WAS PRISON PROBE A WHITEWASH?

CORCORAN, Kings County - For seven years, California turned a blind eye to
the deadliest prison in America, where 50 inmates were wounded or shot dead
by guards.

Gov. 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, although aides to 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, 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 each other 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 nicknamed the "Booty Bandit."

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? 8A This is the
first we've heard of a conspiracy or attempt to cover up."

Whitewash denied

Lungren said 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 going on 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 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 accounts
provide new and disturbing details of Corcoran's violent breakdown and
coverups. The investigation shows a pattern of neglect at every level.

From the day Corcoran opened in 1988, the escalating violence failed to set
off any alarms.

Toothless probes

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 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.

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

Considerable energy 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."

Unusual step

Federal prosecutors have taken the unusual step of accusing corrections
officials and union representatives of trying to thwart the FBI and cover
up wrongdoing.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association contends it is
ridiculous to believe that officers at Corcoran engaged in a pattern of
abuse that was covered up with union help.

Union President Don Novey did not respond to requests for interviews over a
two-month period.

Several inmates sued the state in 1992 for staging scores of fights
involving the same rival boxers. In each case, the Corrections Department
was defended by the civil arm of Lungren's office.

Attorney General Lungren said it wasn't until 1996 that a pattern of inmate
lawsuits raised serious questions about Corcoran among his top staff.

"Sacramento knew the level of violence," said Steve Rigg, a former
lieutenant who also cooperated with the FBI. "We assumed that they would
read the numbers and say something is terribly wrong here and take
appropriate corrective action. Instead, we continued to bait inmates into
fights and then shoot them for throwing punches."

In fall 1996, after stories in the Los Angeles Times and then CBS's "60
Minutes," Wilson's staff met with then-corrections Director James Gomez and
devised a plan. Corcoran would be the focus of a pair of investigations by
the Corrections Department and the attorney general.

Boring deep

By this time, two FBI agents had spent two years boring deep inside
Corcoran. The focus of the federal grand jury was the 1994 shooting death
of inmate Preston Tate, a 25-year-old gang member from Los Angeles killed
by a guard during a fistfight.

State officials said it was out of deference to the federal probe that they
hadn't investigated Corcoran two years sooner.

Investigator Eason said he put aside his doubts and took the job out of
respect for Brian Parry, a longtime corrections investigator who would
direct the team from Sacramento. Parry had chosen Jim Connor, a corrections
investigator from Southern California, to oversee day-to-day movements.

But team members said it was clear that neither Parry nor Connor was in
charge. The man directing the probe was Del Pierce, a former head of the
Department of Motor Vehicles and a trusted Wilson troubleshooter.

"We couldn't go here, and we couldn't go there," said Connor, who
supervised the team. "We couldn't touch the shootings. We couldn't follow
the leads. If a lead took you to the ivory castle - someone high up in
corrections - that lead was turned off by Pierce."

Pierce confirmed that he focused the probe on the newspaper allegations,
but said he never told investigators they couldn't pursue wrongdoing by top
brass.

But Connor and other investigators were troubled by the presence of Deputy
Director of Corrections Eddie Myers, who had made his feelings clear about
violence at Corcoran and the FBI probe, according to a deposition by former
warden George Smith. He told Security Housing Unit staff members in a 1994
meeting that he backed them fully and didn't believe the allegations.

Guards' union role

The investigators said they knew the role the guards' union had played in
clamping down on past inquiries at Corcoran. They had watched the union
under president Novey ride the prison construction wave, growing from a
kind of social club into one of the more powerful forces in the state, with
a rank-and-file 27,000 strong.

The governor's top aides said the union never came to them to influence the
investigation.

The corrections team trudged on, uncovering over the next four months
evidence to support allegations of beatings, torture, missing reports and
coverups by top Corcoran brass, according to interviews and reports
detailing their work. And yet none of these cases resulted in criminal
prosecution.

There was one area, however, where the state team clearly had a green
light: digging up dirt on officers working with the FBI. The team generated
more than 1,000 pages of information regarding whistle-blowers.

After spending more than $500,000 and employing 15 agents to canvass the
state, corrections officials ended up investigating and disciplining only
one officer involved in a shooting: Richard Caruso, who was docked 90 days
pay for firing wood blocks at an inmate in 1993, a shooting that resulted
in no injuries.

Checked-by: Richard Lake