San Diego prison guard sentenced to federal prison for bribery scheme involving bejeweled ‘grill’

A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a former guard at a state prison in Otay Mesa to two years in prison for participating in a bribery and smuggling scheme, saying it was important to send the message to other officers penitentiaries that such conduct will be punished despite the “ridiculous nature of the contraband involved”.

This contraband? A jeweled “grid” for a prisoner’s teeth and the dental molds needed to create it.

Benito Jamar Hugie, 49, pleaded guilty last year to a bribery conspiracy charge, as did the prisoner who received the grill, Shawn Brown, and two Fresno men whom prosecutors identified as the brothers of Brown.

In court Thursday, a prosecutor alluded to suspicions that Hugie, who worked at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Center, had previously been involved in similar behavior. U.S. District Judge Cathy Bencivengo also said there were references in a sealed pre-sentence report to contact Hugie had with the prisoners’ families.

“That suggests the line got 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 allowed himself to “blur the 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 following month, Hugie smuggled the finished product — prosecutors said the grill in question was made of gold and encrusted with diamonds — into Brown’s establishment.

The indictment alleged that Hugie accepted at least $5,000 from Brown and his brothers. In their plea agreements, Brown and his brothers admitted that the entire scheme — acquiring the bejeweled grill, bribing Hugie and smuggling the grill into the prison — exceeded $30,000.

Hugie’s lawyer, Douglas Brown, said in court Thursday that the financial benefit to his client was “not $35,000.” It was much less than that.

The lawyer said his client “understands that his conduct was completely unacceptable” and has told the FBI everything he knows after initially denying his involvement in the scheme.

“It was really stupid,” Hugie said in Bencivengo on Thursday. In his letter to the judge, he wrote that at the time, his marriage of 20 years was falling apart and his personal life was in disarray.

“In the midst of this tumultuous time, I made a serious error of judgment. I allowed my already diminished self-esteem 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 were not financially motivated.

As the FBI investigated the bribery scheme, agents learned that Brown was defrauding state taxpayers with false COVID-related unemployment claims, according to a second indictment. He and five of his co-defendants in the case pleaded guilty to a wire fraud conspiracy charge in November, the same day as the guilty pleas in the bribery case.

Brown admitted in his guilty plea to wire fraud that the fake unemployment program resulted in a loss of more than $550,000 to the state’s Employment Development Department.

Bencivengo ordered Hugie, who remained out on bail shortly after his arrest in June 2022, to report to prison in May.