A former guard at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center admitted she abused her power to give inmates a different sort of power — smuggling in a stash of cell phone charger cables last year.
Fabienne Osias, 40, of Brooklyn, wept Tuesday as she pleaded guilty in Brooklyn Federal Court to smuggling the contraband into the troubled Sunset Park jail.
The feds say she tried to sneak five USB charging cubes and nine cables to an inmate.
“I understood at the time that it was against the law and also against the rules of the BOP [Bureau of Prisons] and the MDC,” she said through tears. “I’m sorry for what I did. I recognize that I could have harmed others with my actions.”
Osias was arraigned on and pleaded guilty to the federal misdemeanor charge before Magistrate Judge Marcia Henry Tuesday. She faces a maximum year behind bars and a fine of up to $100,000, though based on federal guidelines her sentence will likely fall between zero and six months in prison.
She’s scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 31.
At one point, the judge had Assistant U.S. Attorney Sara Winik lay out her legal argument as to why the charging equipment should be considered phone contraband or a more benign “other” type of banned item — which would mean the difference between a six-month or one year maximum sentence.
Osias, who quit her job at the federal jail last week, agreed as part of her plea deal that she won’t seek work at a prison or jail in the future.
She and her lawyer, Anthony Cecutti, declined comment as they left the courtroom Tuesday.
“The defendant abused her position of trust to smuggle cell phone chargers into the Metropolitan Detention Center,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Tuesday. “Contraband cell phones enable federal inmates to continue committing crimes even while they are in custody at the MDC, which endangers both the jail population and the community at large.”
She’s the latest correction officer caught sneaking banned materials into the MDC. In July, Quandelle Joseph was sentenced to 2½ years behind bars for taking bribes to sneak in drugs, cigarettes and cell phones.
Another former correction officer, Jeremy Monk, was sentenced in December to three months of home detention and a year probation for smuggling pot into the jail.
The federal jail — which houses violent gang members and white-collar crooks like crypto-fraudster Samuel Bankman-Fried, and at one point held Ghislaine Maxwell and R. Kelly — has faced a steady stream of criticism from judges and defense lawyers for its “barbaric” conditions and inadequate staffing.
The jail saw two stabbing murders in June and July, and video showed one inmate stabbed 44 times on April 27 before a lone correction officer arrived to stop the attack.
On July 17, Edwin Cordero was stabbed to death during a brawl at the jail as he was waiting to be transferred to a different facility to serve a two-year prison sentence. Less than six weeks earlier on June 7 another detainee, Uriel Whyte, was fatally stabbed in the neck.
