2 Plead Innocent in Attack on Prisoner

NEW YORK — Two police officers charged in an attack on a Haitian immigrant pleaded innocent Friday, while the officer accused of forcibly sodomizing the man with a toilet plunger said the immigrant was injured before his arrest.

“It wasn’t me,” the prime suspect, Officer Justin Volpe, said in a published interview. “It happened before” Abner Louima had been arrested, he said.

Volpe, 25, did not elaborate in the Daily News interview published Friday. But authorities are investigating reports that he and other officers claimed that when they arrested Louima on Aug. 9, he had already been injured during homosexual sex in a Brooklyn nightclub.

Louima’s attorney said Friday that that story was part of an attempted cover-up. “We have witnesses who saw Abner get into the squad car that night in healthy condition,” Brian Figeroux said.

Prosecutors say Volpe and officers Charles Schwarz, 31, Thomas Bruder, 31, and Thomas Wiese, 33, turned on Louima because they thought, perhaps mistakenly, that he was a man who punched Volpe when police tried to break up a brawl outside Club Rendez-Vous. The officers are accused of driving him to a deserted street and taking turns beating him.

Once back at the 70th Precinct station house, prosecutors allege, Volpe borrowed some gloves, took a stick, believed to be the handle of a toilet plunger, and jammed it into Louima’s rectum and mouth.

Based on Louima’s claims that officers repeatedly used a racial slur, a grand jury charged Thursday that the assault was racially motivated. Volpe’s attorney, Marvin Kornberg, called the charge “ridiculous,” given that his client has a black girlfriend.

Louima, 30, denied involvement in the fight, and assault charges against him were later dropped.

Bruder and Wiese were silent Friday as their lawyers entered innocent pleas on second-degree assault and other charges in Brooklyn Criminal Court; they remain free on $25,000 bail. Volpe and Schwarz will be arraigned Sept. 8 on charges including first-degree assault and aggravated sexual assault.

Attorneys for Bruder and Wiese said the officers were targets of a reckless investigation driven by outrage over the Louima case and other recent accusations of police brutality.

In one of those other cases, Missouri took back the last of its 415 inmates from an Angleton, Texas, jail where private guards were videotaped roughing up prisoners. With nobody left to guard, more than 100 employees of the jail were laid off.

Most of the 82 full-time and 33 part-time employees of Capital Correctional Resources Inc. at the Brazoria County Detention Center were laid off Thursday, Warden Bobby Crawford said.