By A.C. Thompson

IT'S A LONG 50 miles from the streets of San Francisco to the juvenile jail they call the Log Cabin Ranch School. To get there you drive south on Highway 1, the ocean a gray-green line on your right, wind-eaten cliffs on your left, and go past the surfers slashing through the frothy chop near Pacifica, past horses and cows grazing lazily in emerald fields, past the quaint little homes and antique shops of Half Moon Bay. Hang a left at San Gregorio State Beach onto Route 84. Follow it as it slithers through voluptuous, grassy hills and cuts back and forth across a cold, fast-moving creek. At the sign for Log Cabin Road, put it in low gear and grind up a steep one-and-a-half-lane access road under a latticelike canopy of redwood branches.

The 50-year-old institution sits on a table-flat plateau cut into the side of a heavily wooded hill. The moniker of the facility – like those of suburban tract home developments the world over – is inaccurate. There are no horses, cows, goats, sheep, llamas, or other livestock on the premises, no wide-open fields, and no log cabins in sight.

In actuality the Log Cabin Ranch School is a collection of low, salmon-colored cinder-block buildings ringing a pair of asphalt basketball courts. It doesn't really look like a correctional facility – there are no tall chain-link fences, no coiled razor wire to separate the inmates from the rest of us. The dorms are locked at night, but other than that there's really no need for physical barriers. Out here in the sticks, 10 lonely miles from the highway, isolation is the main deterrent to would-be escape artists.

Typically, you end up here when you're black or brown and you live in a harsh neighborhood and you've been busted over and over and over on petty charges and you've finally gotten popped for something heavy, like, for example, pulling a gun on somebody or sticking 'em with a blade. It's a repository of San Francisco's most problematic problem children, a dumping ground for hostile boys bent on acting out the bling-bling gangsta fantasies sold to them by MTV and BET and Hollywood. Sentences generally start at eight months and can be lengthened due to bad behavior.

Some insiders portray the place as a disaster zone. "I have never seen a place so cruel, so violent," says one ex-Log Cabin employee who spent more than a decade at the ranch and claims to have witnessed staffers mistreating inmates. "The best thing they can do is close that place."

Others disagree. "Log Cabin has been starved and neglected and abused by the media," complains one current staffer who asked to remain anonymous. "They've had programs and resources cut, and despite that, the staff is doing a lot of good. As a whole, Log Cabin is very effective 'cause you've got kids from warring neighborhoods who are forced to live with each other, to sit down and eat with each other."

Whatever the case, the status quo at Log Cabin is likely to get a shake-up in the months ahead. District Attorney Kamala Harris is not a fan of the facility, recently telling the San Francisco Chronicle, "We need to do something about that place as soon as possible." Mayor Gavin Newsom has convened a blue-ribbon panel of some 15 experts hailing from both city government and the private sector to come up with a blueprint to reform Log Cabin. The panel is expected to announce its recommendations in mid-March.

At this rare historical moment, when city officials seem genuinely concerned about the well-being of young people from the hood, we'd like to make our own recommendation: they should talk to Gary Thompson. Because Thompson, who worked at the facility for 13 years, has a hell of a story, a narrative studded with threats, an apparent payroll scam, a handgun that definitely existed, a handgun that may have been completely fictional, $135,000, and an alleged secret pact between a pair of inmates and the head of Log Cabin, a man named Donald Sanders.

In sworn testimony, these inmates say Sanders offered them special treatment in exchange for performing one simple task: wrecking Gary Thompson's life.

The gun

Thompson is a linebacker-size guy with a shaved noggin, a gray-flecked goatee, and a chest like a keg of beer. His former colleagues remember him as a disciplinarian with a gruff, no-bullshit approach. They also remember him as someone who allegedly made some incredibly dumb decisions while employed at Log Cabin.

According to his superiors, Thompson toted his personal handgun to the ranch one day in early 2002 and invited a small circle of inmates to check out the loaded firearm and even handle it. He also, allegedly, handed some inmates an extendable metal billy club and let them play with it. The key witnesses arrayed against Thompson were three male prisoners.

