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Six of the 21 people charged in the investigation are City Department of Correction officers assigned to Rikers Island facilities.
By Forum Staff
Three criminal complaints were unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn charging 21 people—including six City Department of Correction officers—with conspiring to bribe Rikers Island COs as part of narcotics smuggling conspiracies, according to prosecutors.
Since early 2019, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and City Department of Investigation have been investigating contraband rings involving the payment and receipt of bribes by DOC officers in exchange for transporting marijuana, Suboxone (narcotic prescription medication for treating opioid addiction), K2 (a synthetic cannabinoid), and an unauthorized smart phone into the George R. Vierno Center and the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island.
According to the complaints, the defendants conspired to smuggle the contraband into Rikers Island facilities with the assistance of Correction Officers Darrington James, Patrick Legerme, Aldrin Livingston, Michael Murray, Angel Rodriguez and Christopher Walker. James, Legerme, and Livingston are Queens residents.
Defendants James Albert, Clarence Brooks, Kyle Charles, John Mohammed and Christopher Rivas, who were incarcerated for unrelated offenses, arranged for marijuana and other contraband to be packaged and secretly delivered to those correction officers by defendants Celena Burgess, Veronica Jagdeo, Jorcetta King, Aboudou Krigger, Queens resident Jonathan Medina, Styles Shephard, and Tony West. The defendant correction officers allegedly received thousands of dollars in bribes to smuggle the drugs past DOC security, for distribution inside the Rikers Island facilities.
As a part of their investigations, law enforcement officers reviewed financial records related to online money transfer tools, such as CashApp, conducted surveillance and reviewed recorded telephone calls made by defendants who used coded language in their conversations.
For example, on Feb. 19, 2019, an inmate at the Vierno facility called a co-conspirator to discuss supplying the inmate and Albert with marijuana: “I’m trying to get, um four ‘Oakland Raider jerseys’ [code for marijuana]. “…’Got Pink Panties’ [code for correction officer] on the line right now, you heard? Gangsta. You just gotta make it to the ‘Jungle’ [code for Brooklyn] to drop it off to them and, more or less, we lit from there.” In recorded telephone calls between Rivas and a co-conspirator in October 2019, Rivas requested a “joint” [code for a cell phone] with a Facetime application. In a subsequent telephone conversation, Rivas asked West whether the joint is a size 5 or size 6 [code for iPhone 5 or iPhone 6], and West replied that it was a size 6, referring to an iPhone 6 that was delivered to the Vierno facility the previous night.
On Oct. 25, 2019, a DOC Special Search Team seized an iPhone 6 and an iPhone charger from Rivas’s laundry bag and 12 clear plastic bags containing marijuana from his person.
“The correction officers charged today allegedly accepted bribes to sneak contraband onto Rikers Island—propagating behavior that has the potential to harm other officers and prisoners alike,” said FBI NY Assistant Director-in-Charge Bill Sweeney, Jr. “The smuggling of contraband into our jails is a common Hollywood storyline, but while there’s an element a fiction in many a screenplay, there’s nothing fake about this real-life threat to our correctional facilities.”
If convicted, the defendants each face a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment.
