New York, NY —

In 2002, in the final weeks of Governor George Pataki's campaign for re-election, word began to emerge that New York City Correction Department employees were working on Republican political campaigns -- often while on-duty. Now, WNYC takes a close look at the system of rewards and punishments on Rikers Island that led to hundreds of city employees working as campaign foot soldiers - in apparent violation of city law. WNYC's Andrea Bernstein has this first of two reports.

In New York City, most of the jail population of about 12,000 inmates is housed on Riker's Island, a four hundred and fifteen acre land mass once home to the Dutch family, the Rykens. To get there you have to stop at the foot of a bridge in Queens just about where the East River begins to change into the Long Island Sound. The smell of salt and slighty decaying fish rises from the Bowery Bay. There's a culture of watching here. The guards oversee the inmates, inmates eye the guards. It is also a place where the guards watch each other.

Darryl Bryant was watched. He has worked here for 17 years. He says his career was on the rise - until his supervisor found out he was volunteering - on his own time -- for Democratic mayoral candidate Mark Green. Back in August of 2001, Bryant says his supervisor called him at home.

Bryant: She says come tomorrow, early, pick up your stuff, pack it and you have to report to 74. Seventy four is the most dangerous prison on Rikers Island.

He asked her why he was being transferred. Bryant says she told him, it was because of his support for the Democratic candidate.

Worse was coming. In his new post, Bryant received a detailed and chilling threat from a gang member - and was issued a gun and a bulletproof vest. Two months later the protective equipment was taken away.

Bernstein: Do you feel like your life is still in danger?
Bryant: No.
Bernstein: How long did you feel your life was in danger?
Bryant: For that entire year I had to look over my shoulder.

A corrections spokesman says a security assessment determines how long employees are issued protective equipment. But Bryant believes it was taken away as punishment for working for the wrong political party. Bryant that's the way it was, at Rikers.
We interviewed more than three dozen present and former corrections employees and read hundreds of pages of sworn deposition testimony from top corrections official. Almost all agree. For a decade beginning in the early 1990's, Rikers was ruled by fear. And when it came to partisan politics it worked like this: if you supported Republicans - and worked on their campaigns, sometimes while on duty, you'd get the choicest assignments and promotions. If you worked for the Democrats, you'd be treated like Darryl Bryant.

In the 1990's Ralph McGrane was a Rikers Bureau Chief - the second highest ranking uniformed job. He's now the number two man in the Morris County, NJ Sheriff's office. He says he was present when other officials talked about meting out punishment for guards who were NOT on the team.

Bernstein: They would say: we're going to whack someone ?
McGrane: Absolutely. Talking about high ranking people. People would be demoted, forced to retire. And the vocabulary that was used, the vernacular was we're going to whack warden so and so, deputy warden so and so. It was as if it were a mafia hit.
Bernstein: And what would happen after they said were going to whack somebody?
McGrane: It happened.
Bernstein: They got whacked?
McGrane: That's right.

Former Deputy Warden Jane Gibson says that's what happened to her. She says that after the higher-ups tagged her as not being part of the team, after a difference on a personnel matter, they began a campaign of harassment. She says a captain warned her they were going to set her up for some missing radios.

Gibson: He tells me Dep, another captain overheard the warden and three other people in his office saying don't worry we'll get her for the radios.'

Gibson protested - and was accused of insubordination. Gibson says she was called into her warden's office and told to sign a letter acknowledging problems in her jail.

Gibson: I told the warden I would never sign that document. He asked me why and I told him it is rift with lies and tehre's nothing here that's true and I will never sign a document that's not true.

In the end, Gibson decided she had no choice.

Gibson: This is a paramilitary organization they concluded if I did not sign this document it was failure to obey a direct order and I was to be suspended and demoted immediately if I did not sign that document.

Gibson did sign it. Then, she says, she suffered a nervous breakdown. She never went back to work at the department of correction and now works in a private security firm.

Around the same time Deputy Warden Lionel Lorquet organized a fundraiser for Democrat Mark Green, at his own home, on his own time. Soon after, he was transferred, and transferred again.
Lorquet says just before the election, then-Commissioner William Fraser and his staff came through his facility. An aide to the commissioner took him aside.

Lorquet: And told me straight up If your boy didn't make it then you're all mine your life will be miserable you will be transferred we will have all eyes on you.

Lorquet says his life WAS made miserable. So he sued the city, and won a settlement of $325,000. Soon after he was promoted to warden. In the course of the lawsuit, the city turned over to Lorquet's attorneys a surveillance videotape. It was made by ON DUTY corrections employees, sitting in a van across the street from the fundraiser held outdoors at Lorquet's modest Queens home.

SOUND FROM VIDEOTAPE: Camera shutters.

On the videotape, you can hear the corrections employees snapping photos. One of the people they saw at the party was Warden Clyton Eastmond . Eastmond was also there on his own time. In sworn testimony, he says he was transferred the day after the fundraiser,
and forced to take an $8,000 pay cut.

But then Eastmond got a rare second chance. According to deposition testimony, Commissioner Fraser called him into his office and told him we want to bring you back into the fold of things.

Not long after that, a three star chief named Anthony Serra motioned Eastmond into his office. Serra was well known on Riker's island as the organizer of the political operation.

He said I know about the meeting that you had with the commissioner, Eastmond testified. You have to come and do some things for the team and we will get you back into the position where you are suppose to be. And then Eastmond got instructions for what to do for the Pataki re-eleection campaign, in his office, on government time. Why wouldn't I want to follow a lead into that nature? Eastmond testified. Especially when he had all the stars and I didn't.

Gene Russianoff, senior attorney with the New York Public Interest Research group, helped write the current city charter. He says what happened to Clyton Eastmond is clearly wrong.

13: Russianoff: That's a violation of the conflicts of interest code and that is punishable and finable and it is unethical. You can't ask someone who works for you to work on a campaign and there's a good reason for that. One hundred years ago, or more, in the Tammany hall era, we had the spoils system.

Russianoff says city employees CAN work for political campaigns on their own time - that's their first amendment right. But pressuring city employees to do it is coercion.

Republicans said they suffered, too. Whenever any of us wanted out, one former top aide to Serra told us, he put these guys on midnight tours. I got kids, working midnights was tough after 18 years on the job.

Through their attorneys, both Anthony Serra and former Commissioner Fraser declined to be interviewed for this story, but both have said they did nothing wrong. Serra told the Daily News he spent 95 percent of his time on his corrections job.

The current commissioner is Martin Horn. He acknowledges there are still people like Daryl Bryant, stuck in what the commissioner calls purgatory based on what they did or did not do years ago.

Horn: There are many wrongs that have probably been done to people over time I can't go and start moving everybody around who got where they are for the wrong reason. I think, look, this Department has been through a lot, it didn't get the way it got overnight.

Horn says he's committed to a promotion system based on merit. But he says he worries there may be not enough time to fully change the culture at Rikers Island. The average tenure of a corrections commissioner is two years. For WNYC, I'm Andrea Bernstein.