A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a former guard at an Otay Mesa state prison to two years in custody for taking part in a bribery and smuggling scheme, saying it was important to send a message to other corrections officers that such conduct will be punished despite the “ridiculousness of the contraband involved.”
That contraband? A bejeweled “grill” for a prisoner’s teeth and the dental molds needed to create it.
Benito Jamar Hugie, 49, pleaded guilty last year to a charge involving a bribery conspiracy, as did the prisoner who received the grill, Shawn Brown, and two Fresno men whom prosecutors identified as Brown’s brothers.
In court on Thursday, a prosecutor alluded to there being suspicion that Hugie, who worked at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, was previously involved in similar conduct. U.S. District Judge Cathy Bencivengo also said there were references in a sealed pre-sentence report to contacts Hugie had with prisoners’ families.
“It suggests the line was getting blurred here, and then disappeared,” Bencivengo said.
Hugie, who served 10 years in the Navy, also wrote in a letter to the judge that he’d allowed himself to “blur appropriate boundaries.”
According to his plea agreement, Hugie smuggled dental molds in and out of the prison in September 2020 so that a Houston jeweler could create the grill, a piece of jewelry that fits over a person’s teeth. The next month, Hugie smuggled the finished product — prosecutors said the grill in question was made of gold and encrusted with diamonds — into the facility for Brown.
The indictment alleged Hugie accepted at least $5,000 from Brown and his brothers. In their plea agreements, Brown and his brothers admitted that the entirety of the scheme — to acquire the bejeweled grill, to bribe Hugie and to smuggle the grill into the prison — exceeded $30,000.
Hugie’s attorney, Douglas Brown, said Thursday in court that the financial benefit to his client was “not $35,000. It was much less than that.”
The attorney said his client “understands his conduct was completely unacceptable” and told the FBI everything he knew after initially denying his involvement in the scheme.
“This was truly idiotic,” Hugie told Bencivengo on Thursday. In his letter to the judge, he wrote that at the time, his 20-year marriage was falling apart and his personal life was in disarray.
“In the midst of this tumultuous period, I made a grave error in judgment. I allowed my self-esteem, already diminished, to cloud my judgment, leading me to identify with the humanity of the inmates and blur appropriate boundaries,” he wrote. “Looking back, I can now see how I was manipulated into actions that, at the time, seemed like a misguided attempt to be the ‘good guy.’”
Hugie claimed his actions weren’t financially driven.
While the FBI was investigating the bribery scheme, agents learned Brown was defrauding state taxpayers with fake COVID-related unemployment claims, according to a second indictment. He and five of his co-defendants in that case pleaded guilty to a wire fraud conspiracy charge in November on the same day as the guilty pleas in the bribery case.
Brown admitted in the wire fraud guilty plea that the fake unemployment scheme resulted in a loss of more than $550,000 to the state’s Employment Development Department.
Bencivengo ordered Hugie, who had remained out of custody on bond since shortly after his June 2022 arrest, to report to prison in May.
