The Martuscello Dynasty: Power and Patronage in New York Prisons

The killing of Robert Brooks at a central New York prison became a media sensation. Body-worn camera footage of the deadly beatdown, released in December, triggered a flurry of coverage, from local headlines to rolling cable news stories, directing national outrage at a state prison system that often evades scrutiny.

It caused a particular headache for the state prison commissioner, Daniel Martuscello III. A self-styled reformer, he responded to the public disgust by announcing a suite of initiatives aimed at reducing violence and holding abusive officers to account. Backlash followed, with the corrections officers union issuing a rare vote of no confidence against him last month. The following week, an annual budget hearing — normally a polite affair — saw the commissioner dodging activist protesters, escaping a gaggle of reporters, and fielding three hours of questions from horrified legislators.

Then, the guards went on strike. The state’s prisons locked down, threatening system-wide collapse. Like the activists, picketing corrections officers, convinced that Martuscello had abandoned them, called for his resignation.

This probably isn’t how Martuscello imagined his time as prison chief would go. Officially confirmed last May, he’d been the top job’s heir apparent for years. He’s the scion of a New York prison dynasty and came of age in the system, brought up by an ambitious, well-connected family that helped propel him to power.

That family has made enemies within the prison system, angering staff with what some describe as blatant nepotism. Still, the Martuscellos have risen through the prison agency ranks relatively unscathed. Amid turmoil, they’ve consolidated their influence.

A year-and-a-half-long New York Focus investigation reveals the story of the Martuscellos’ rise to power — not just Dan’s, but his father’s, brother’s, siblings’, in-laws’, and that of their friends across the prison system. Over decades, the family has built a patronage network so embedded in the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, or DOCCS, that staff have given it a name: the “friends and family” program.

The network’s actions have reverberated across the system, playing roles in some of the agency’s biggest scandals of the last decade: a sexual harassment investigation, mishandled drug evidence, a half-million-dollar lawsuit, a nationally infamous prison escape. Those connected to the Martuscellos have rarely faced consequences.

The favoritism is directly tied to a part of the system that enables officer abuse. For two decades, the main hub for the friends and family network has been the prison agency’s internal investigations office, which is responsible for investigating complaints of misconduct by DOCCS personnel. Traditionally staffed by former corrections officers, it allows the agency to police itself. Incarcerated people and advocates describe the office as a black box, quick to absolve officers and adept at keeping DOCCS wrongdoing out of the public eye.

The commissioner’s younger brother, Chris Martuscello, has spent most of his career in the internal investigations office. Around the time Dan rose to DOCCS’s top job, Chris was promoted to assistant commissioner and the office’s second-in-command. Some former staff who worked with Chris describe him as a hot-headed tyrant. They said he leads by threats and patronage — an approach he seemed to inherit from his father and family friends.

Dan, on the other hand, is the family’s suave politician. He’s become popular among the state government’s Democratic majority, giving the friends and family network the legitimacy it has needed to complete its DOCCS takeover. After the no-confidence vote, Governor Kathy Hochul came to Dan’s defense, saying that she’s “grateful to have Commissioner Martuscello leading the agency.”

His reformist rhetoric has also charmed some prisoners’ rights advocates, who say he’s as progressive as one can hope from the head of a sprawling 14,000-guard, 33,000-prisoner carceral system.

Others aren’t so sure. However well Dan speaks, his critics point out, little has meaningfully changed during his time at the top. As a deputy commissioner, he promised to reform the internal investigations office, to little noticeable effect. Brooks’s killing happened under his watch, as have other cases of abuse.

“The fish rots from the head,” said attorney Danielle Muscatello. She represents incarcerated victims of alleged officer violence, including a weeklong systematic beatdown that took place — with internal investigations staff allegedly watching — during Dan’s initial tenure as interim DOCCS commissioner. “Martuscello, the commissioners, they need to know that this is all happening under them.”

“He’s so hell bent on maintaining his position that he’s willing to say and do almost anything,” Rodney Young, a retired parole officer who organizes a fraternity of Black DOCCS employees, said of the commissioner.

