Inside a shuttered Rikers Island jail, city investigators in November 2020 discovered a secret lounge with leather couches and a giant TV screen, caches of Correction Department equipment including 17 unused snowblowers — and a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
Who stashed the equipment and built the secret lounge? And why?
Department of Correction (DOC) workers are suspected of building the lounge in the James A. Thomas Center, a 90-year-old facility that was vacated in 2015 after being condemned because of extensive lead and asbestos contamination, the lack of a working fire safety system and other hazards.
The old jail was officially declared off limits to everyone after its closure.
But workers — believed to be correction officers and maintenance staff — used Correction Department plywood to raise a floor in the building, put down wall-to-wall parquet-style carpeting, installed a bathroom, and hacked into plumbing and electrical lines to snatch power and water, according to a December 2021 city Department of Investigation memo obtained by the Daily News.
The investigators found hundreds of thousands of dollars in Correction Department equipment purchased with taxpayer money, including 17 $2,000 snowblowers still with their factory tags and stacks of remote-controlled air conditioners still in boxes.
The investigators also found 339 unused lockers that cost $230,000 and untouched desks.
The items were in some cases hidden in a hallway behind a false wall made out of plywood blocked with equipment or in rooms behind doors secured with combination locks.
It was all unauthorized.
“No one had permission to even go in there,” a former investigator familiar with the case recalled. “It was crazy. That was one of the last things you would expect to see in a jail.”
Three years after the discovery, it’s unclear who built the secret lounge — and whether the Correction Department is adequately tracking the vast amounts of material and equipment it buys with taxpayer funds.
“Some (of the items) had been left so long they were obsolete,” the Investigation Department memo found. “The overall result was enormous waste. There was a complete lack of institutional oversight, and no apparent protocols to account for incoming and outgoing materials, equipment and property.”
The most bizarre item unearthed in the building was a handmade roulette wheel decorated with head shots of top Correction officials and dubbed the “Wheel of Knowledge.” Its purpose remains unclear.
The city investigation into the shenanigans in the Thomas Center remained secret until The News obtained the memo — with all names blacked out — through a Freedom of Information Law request.
The initial tip about the Thomas Center came from an unnamed correction captain assigned to an adjacent building who noticed strange comings and goings from jail, the Department of Investigation report reveals.
Officers assigned to the Correction Department’s Facilities Maintenance and Repair Division had been traipsing in and out of the building, the tipster said. The workers, often among the most well-paid in the agency, had even built a 300-foot paved road to a newly built loading dock with its own entrance.
During the Department of Investigation’s initial search of the building, investigators found a huge cache of unused and expensive goods behind a false wall blocked with equipment. The investigators sealed the jail and returned more than 10 times through April 2021, finding more things each time, the DOI report said.
Some of the caches were hidden behind locked doors. The combination for the locks was one officer’s shield number with the pound symbol, a source familiar with the investigation said.
Photos obtained by The News show stacks of brand new air conditioners — devices that could have been used in the jails during the oppressive heat of summer.
There were new mattresses and boxes of waterproof pillows, wool blankets and toilet paper that were supposed to be given out to detainees but had been marooned or forgotten, the report said.
There were never-used heavy-duty chain saws, leaf blowers, nail guns, air compressors, circular saws and tile saws. There were thousands of air filters and 1,110 pieces of aluminum duct piping.
Much of the material had been literally gathering dust for years. Labels on many of the boxes dated to 2017. Things found there could not be accounted for in Correction Department records, the report said.
Investigators learned that the 339 lockers were bought in 2015 as part of a project to build outside locker facilities for staff. The project was discarded, the Department of Investigation report said. A top facilities officials told the investigators no record was made of where the lockers went. That official said he was “unaware” the lockers were never installed.
The agency has long had trouble tracking its purchases, a former senior correction official said.
“You would find conference rooms filled with stuff that should have been given to the inmates but it’s just sitting there,” said the official, who requested anonymity. “There was so little structure to anything.”
“This is what happens when DOC is allowed to operate a penal colony with little to no oversight, and yet another reason to accelerate the closure of Rikers Island,” said Darren Mack of Freedom Agenda, a jail reform organization.
“Mayor Adams should be doing everything in his power to end this stain on our city, but instead he’s obstructing closure and enabling this type of corruption.”
The investigators also noticed that until they shut it down, steel pipes, bathroom fixtures and sheet metal in the Thomas Center were being dismantled and placed in piles for some unknown purpose.
“DOI discovered that within housing areas, property had been removed, including metal connecting pipes, sinks, and toilets,” the report said.
Correction officials claimed to the Department of Investigation that the fixtures were being removed for use in other jails. But it was not clear from the report whether that re-purposing was actually happening.
“Someone went through and systematically removed fixtures, but (DOI) never looked at what happened to it,” a source familiar with the probe said.
“They didn’t push the investigation as far as they could to find out if materials were being re-sold or taken off the island. It was unclear why they didn’t pursue it.”
Two sources told The News that a significant number of the purchases were made through agency credit cards distributed only for use in emergencies.
“They weren’t supposed to be used for day-to-day purchases,” one Correction Department insider said. “That’s why DOC had trouble finding out what they bought.”
The use of the Thomas Center for storage had been supposedly approved by a deputy commissioner who then left the agency in 2018, facilities officials told DOI,
The weight of the DOI report focused on breakdowns in the convoluted systems that track department purchases.
There was no “global” agency inventory of purchases, the report found. A computer system supposed to track purchases was “unreliable because of user error.”
Facilities officials told the Department of Investigation that an attempt to create an inventory for the Thomas Center “failed” so no complete list of the items existed, the memo said.
On Dec. 2, 2021, the Department of Investigations made seven recommendations to the Department of Correction to address the problems that emerged from the probe.
According to DOI, the recommendations were “accepted” by Correction officials — but it’s unclear if the jail agency actually followed through on putting the recommendations in effect.
Frank Dwyer, a DOC spokesman, touted a recent restructuring of the facilities management division when asked by The News about the report.
“The department has installed new leadership for facilities management and restructured the division to ensure accurate tracking and inventory of all equipment for facilities,” he said.
In the end, no one admitted knowing who built or used the secret lounge. The News was unable to determine whether anyone was ever disciplined for the mischief in the Thomas Center.