Their testimony led to Thompson's suspension from his post as a counselor at the institution and, after a protracted investigation, his firing from the Juvenile Probation Department, the municipal agency that runs Log Cabin. (In the juvenile justice system, counselors typically play a dual role, talking to teen inmates as well as guarding them.)

Thompson's unceremonious expulsion would seem like a good thing. Obviously, an angry adolescent brandishing a gun could provoke a full-blown crisis in a matter of seconds by taking hostages or putting some holes in somebody. And the idea that the department would actually discipline a judgment-impaired employee is refreshing; as a general rule, correctional facilities have a tendency to let employees slide when they behave badly – hence the grisly stories steadily emanating from the state prison system and the California Youth Authority.

But in Thompson's remarkable case, cold hard facts have a way of melting. Start scrutinizing the official account and the threads holding the entire thing together start to fray and disintegrate, leaving the man looking more like the victim of a scandalously vindictive boss than like a dangerous rogue.

The tale also offers some dark insights into how business seems to be conducted behind the walls of the city's juvenile correctional facilities.

Thompson, for his part, is emphatic. As he sits in a café sipping hot chocolate and speaking in soft tones, his volume surges when the inevitable question comes up. "I didn't bring no gun. I didn't bring no bullets. I didn't bring no clip," he replies. "No way."

The hours

It was football that brought Thompson to Log Cabin. After attending San Jose State University, Thompson, a defensive back, bounced around the NFL and the Canadian football league for much of the '80s, doing a couple quick stints with the 49ers and two years with the Buffalo Bills, as well as several seasons up north. By 1989 his gridiron career had stalled, and Thompson, who had moved back to the Bay Area, was casting about for a new profession. Some friends from a semipro league encouraged him to check out Log Cabin.

Now 46, Thompson still looks like he could plow a running back into the turf without breaking a sweat. From the tree-trunk arms to the collar-stretching neck, he cuts quite an imposing figure.

When Thompson was hired on at Log Cabin, he quickly took on a central role in the facility's sports program, coaching its volleyball, basketball, softball, and cross-country squads, which compete against teams from 8 or 10 other teen correctional facilities around the Bay Area. "The youths really took to it. I trained them the way I used to train," he says. Toward the end of his career, he spent three years pulling 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. graveyard shifts.

While Thompson relished his time with the teens, by the late 1990s he wasn't always on the best terms with his bosses. Things really started disintegrating when Thompson caught on to a scam Donald Sanders, then deputy director of Log Cabin, was purportedly orchestrating.

Log Cabin employed a handful of temporary counselors who didn't receive any of the perks – medical insurance, vacation pay, sick leave, etc. – enjoyed by permanent staffers, who are unionized. The temps filled holes in the schedule, pulling shifts as needed to keep the place staffed around the clock. The temps often put in more than 40 hours a week, or eight hours in a day – the two points when overtime pay is supposed to kick in.

But for some mysterious reason, temp employees never got any O.T. Some former temps say they were told by Log Cabin officials that they weren't eligible for it.

From a look at the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which lays out the rules for compensating employees, it appears the exact opposite is true, that, in fact, the temps should've gotten the extra dollars.

Thompson had several pals at Log Cabin who were temps – and he himself had put in three and a half years as a temp when he first started – so when the temps began griping about the situation, he decided to show a little solidarity. First, in 1999, he did a little favor for an ex-employee named Ed Williams.

Williams, a temp, was suing the department over the O.T. scheme, claiming he'd been deprived of a significant chunk of change. "I was irritated because they were screwing us out of money, and I knew it," Williams says.

Thompson decided to help him out by personally serving the legal papers on the top managers at Log Cabin. "That was the first real initiative," he recalls. The Juvenile Probation Department, like any correctional or law enforcement organization, is built on discipline and respect for the chain of command, and as you might imagine, Thompson's act of defiance wasn't particularly well received. His coworkers warned him. "They were saying, 'You're causing trouble for yourself,' " he says.

But the situation got even more heated when Thompson started kicking it with Ray Mizyed, another temp pissed about the O.T. rip-off. Mizyed had the feeling he was being played, but no real proof. Thompson helped him get it. Using his connections in the departmental bureaucracy, Thompson came into a thick stack of Mizyed's time sheets covering 1999 through 2001.

