By A.C. Thompson and Matthew Hirsch

For more than four years now, a fascinating drama involving all the elements of John Grisham pulp – notably, charges of fraudulent accounting, public sector corruption, and blatant intimidation – has been quietly unfolding behind closed doors.

Revealed here for the first time, the allegations form the core of a lawsuit brought by a former staffer at San Francisco's Juvenile Probation Department, the Chernobyl-like municipal agency now under investigation by the City Attorney's Office.

The department operates on a nearly $30 million annual budget, employs more than 300 people, and handles roughly 3,000 new cases every year.

Ray Mizyed, the former staffer, claims his bosses systematically screwed him and other grunt workers out of thousands of dollars in overtime pay by altering employee time sheets. When Mizyed spoke up about the issue, he says, he found himself subject to a campaign of harassment by departmental higher-ups – a campaign so determined that Mizyed eventually resigned and went to work for the Alameda County Juvenile Probation Department.

While this whole thing might sound like a wild yarn invented by a disgruntled kiddie cop, there are several reasons to believe the man – not the least of which is the fact that the city last month agreed to pay Mizyed $135,000 to settle his lawsuit.

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Mizyed is a husky guy of Arab descent, his goatee and close-cropped dark hair flecked with a little gray. He loves law enforcement. If he weren't working in juvenile probation – a field that largely consists of supervising and incarcerating teen offenders – he says he'd apply to be a cop or Federal Bureau of Investigation agent.

So when Mizyed took a job with the Juvenile Probation Department in 1998, he didn't exactly expect to have more problems with his bosses than with the lawbreakers he was overseeing.

But by 2000, Mizyed, a counselor at the Log Cabin Ranch School, a long-term locked facility for serious offenders, began scrutinizing his pay stubs and asking questions. And that's when the situation got dicey.

Mizyed was working epic shifts of up to 20 hours a day but never receiving any overtime pay. He brought up the matter with a department secretary who told him, according to court documents, that she "regularly changed the dates reflected on timesheets" so that "employees would not be paid overtime."

He broached the subject with Johnny Miller, then head of Log Cabin, who told Mizyed he wasn't eligible for O.T. because he was an "on-call" employee, according to the suit.

The department uses on-call workers with flexible schedules to keep Log Cabin staffed around the clock. They do not receive the generous vacation, medical, dental, and pension benefits of regular city employees.

Another staffer helped Mizyed get access to his time sheets, which the department was reluctant to release. Mizyed was stunned by what he found: right there on the time sheets were typewritten notes instructing payroll clerks to cut out O.T., an obvious violation of state and federal law. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which covered Mizyed and his coworkers, mandates employees be paid time and a half if they clock in for more than 40 hours a week.

We reviewed the time sheets, and Mizyed's story checks out. From examining the documents, it's clear Log Cabin bosses directed payroll clerks to doctor the time sheets.

One of the most damning things about the evidence is that it directly implicates high-level department officials. One time sheet from late 2000, for example, bears a note saying the falsification is to be done "Per Donald Sanders." At that time Sanders was a deputy director of Log Cabin working directly beneath Johnny Miller; today he's the top boss at the facility.

There's nothing iffy about this stuff. "State law," said Dean Fryer, spokesperson for the California Department of Industrial Relations, "requires a worker's hours to be recorded accurately."

Not surprisingly, Mizyed says his bosses weren't pleased he insisted on bringing up the issue – which he took to his union rep, the city's Human Resources Department, and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Another thing that rubbed his superiors the wrong way, his suit contends, was his decision to back up Howie Chaves, an employee who sued the department alleging discrimination.

In his suit Mizyed contends he was threatened by several higher-ups, including Gwendolyn Tucker, the department's controversial former chief probation officer, who stepped down last week in the wake of a widely reported probe by the City Attorney's Office. According to the suit, Tucker tried to dissuade Mizyed from discussing the payroll scam, saying, "You do not want me coming after you, and if you do not stop what you are doing, I will come after you."

We contacted Tucker's attorney, Gregg Adam, about the allegations. Adam told us, "My client's not interested in responding to Mr. Mizyed's suit at this time."

In 2003, after trying to collect his overtime money for three fruitless years, Mizyed finally decided to sue. "It was disheartening for me, a person who has so much faith in law enforcement and the justice system, to see this type of corruption and see the people in power just ignore it," he said, adding that he believes at least six people fell victim to the same scheme while he was working at Log Cabin.

As far as acting chief probation officer William Johnston is concerned, Mizyed's charges "were never substantiated."

Johnston portrayed the whole saga as a relic of the past, noting that most of the named defendants in the case – including ex-chiefs Tucker and Jesse Williams and former Log Cabin director Miller – have left the department. "I'm certain that's there's nothing inappropriate going on," he said. "It's a story that, as far as we're concerned, is over and done with." Williams and Miller have left town, and we were unable to locate them for comment on this story.

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Today Mizyed is a full-time probation officer in Alameda County, assigned to the youth lock-up in San Leandro. He took the position in mid-2003 after deciding he was done with San Francisco.

He's already received letters of commendation from the Oakland Police Department and the county's head probation officer, Donald Blevins, for helping OPD detectives crack an unsolved shooting.

In August, with zero fanfare, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors approved a $135,000 settlement with Mizyed. The city admitted no wrongdoing, though the City Attorney's Office earlier sent Mizyed a letter acknowledging that his hours had been misreported between July 1, 1999, and Dec. 31, 2001.

Mizyed is starting to regret taking the money and is now looking for new counsel. "I felt like I had to take what was there just to get it over with. But I feel it's not just. I'm trying to renegotiate based on the new evidence that's coming out."

That fresh evidence, comprises, in part, the recent statements of one of the named defendants in the case, Mercedes Hernandez-Bran, a top-level manager at the department. In recent weeks Hernandez-Bran's name has been splashed across the dailies as she's tried to blow the whistle on what she views as a plague of scandalous behavior in the department. As she tells it, managers were given tens of thousands of dollars in bonus pay for slashing overtime costs, giving them a financial incentive to swindle their frontline staffers.

She sketches a picture of a rip-off that extends far beyond Mizyed. "Reducing overtime has always been the number-one thing in our department," she told us, adding that she wasn't involved in the O.T. manipulations. "I saw the time sheets myself. In fact, those boxes are sitting in my office right now. It goes further than [Mizyed]. I think it's been going on since '95."

Despite the mounting array of evidence suggesting the department illegally – or, at the very least, unethically – shrank the paychecks of its workers, so far none of the people at the heart of the case have been forced to account for their actions. Nobody's been fired or criminally prosecuted or even reprimanded.

Anyone care to investigate?

E-mail A.C. Thompson and Matthew Hirsch