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The handwritten letter arrived days before Christmas 2022.
“THIS IS AN EMERGENCY ISSUE!!!” it began. “PLEASE HELP.” Signed by 14 people incarcerated in one of the highest security federal prisons in the country, the letter was an urgent warning for prison officials.
Several corrections officers were trying to bribe prisoners to attack the warden and one of his captains. Three men said officers “offered to poorly tighten their hand restraints” during the warden’s walk-through “so that the inmate can easily slip his hand restraints and carry out a physical assault,” according to the letter.
Guards had offered the men extra food trays and other favors, and promised not to injure them after the attack. The men wrote that officers were angry about changes by the new warden.
Thomas Bergami had taken over the Thomson penitentiary in western Illinois nine months earlier — tasked with fixing a prison where five prisoners were killed in recent years and where more than 120 people have reported serious abuse. A second letter delivered soon after the first made similar claims, and said that officers suggested someone stab the officials.
An investigator from the Bureau of Prisons interviewed some of the men who signed the letters and found the information they provided “fairly consistent,” according to his report. But because “none provided specific dates or times of the allegation,” the agent wrote, he “could not confirm nor refute” their accounts.
Bergami, who retired this summer, said in an interview that the officers on that unit, who had been taken off their posts, returned to work days later. “When the regional director called me and said, ‘Well, they looked into it and put those guys back on their post,’ I’m like, ‘Are you freaking kidding me right now?’” Bergami said. “My staff were saying to stab me and the captain. I’ve got to worry about our safety.”
Bureau officials did not respond to questions about the letters and the investigation. The explosive allegation is among several incidents that Bergami and his former top deputy at Thomson recalled in recent interviews with The Marshall Project and NPR, detailing what they described as a culture of abuse and impunity at the prison.
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