And right there, in black and white, was all the evidence Mizyed and the other temps needed: scrawled on the time sheets were handwritten notes instructing the payroll clerks to falsify the documents.

The time sheets – which the Bay Guardian has reviewed – were doctored to make it look as if Mizyed and the other temps weren't putting in any extra hours.

By all indications, the plot originated in the department's upper echelons. The notes penned on many of the time sheets say the book-broiling was to be done "Per Don Sanders."

Department officials stand by Sanders. "Don Sanders has been an excellent and diligent employee," says William Johnston, who helmed the department until resigning abruptly Jan. 1; a permanent chief hasn't been named yet. "If everything at Log Cabin isn't perfect, it's not all his fault. He's certainly worked hard." Johnston declined to comment directly on the overtime issue.

The lepers

Predictably, when Thompson and Mizyed unearthed the scheme, they achieved instant leper status in the eyes of their superiors. "I'm positive the bosses weren't happy," says Mercy Hernandez-Bran, a senior human resources analyst at the department.

After much acrimony, Mizyed bailed in 2003, promptly suing his former employer, alleging harassment, retaliation, and, of course, that he was shorted on O.T. pay.

Mizyed claims some of his former bosses, including Gwendolyn Tucker, were quite blatant about trying to shut him up. According to his suit, when he brought up the payroll scam with Tucker, she got irate, telling him, "You do not want me coming after you, and if you do not stop what you are doing, I will come after you."

But Mizyed didn't stop. And in August 2004 the city quietly signed off on a settlement, handing him $135,000. He's now a juvenile probation officer in Alameda County.

As for Thompson, his career with the department went south in August 2002, when he returned from a vacation to find himself the subject of a probe initiated by Sanders, who by that time had moved into the top slot at Log Cabin. "Don Sanders hands me a memo saying I'm on a 30-day suspension and under investigation for allegedly bringing a firearm to the job," Thompson says, a surge of anger flashing in his eyes. "My jaw dropped."

Unlike adult correctional officers, staffers at Log Cabin aren't equipped with guns, and city rules on the matter don't leave any wiggle room, stating, "Ranch employees shall not be in possession of firearms or other weapons on Ranch grounds or inside of Ranch buildings."

Interestingly, it had taken Sanders three or four months to uncover the gun incident, which supposedly occurred in the spring of 2002.

The core allegations were lobbed at Thompson by two inmates, whom we'll identify by the initials R.R. and P.H. The teens spun similar tales, according to a confidential report written up by a detective for the City Attorney's Office.

R.R. told the detective he and one other prisoner were invited by Thompson to leave their dorm and walk out to his car, which was parked in a lot on the grounds of Log Cabin. With one boy sitting in the car and the other standing outside the vehicle, "Thompson pulled a gun from under his front passenger seat," according to the report. R.R. "grabbed the gun from Thompson and held it for about a minute before giving it back to Thompson. [R.R.] stated there was no bullet in the chamber but the clip had bullets in it. The clip was full."

He described the weapon as "all black" save "the chrome piece where the gun is cocked," and thought "it was possibly a 9mm or 40 caliber gun with a 6 inch barrel." Not content with showing off his handgun, Thompson also yanked out an extendable metal club and passed it around, R.R. said.

In interviews with the detective, P.H. also claimed to have had his own experience with Thompson and his gun. P.H. said Thompson displayed the weapon – which he pulled out of "a black gun case that looked like a mini suitcase" – to him and two other boys. In this instance, P.H. said, the boys didn't actually handle the firearm. The incident occurred a few hours before R.R. allegedly checked out Thompson's weapons collection.

P.H. also did some art for the investigator, drawing a simplistic diagram of the purported weapon; the drawing, which the Bay Guardian has obtained, isn't particularly incriminating – it could be of any semiautomatic handgun.

The stories were a tad weird – what, exactly, was Thompson's motivation for these little games of show-and-don't-tell? And while Thompson did indeed carry a handgun, a .380 caliber weapon he used at his second job, toiling as a security guard for the AMC Kabuki 8 movie theater, the firearm lacked the distinctive chrome chunk described by R.R., and Thompson says he's never owned a gun case.

