By Molly Crane-Newman
New York Daily News
BROOKLYN, NY — A corrupt ex-prison officer who has spent more than a year behind bars awaiting his fate didn’t get the deal that he bargained for.
Armando Moronta, 40, a former federal correction officer at the Metropolitan Detention Center, was sentenced to 10 years prison time on Wednesday — nearly double the time prosecutors had recommended — for fondling a prisoner and forcing three other inmates to perform oral sex on him during a dozen encounters in 2016.
“Over a period of months, Moronta flagrantly violated his sworn duty as a law enforcement officer, sexually abused inmates entrusted to his supervision and undermined the safety of his fellow officers and others in exchange for bribes,” U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said in a statement.
Moronta must forfeit $15,000 in bribe payments, and register as a sex offender.
The disgraced former jail official copped to four counts of sexual abuse of a ward in November 2017, and pleaded guilty to bribery and narcotics charges.
During the same period he was sexually abusing inmates, Moronta was smuggling contraband — such as K2 and cell phones — to male inmates in exchange for thousands of dollars in bribes, prosecutors said.
The ex-guard pleaded guilty in the hope it would result in a lesser sentence, but his dreams were dashed when a judge discovered his name among a dozen other defendants in a wrongful death lawsuit filed in February of his year at Brooklyn Federal Court.
U.S. District Judge Roslynn Mauskopf questioned bewildered prosecutors on Tuesday about the eleventh-hour discovery, which she made while preparing for sentencing the night before.
“It might very well color my sentence or, at least, give me some other reason — reasoning — for a sentence I’m thinking about,” the judge said of the allegations charged in the suit.
The lawsuit alleges Moronta caused the 2016 death of an inmate, Michael Garrett, who died of heart failure at MDC after smoking lethal K2 the guard had smuggled into the jail.
“Mr. Garrett had obtained and ingested synthetic marijuana, or ‘K2,’ that had been smuggled into the facility by Correction Officer Armando Moronta,” the suit states.
“Soon thereafter … Mr. Garrett was pronounced dead.”