Guards charged

2 prison guards charged as part of investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s death

The guards face charges of making false entries in official records, as well as conspiracy.

By JOSH GERSTEIN

Two prison guards at the New York federal jail where wealthy serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein allegedly died by suicide in August repeatedly falsified official logs to show they made cell checks they never did, according to a six-count felony indictment returned Tuesday.

The indictment also accused them of apparently sleeping on the job and casually surfing the Internet in the hours before Epstein’s body was found.

Tova Noel, 31, faces five charges of making false entries in official records, while Michael Thomas, 46, faces three counts of falsifying records. Each was also charged with one count of conspiracy.

The sudden death of Epstein, 66, a wealthy financier and registered sex offender facing a new round of sex trafficking charges at the time of his demise, prompted widespread suspicion fueled by his long history of association with other prominent men in politics, academia and business. A pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother further fanned the flames by declaring that neck fractures seen during the autopsy were more consistent with homicide than suicide.

An investigation carried out by the FBI and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General reaffirmed the official stance that Epstein’s death at the Metropolitan Correctional Center was self-inflicted, but suggests it was enabled by negligence, misconduct, fraud and perhaps exhaustion on the part of the personnel on duty that night in the high-security, ninth-floor cell block where Epstein was being held after a reported suicide attempt the previous month.

There was apparently no video of Epstein’s cell or the area immediately outside it, but investigators established a chronology of what the guards did — and failed to do — that night by reviewing video of the guard station in the jail’s Special Housing Unit, or SHU.

That video revealed that guards in the SHU failed to perform five jail-wide counts between 4 P.M. on August 9 and 5 A.M. on August 10, even though all were certified as complete and passed to the facility’s command center.

In addition, Noel signed more than 75 separate entries saying she and Thomas performed required half-hourly “rounds” for each tier of the SHU between midnight and 6:30 A.M., even though they were not done, the indictment says.

“During the night, instead of completing the required counts and rounds, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, the defendants, were seated at the correctional officers’ desk in the SHU common area (…approximately 15 feet from Epstein’s cell), used the computers, and moved around the SHU common area,” the grand jury and prosecutors alleged. “For a period of approximately two hours, Noel and Thomas sat at the their desks without moving, and appeared to have been asleep.”

Noel was perusing furniture sales and “benefit websites,” while Thomas occasionally looked up “motorcycle sales and sports news,” while neglecting their official duties, the indictment says.

Both officers owned up to at least some of their failings soon after Epstein’s body was found with a “noose” around his neck at about 6:30 A.M on August 10, according to the indictment. Noel allegedly admitted skipping two sets of early morning rounds, while Thomas allegedly said to a supervisor: “We messed up…I messed up, she’s not to blame, we didn’t do any rounds.”

Noel faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted on all counts, while Thomas faces up to 20 years. Federal defendants are typically sentenced in accordance with sentencing guidelines that usually call for sentences far short of the maximum, particularly for first-time offenders.

At least two other correctional staff members are implicated in the alleged misconduct — officers who claimed to have performed counts with Noel at 4 P.M. and 10 P.M. on August 9, but never did, according to the indictment. They are not named in the charging papers and there is no indication whether they’ve been charged or are expected to testify against Noel and Thomas, who reportedly turned down plea deals last week.

Noel and Thomas pleaded not guilty on Tuesday afternoon and were released on $100,000 bond. The defendants, hiding their faces with clothing, left the courthouse in separate cars just a block or so from the lower Manhattan jail where they had worked and Epstein died, The Associated Press reported.

A lawyer for Thomas, Montell Figgins, said both guards were being “scapegoated.”

“We feel this is a rush to judgment by the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” he said, according to The AP. “They’re going after the low man on the totem pole here.”

Noel’s lawyer, Jason Foy, said he hoped to “reach a reasonable agreement” with the government that could avoid a trial, the AP reported.

The indictment does also suggest institutional failings apparently not involving individual guards. For instance, psychologists had ordered that Epstein have a cellmate after he was transferred out of the hospital ward following his apparent suicide attempt in July. However, less than 24 hours before Epstein died, his cellmate was transferred out of the jail and not replaced, the indictment says.

The grand-jury charges call the transfer “routine” and ”pre-arranged,” but do not explain why the instruction that Epstein have a cellmate was ignored.

