from: The San Francisco Chronicle
For years, a canine officer assigned to Bay Area prisons seemed to have an extraordinary knack for sniffing out contraband being smuggled inside, vastly outperforming his colleagues by repeatedly locating drugs, weapons and cellphones.
Federal prosecutors now say it was all a scam.
On Thursday, a federal grand jury in San Francisco indicted the canine officer, Avelino Ramirez, saying he pretended to find prison contraband that he had planted himself, after preparing the packages in his basement.
Ramirez, who faces a charge of wire fraud, is accused of duping the state into wiring him paychecks that included $8,200 in overtime he worked to document bogus discoveries.
Efforts to reach Ramirez for comment Friday were not immediately successful. A corrections spokesperson said he was hired in 2006 and has been on administrative leave since Feb. 27.
The canine operation run by the California corrections department is budgeted to place two teams — an officer and a dog — in 34 prisons and other facilities, according to the program’s website, with a mission to “reduce the overall level of drug/contraband and criminal activity within the inmate population.”
Ramirez’s indictment states that he worked from 2013 to 2022 at San Quentin State Prison before being promoted to K-9 sergeant in September 2022 and ending up at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.
Ramirez was prolific: In all of 2022, prosecutors said, contraband drugs were found 28 times at San Quentin. Ramirez was responsible for 20 of the discoveries, with no other officer recording more than two finds.
Ramirez planted drugs, drug paraphernalia, tobacco, cellphones and weapons, placing them inside Ziploc bags, latex gloves, foil or tape, his indictment states.
On multiple occasions, he allegedly planted packages of “marijuana shake,” a mix of leaves, stems and trimmings that Ramirez supplemented with foxtails and lawn trimmings.
“To further his scheme, Ramirez maintained, in the basement of his house, a jar of marijuana shake, latex gloves, salt, sugar, electrical tape, cellphones wrapped in plastic in the rafters, electrical tape, tinfoil, and Ziploc bags with a green seal,” the indictment states.
Grand jurors said he executed the scheme to “hold himself out as a successful K-9 officer with the hope that it would help him obtain a promotion to K-9 sergeant and also to fraudulently inflate his salary through overtime pay for report writing following these false discoveries.”
The indictment does not say what led investigators to suspect Ramirez, but states that supervisors became aware of “irregular contraband discoveries.”
link to article: California prison officer accused of planting contraband (sfchronicle.com)
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