Rogue jail guards at a troubled federal lockup viciously beat two inmates, in one instance trying to cover up the attack by making it look as though the victim had attempted suicide, prosecutors alleged Thursday.
A federal indictment charges 11 current and former correction officers at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, including a high-ranking supervisor, with violating the civil rights of the two inmates in separate assaults in 2002 and 2006 and with making false statements.
The supervisor, Capt. Savatore Lopresti, "led a vicious and brutal attack on one of the victims and was the ringleader for covering it up," prosecutor Sarah Coyne said at an arraignment.
Lopresti, described by defense attorney Zach Marulis-Ohnuma as a family man "with deep roots in the community," was released on $250,000 bond after pleading not guilty. If convicted, he faces up to 57 months in prison.
The captain and two of his co-defendants also are named in a pending lawsuit filed in 2002 that alleges that guards at the MDC routinely abused Muslim men detained following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The federal jail on the Brooklyn waterfront was also criticized in a 2003 report by the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General, which found "significant problems" with the treatment of nearly 800 detainees nationwide.
In the new case, the guards "not only inflicted pain on the inmates they are charged with abusing, they also undermined the integrity and safety of the detention facility, other inmates and their fellow employees," said James Tomlinson, head of the Inspector General's New York office.
A telephone call to the Bureau of Prisons was not immediately returned Thursday.
The first incident occurred in November 2002 after one of the unidentified victims "disrespected" Lopresti by refusing an order to remove a T-shirt tied around his head, court papers said. The supervisor and other officers responded by beating and kicking the inmate so severely it left "a pool of blood and clumps of the inmate's dreadlocks on the floor of the cell," the papers said.
Afterward, the defendants pulled a sheet off the victim's bed, tied it into a noose and rigged it to the cell bars to make it appear he had tried to hang himself, the papers said. They later allegedly filed a report saying the victim had become "combative" when they stopped him from attempting to commit suicide.
In the second incident, last April, officers allegedly entered a cell and beat the victim as punishment for fighting with another inmate. A female lieutenant "looked on and taunted the inmate," court papers said.
The officers, while transporting the handcuffed victim in an elevator to a high-security unit, purposely tripped him so he fell face-first onto the floor, the papers said. When he put up a struggle, the guards swarmed and allegedly stomped him into submission.
Prosecutors said the elevator attack was captured on videotape. The tape was not made public.