The indictment also details that both Noel and Thomas were on overtime shifts. Noel worked a double shift that night from 4 P.M. to 8 A.M. Thomas had not worked the day before Epstein’s body was found, but the indictment says his shift from midnight to 8 A.M. on the morning Epstein was discovered dead was overtime.

While Noel was officially employed as a guard, Thomas' title at the jail was “materials handler,” although he regularly picked up overtime shifts.

Correctional worker unions have been highly critical of federal prison management for excessive reliance on overtime and on ancillary personnel like Thomas to pick up guard shifts through a process known as “augmentation.”

After an extensive FBI investigation more than a decade ago into Epstein’s proclivity for hiring teenage girls to perform “massages” that often involved sex acts, federal prosecutors in Florida entered into a controversial plea deal that allowed the money manager to escape federal charges by pleading guilty to a pair of prostitution-related charges in state court. He wound up serving about 13 months in county jail and during much of his sentence was allowed to work from his office during the day.

The deal prompted a lawsuit against the federal government by some of Epstein’s alleged victims, who claimed they were illegally shut out of the process. In February, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors violated the rights of the women involved by intentionally deceiving them about the status of the case. That ruling, and new press reports about the deal, put heavy pressure on Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who was the top federal prosecutor in south Florida at the time.

In July, federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed a new indictment against Epstein, charging him with sex trafficking and conspiracy. He pleaded not guilty to the charges but a judge turned down his requests for bail. A few days later, Acosta resigned, citing the mushrooming controversy over his decisions on the Epstein case a decade earlier.

Reports of the new charges against the guards on duty at the time of Epstein’s death emerged as Bureau of Prisons Director Kathleen Hawk Sawyer was testifying before a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing. She was repeatedly pressed by senators about Epstein’s death, but said she was effectively taken out of the loop as soon as the FBI and inspector general began investigating.

However, under questioning from Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), Hawk Sawyer — a former BOP director re-appointed to the post about a week after Epstein’s death — acknowledged a BOP review found some other instances of guards asleep on the job.

“We have a few, sir,” said Hawk Sawyer. “We have found a couple of other instances. And we have immediately referred those to the inspector general’s office.”

The top federal prison official said she’d like to see those individuals not only fired, but prosecuted.

“I am encouraging that if people just chose not to do their job the US Attorney’s office will pick up those cases and prosecute those cases because we don’t want those people in the Bureau of Prisons because they are dangerous to everybody — the inmates and the staff,” she said. "We want them gone.”

Hawk Sawyer said suicides like Epstein’s are rare in federal prisons and even rarer in pretrial detention facilities like the one where Epstein died.

“In our jail facilities in the last year, we’ve had two,” she said. “And, unfortunately, one of those was an extraordinarily high-profile case. And it makes everyone paint the Bureau of Prisons with that broad brush of incompetence across our system.”

However, several senators said Epstein should have been watched more closely than a typical prisoner, not just due to the high-profile nature of his case, but because his testimony might have been used against others.

“Not every inmate has equal value for future criminal investigations. Jeffrey Epstein was still to testify in a case,” Sasse said, apparently referring to the possibility Epstein might have cut a deal to testify against his associates who were reportedly under investigation.

“It isn’t just about the individual inmate who might kill themselves. It’s about the fact that that bastard wasn’t able to testify against his other co-conspirators,” Sasse added. “You’ve got a whole bunch of women who were raped by this guy….This is a sex-trafficking ring in the United States. This guy had evidence. He’s got co-conspirators and there are victims out there who want to know where the evidence has gone.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), meanwhile, hinted there may have been nefarious forces at play in Epstein's death.

“He died in federal custody before he had a chance to testify about his crimes, about his wrongdoings, and about the other powerful men who were complicit in that sexual abuse,” he said. “There were powerful men who wanted Jeffrey Epstein silenced.”

While Cruz talked about the possibility Epstein was murdered, the prisons chief insisted she was unaware of any evidence of that.

“There is no indication, from anything I know, that it was anything other than a suicide,” she said.

However, before, Hawk Sawyer stressed that she was in the dark about the FBI and inspector general findings.

“We are not allowed to talk to anybody in our institutions about any that happened over the Epstein case,” she said.

Sasse wasn’t satisfied. “With all due respect, you still have an obligation to speak to the girls that were raped by this guy, today,” he said.