The claims made by R.R. and P.H. were buttressed, somewhat, by a third inmate, J.S., who said he'd "seen guns on two separate occasions" while at Log Cabin, but refused to point the finger at Thompson, saying "he did not want to name names," according to the detective's report. Aside from these three prisoners, none of the kids who supposedly witnessed the two incidents would go on the record.

Still, the department had more than enough evidence to can Thompson, and in August 2003, exactly one year after the allegations first surfaced, he was terminated.

The wreckage

Unemployment has not been kind to Thompson. In the days after he was booted from the department, the foundations of his life fissured, fractured, and eventually collapsed. "I felt like these guys cut off my limbs from the base," he says, his voice dropping to a near murmur. "This completely destroyed my family. I was homeless for nine months. I was completely distraught. I just felt torn inside."

Despondent, he couldn't conjure up the motivation to go hunt for a new job, and he spent months living on plastic and sinking deeper and deeper into debt. To stave off bankruptcy, he sold one of his cars, a 2000 Volkswagen Jetta. Sold the three-bedroom house in Sunnyvale he shared with his family. Blew out the credit cards. His marriage of 16 years ruptured, with his wife leaving him and taking their two grade school-age children to Buffalo, N.Y. As you read this, Thompson's relying on the kindness of friends, crashing on their couches and borrowing cash like a twentysomething slacker. This is actually a step up – for a while he was stuck sleeping in his truck.

"I haven't even had the mental state to do anything. They took a big part of me and just crumbled it. They'll never make me whole," he says.

But, ironically, as Thompson's life has crumbled, so has the case against him. When Thompson got the axe, he responded in classic American fashion by suing the department for wrongful termination and filing an administrative grievance. His lawyer, Joseph Morehead, scoured the city in hopes of locating the kids who'd testified about his alleged gun-toting habits.

After many months of searching and several calls to the Multnomah County jail in Portland, Ore., Morehead finally hit pay dirt, with the two key witness against Thompson recanting their stories entirely.

The gumshoe work led to sworn depositions taken in September 2004, during which R.R. and P.H. said they'd been pawns in a plot engineered by Sanders to oust Thompson.

R.R. says that, because of his poor behavior at Log Cabin, he was slated to be shipped to the California Youth Authority – the über-violent, dangerous state lockup for juveniles where four young men perished under suspicious circumstances last year and the wards tend to emerge as hardened cons. But Sanders, in exchange for R.R.'s statements implicating Thompson, spared him that fate.

By R.R.'s account, Sanders "threatened" to "send me to CYA if I didn't say what [he] wanted me to say."

"What did Donald Sanders want you to say?" asked Morehead, according to a deposition transcript.

A: To say that Gary Thompson had a gun, that he brought the gun to work, which wasn't true.

Q: Why would you want to say something like that if it wasn't true?

A: Because I was threatened for my life. I didn't want to go to CYA.

Q: Why not?

A: Because people get killed and raped and hang theyself. And you're in a little cell.

When asked again, more directly, about the firearm, R.R. was unequivocal.

Q: Did you ever see a gun at Log Cabin Ranch school?

A: No.

For his part, P.H. offered an analogous story line, saying Sanders offered to cut him a "break" in exchange for his testimony against Thompson. "I was promised some time off from my case, man, to say these things I was saying," P.H. said in response to a question from deputy city attorney Anthony Grumbach. The pact was made when Sanders pulled the young man into his office for a one-on-one meeting and "told me what to say and everything."

P.H. said Sanders "told me I can get out if I say I seen something; if I get Mr. Thompson and Mr. Mizyed in trouble, we can work around all my legal problems."

Q: Did he tell you to say where Mr. Thompson had showed you the [gun]?

A: Yeah.

Q: Did he tell you to say who was there?

A: Yeah. He said – that's how I kind of knew who all was involved, when he started giving up the names. He said who was involved.

Though P.H. didn't end up getting released early, he did receive what he perceived as a serious benefit from his testimony.

