complained to Dillon, his superiors told him in October, 1993, that
officers would have to be interviewed with union representatives
present. "It made it impossible. The union rep is there for the
union," Delle said. "You're going to approach someone and try to turn
them, and he's spilling his guts in front of a union rep? You just
can't do it. What is the point?

Who go es to confession with the doors wide open?" Soon afterward,
Delle, who is now in private practice, said he was transferred to deal
with different cases.

Mark Barber, a former union president, said he and another union
member personally met with Dillon to complain that his prosecutors
were telling officers they were not entitled to union representation
during interviews - something Delle denied. "After the meeting, they
left us alone.

Any time any officers were called and questioned, they were questioned
in front of us," Barber said. He said he always told union members
they could speak alone to investigators if they chose.

Francis Quigley, the chief of Dillon's special investigations bureau
who was Delle's supervisor, said no one barred prosecutors from
interviewing officers alone.

He discounted how much of a difference it would make regardless.
"There's such a strong group identification with the union that with
or without a union rep, it's still difficult," he said. Besides, he
said, the paperwork officers were required to fill out whenever th ere
was an altercation provided investigators with much of the information
they would have gleaned from interviews. Dillon and his aides said
they often chose not to interview officers, or call them before grand
juries, because they feared forcing them to testify might undermine
their ability to successfully prosecute them later on. "State law is
pretty tough on developing criminal prosecutions on guys who have
given administrative statements," Quigley said. A CASE GOES AWRY In
fall, 1993, Nassau's overall difficulties in investigating complaints
against corrections officers became embarrassingly apparent.

Dillon's office charged two corrections officers with assaulting an
inmate named Fitz Knibb, but in a nonjury trial, the judge acquitted
both officers. "It was such a phony case," said the defense lawyer,
Ernest Peace. "The guy lied about everything. He said, 'Oh no, I never
suffered a head injury.' We showed that at his job, a box fell on his
head. There were all sorts of things that didn't bear out." Dillon
insisted in a recent interview that the case's outcome did not
discoura ge him from aggressively investigating complaints from
inmates. "Losing cases never bothers me," he said. "I can't speak for
all my assistants, perhaps, but we have a high enough conviction rate
that I don't care." Nevertheless, over the next four years no
corrections officer was indicted for mistreating an inmate, although
Dillon's office received 111 complaints of one sort of another between
1994 and 1998. "I did not see us proving beyond a reasonable doubt . .
. that a correction officer was not justified in using physical
force," Quigley said. "I had to make that decision, and I made those
decisions 111 times." But Barber, the former union president, said:
"After that case, they didn't go after anybody." THE SHERIFF'S TURN
Whenever prosecutors decided they could not make a criminal case, they
returned the complaint to the sheriff, telling him that he could
consider disciplining the officers if he found they had broken any
noncriminal rules of the jail. But Jablonsky said he was reluctant to
do that because of how difficult he fou nd it to make punishments
stick after an officer had been investigated but not charged by
prosecutors. He said in any case it was often very difficult to fire
officers.

For instance, he pointed out that Salvatore Gemelli, a former union
leader who cost the jail close to $1 million in civil lawsuit
settlements, is appealing his firing. Steve Martin, an Austin,
Texas-based consultant for the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights
Division, said the strong union presence in jails and prisons
throughout the Northeast often makes investigations difficult. "I've
not seen a well-oiled, effective IA division in a jurisdiction that
has a strong union," Martin said. "There are just too many hurdles
they can put up, and the process can be so protracted that it
undermines management's ability to impose swift disciplinary action."
After Pizzuto's death in January, Gulotta increased the size of the
internal affairs unit to eight officers.

It was nearly a decade after the district attorney first complained
about backlogged cases.

Even now, disputes among Nassau's top law-enforcement officials
continue.

Dillon, who this summer brought prosecutions against five officers in
excessive force cases, still wants an independent investigator for the
jail, but the sheriff says it is unnecessary. While the sheriff has
agreed to install video cameras throughout the jail, as Dillon has
been insisting, county lawmakers are still trying to figure out the
details.

Rank-and-file corrections officers are complaining that inmates, aware
of the controversy over the jail, are the most unruly they have ever
been, and that the jail administration is not supporting officers
adequately. And everyone at the facility is anxiously awaiting the
conclusion of a federal investigation sparked by Pizzuto's death. "The
problem was that there was no deterrent effect.

No fear. There was nothing to worry anyone there," said Delle, the
former prosecutor. "Ninety-five percent of the people working there
are decent people doing a good job, and they get painted with a broad
brush by these animals in uniform."