Indictment of jail officials

"If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher." A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

By Alex P. Vidal

LOS ANGELES, California -- There is a parallel case in the indictment of jail officials in the Los Angeles County jails here and in the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP)-Western Visayas in the Philippines for brutality and corruption.

High-ranking jail officials were hauled off to court in the cases in the Philippines and California.

Charged with plunder before the Office of the Ombudsman in the Philippines was Chief Superintendent Ignacio Panti, the former director of the BJMP in Region 6 for the alleged double funding of the inmates’ food at the Iloilo District Jail (IDJ).

Panti and other jail officials included in the case allegedly amassed ill-gotten wealth through "misappropriation, conversion, misuse of public funds or raids on the public treasury,” their accuser, Valenzuela City Jail Inspector Angelina Bautista, alleged in her complaint-affidavit filed April 21.

Also charged were BJMP budget officers, disbursing officers and accountants from January 2011 to January 2013, and wardens of the IDJ during those years.

The provincial government of Iloilo was spending for the food of some 700 inmates of the IDJ located in Barangay Nanga, Pototan, Iloilo but BJMP Region 6 also appropriated funds for it, Bautista further alleged.

Aside from the Ombudsman case, the BJMP again hogged newspaper headlines when several jail officers were recently sacked for the mysterious deaths of two inmates initially reported to have committed suicide.

MURDER

Follow up investigations showed the two inmates, allegedly involved in gangs that engaged in trafficking of illegal drugs, could have been murdered one after another inside the jail.  

In L. A,. Paul Tanaka, the former undersheriff of the Sheriff's Department, and a now-retired captain William "Tom" Carey, have been charged with conspiracy and obstruction of justice for allegedly concealing the whereabouts of an inmate who was working as an FBI informant.

"What began more than four years ago as a federal investigation into brutality and corruption by deputies in L.A. County jails reached the highest echelons of the Sheriff's Department on Thursday (May 14), with two top officials indicted on charges of orchestrating an elaborate scheme to thwart the FBI," reported the Los Angeles Times on Friday.

The grand jury indictment, report said, "offers a portrait of a department adrift with senior officials responsible for investigation abuses working instead to undermine internal safeguards and ignoring repeated warnings of widespread problems in the nation's largest jail system."

PLOT

Prosecutors accused Tanaka and Carey of directing a group of deputies who were convicted last year of carrying out the plot to impede the FBI investigation.

The cases against them centers on events in August and September 2011 when the pair instructed several deputies to keep close tabs on an FBI inmate informant.

Report said the two met with some of the deputies on Aug. 19 to hear what information they had extracted from the inmate referred only as "AB" about the scope of the FBI inquiry.

The following day the same group  met again to discuss the fact that a cellphone deputies had confiscated from "AB" belonged to the FBI and had been used in a sting operation against a deputy who smuggled it into the jail to the inmate.

Days later, the report said further, Tanaka gathered in a parking lot with deputies who had gone undercover to pose as the inmate's cellmates in an attempt to glean information about the FBI's investigation.

Tanaka and Carey also reportedly went to great lengths to keep FBI agents from speaking with the inmate.