During the course of the deposition, another attorney for Thompson inquired about the details of this alleged bargain. "I was supposed to get sent off to YA," P.H. explained, but Sanders "never sent me off."

Q: Did you understand that if you went along with him to make up the story, that he would not send you to CYA?

A: Yeah.

Q: And I take it, CYA is a place you didn't want to go?

A: Yeah.

None of the recent revelations particularly surprise Hernandez-Bran, the human resources analyst. According to Hernandez-Bran, who's intimately familiar with the facts of the case, department managers heard allegations that "at least three other" counselors were toting around guns, but "nobody was investigated except Gary."

Adds another longtime department staffer, "I don't believe for a minute that Gary was involved in that mess. This is how these folks work: they smash anyone who gets in their way."

The boss

Some department insiders believe Sanders, who holds a masters degree in education and spent years trying to salvage the wrecked lives of drug addicts before coming to Log Cabin, is constitutionally incapable of masterminding an elaborate plot to disgrace an underling. In their view Sanders is a thoroughly decent guy, a man of impeccable ethical standards. Says one, "This is not a bad man. His heart is in the right place, and the kids love him."

During the 1980s Sanders worked at the nonprofit Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, where his former boss, Darryl Inaba, remembers him as a dedicated drug counselor who was "very good at what he did."

We gave our questions about the allegations to Sanders in writing, and we met with him in person; he declined to be interviewed for this story.

However, during the course of Thompson's arbitration, Sanders was deposed, just like R.R. and P.H. and all the other key players in this ugly narrative. Under oath Sanders denied cutting any deals with the prisoners, denied ever threatening to send the young men to CYA, and said he only "glanced" at the investigative reports detailing Thompson's purported screwups.

Rather than harboring a beef, Sanders insisted he was friendly with Thompson and appreciated his skills, at one point tapping him to create a business curriculum for the inmates. "I thought he was a good counselor. He worked well with the young men," Sanders testified.

The ghost town

So, in the end, after sifting through the ruins of Thompson's life, what is one supposed to think? Is he a conscientious dude, a whistle-blower who was framed and disgraced and broken for raising questions that made his boss look like a crook? Did Sanders manipulate and use the prisoners, the boys he was paid to supervise and, if at all possible, rehabilitate? Are the young men now telling the truth, finally? Or have they been pressured or swayed in some way to disavow their earlier testimony?

All these questions are being pondered by an arbitrator. The arbitrator could hand Thompson his job back, along with a fat wad of cash for the trauma he's experienced. Or he could conclude that Thompson, despite the morphing testimony, did in fact commit the transgression he was fired for.

Either outcome is an indictment of Log Cabin, and either outcome suggests that at least some of the adults staffing the institution are just as bent as the kids they're supposed to straighten out.

One thing no disputes is the fact that Log Cabin, which was built to hold 80 inmates, is a virtual ghost town these days, with the head count hovering around 15 prisoners throughout 2004, according to department statistics. Though it's functioning at a fraction of capacity, it's still burning through large sums of taxpayer dough. When the final tally for 2004 is done, the cost of incarcerating a handful of kids is likely to top $1.8 million, which pencils out to $120,000 per year per youth.

Log Cabin's dwindling population is partially due to the reluctance of judges to send young men there. As judge Patrick J. Mahoney put it in a written statement given to the Bay Guardian, "Log Cabin Ranch ('LCR') is a unique asset, one that is greatly underutilized and lacks the resources to perform the task it is being asked to do." To be successful, Log Cabin needs "an enhanced education program, mental health services, substance abuse programs, behavioral programs to address anger management and gang issues in particular," as well as "job training" and follow-up supervision for boys who graduate.

The judge's comments are echoed by Lidia Stiglich, a member of the Juvenile Probation Commission, the body that oversees the city's juvenile justice apparatus. "The buildings are falling into disrepair. In some senses it's become an abandoned area. We need to make a commitment or let it go," she says.

The bottom line, according to Thompson, is that Log Cabin "is doing a disservice to the kids of the city and county of San Francisco. It's not changing these kids' behavior. It's not helping them. Coercion and manipulation are things they can learn on the streets."

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