INVESTIGATOR: PRISON PROBE A `SHAM'

Corcoran: Corrections agents accuse Wilson, Lungren of colluding with guards
union.

CORCORAN -- For seven years, the state of California turned a blind eye to
the deadliest prison in the United States, where 50 inmates were wounded or
shot dead by guards.

Gov. Pete Wilson and the man who wants to succeed him, Attorney General Dan
Lungren, finally examined Corcoran State Prison last year. The result was a
whitewash -- a pair of investigations that never probed a single fatal or
serious shooting, the Los Angeles Times has found.

The Wilson administration blocked efforts to investigate brutality by
officers and mismanagement by top officials in the Department of
Corrections, according to investigators assigned to a special corrections
team. The agents said the powerful prison guard union, which has contributed
nearly $1 million to Wilson and Lungren since 1990, was allowed to stymie
almost every attempt to question key officers about a broad range of alleged
crimes at Corcoran.

``The union and the governor's office ran the investigation,'' said Jim
Connor, the corrections agent who supervised the team. ``We would try to
question a witness, and the union was there blocking us. The (union) even
told us how many interviews we could do, and our bosses in Sacramento backed
them. This was no independent inquiry. It was just a sham.''

Top state officials deny any coverup, each pointing the finger at another,
although aides to both Wilson and Lungren concede that their administrations
didn't do nearly enough to watch over the nation's most violent prison. The
union president declined to talk.

In the middle of California's cotton fields about 30 miles south of Fresno,
this prison is where 43 inmates were wounded and seven were killed by
officers firing assault rifles from 1988 to 1995. While local and state
watchdogs looked the other way, rival gang members were pitted against one
another and watched over by guards -- then shot if they didn't stop
fighting.

But the governor's point man on the 1997 probe ordered corrections
investigators to steer clear of the shootings and the policies sent down
from Sacramento that led to the violence, according to agents.
Investigators were told they could not compel key officers to talk about
their knowledge of any brutality or coverups, including firsthand accounts
that problem inmates purposely were locked into a cell and subjected to
repeated rapes by an inmate enforcer.

The parallel investigation by the attorney general's office was even more
limited. The attorney general investigated only one case of alleged
brutality and possible coverup by a union official. Lungren's top
investigator then took a higher-paying job with the Corrections Department,
the agency he was assigned to investigate.

Wilson declined requests for an interview, but his top aides said they were
surprised to hear that agents were hamstrung in their attempts to
investigate the prison.

``Was there a whitewash or coverup from the governor's office? No,
absolutely not,'' said Sean Walsh, Wilson's press secretary. ``Was there a
whitewash or coverup from the Department of Corrections? . . . This is the
first we've heard of a conspiracy or attempt to cover up.''

Lungren defended his investigation, saying any insinuation of a whitewash
was ``a bunch of crap.'' When asked why his office had delved into just a
single case, he cited an FBI probe into civil rights abuses at Corcoran that
has been ongoing since 1994.

``We weren't going to duplicate or interfere with what the feds were engaged
in,'' Lungren said. ``It's a matter of not screwing up another
investigation.''

But federal authorities say their probe was focused on only one shooting
death and that there was a broad range of alleged misconduct at Corcoran --
enough to keep both state agents and the FBI busy.

The Times has obtained 10,000 pages of internal corrections reports and has
interviewed dozens of guards, investigators and others whose insider
accounts provide new and disturbing details of Corcoran's violent breakdown
and coverups. The investigation shows a pattern of neglect at every level of
the local and state bureaucracy responsible for overseeing this prison.

From the day Corcoran opened in 1988, the escalating violence failed to set
off any alarms -- not at the local district attorney's office, not at the
state Department of Corrections, not at the attorney general's office or at
the governor's office.

And when the Corrections Department and attorney general finally did step
in -- seven years after the first death -- their probes were either so
restricted or so toothless that it became virtually impossible to ferret out
wrongdoing.

``I've been an investigator for 10 years, and no one has ever told me before
that I couldn't talk to certain important people and couldn't pursue certain
key leads,'' said Ben Eason, another supervisor on the corrections team.
``If this was a search for the truth, how can you establish those
parameters?''

The two state probes ended last year without criminal charges being filed
against a single officer.

Considerable manpower was spent trying to dig up dirt on whistle-blowers --
the officers who had reported brutality to the FBI, according to interviews
and the internal reports.

In the end, state officials found only isolated incidents of staff
misconduct at Corcoran, even though a federal grand jury in February charged
eight officers with setting up fights for ``amusement and blood sport.''

Checked-by: "Rolf Ernst"