How did the Martuscellos get to where they are? New York Focus traced the ruling prison family’s rise through thousands of pages of court records and internal state reports, leaked DOCCS memos and rosters, public records requests filed with multiple agencies, open source data, and testimony from current and former incarcerated people, advocates, and more than a dozen current and former DOCCS staff. Hundreds of pages of records date to the mid-2010s, when Dan and Chris were consolidating power — and when a state investigation threatened to topple their family dynasty. Neither Dan Martuscello, Chris Martuscello, nor DOCCS accepted interview requests or responded to multiple requests for comment.

Some of the former agency employees requested anonymity to avoid intimidation and harassment. They said the threat of retaliation is how the Martuscellos keep the heat off.

“You just mind your business,” one said. “Because if you ask questions and show that you’re onto something, you’re the next target.”

Four of his five siblings followed suit. Three worked under their father’s watch at Coxsackie prison, as did three of the Old Man’s sons-in-law.

It takes a lot of people to run a prison system: to provide medical care, maintain security, run programs, train guards — and, when things go wrong, investigate. The Old Man and his children have done it all, ascending the ranks of DOCCS’s nursing corps, administration, security staff, and training and education programs.

Dan and Chris started as guards at DOCCS in the late 1990s at a prison an hour and a half from their father’s. They weren’t long for security work: Dan moved to central administration in 2001. The following year, Chris joined the internal investigations office.

That made it an effective vehicle for the Martuscellos to wield their influence. One of the top internal investigations officials when Chris joined, a veteran officer named Vern Fonda, was a family friend. He and the Old Man went back decades: One employee recalled Fonda telling stories about pushing Chris in a stroller during a 1979 corrections officers strike. Like the Old Man, Fonda “was a god in corrections,” a former underling said. He kept eyes everywhere; several staff members described the internal investigations office under his reign as operating like a “prison” within the prison agency. When the office moved to a new space, they said, he installed a series of mirrors that allowed him to monitor staff from virtually every angle.

Chris got a job in Fonda’s old investigative unit, which monitored prison drug smuggling. Others in the Martuscellos’ orbit followed him to internal investigations: a buddy from Chris and Dan’s corrections officer days; one of the Old Man’s closest friends; the eldest Martuscello daughter’s then-husband. The Martuscello patriarch even directed some to specific posts within the office.

One fall evening in 2012, the Martuscellos gathered for dinner at the Old Man’s house, an officer later recalled hearing from higher-ups in private testimony he gave to state authorities. One of the Old Man’s sons-in-law — then a corrections officer at his prison — was going through internal investigator training, having been invited to vie for the cushier assignment. Staff had a hunch as to why he was there: “He’s married to the Martuscellos.”

Contemporaries describe the son-in-law, BobbyJoe Fosmire, as sharp, generally honest, and a good worker.

“He was a real personable, down-to-earth kid. Came from nothing in Troy,” said a former staffer who knew him. “It didn’t seem like he wanted to get involved in the politics.”

At dinner, Fosmire told the Old Man about the internal investigations units he was being recruited for, including the unit responsible for looking into allegations of officers abusing incarcerated people. It’d be a tough job: Any internal investigators who dig into guards’ misconduct (rather than prisoners’) are unpopular among DOCCS’s rank and file, but the “rats” in that unit are considered the worst of the worst.

That’s why the head of the unit wanted Fosmire. He saw him as a “no-nonsense type” — someone who “wouldn’t get bullied around” for digging into sensitive cases, he testified.

That wasn’t what the Old Man had in mind. “He wasn’t going to have his son being a rat bastard,” the head of the unit recalled.

The Old Man called his friend Fonda, and the son-in-law was diverted to a different internal investigations team. Fosmire, who did not respond to requests for comment, joked about the interaction, the head of the unit said: “I was just told by the Old Man he didn’t want me working there.”

Ferro was physically abusive at work, according to accounts from over a dozen witnesses and victims between 2010 and 2014, documented in state investigative reports and transcripts obtained through public records requests. They said that he kept a handheld melee tool known as a kubotan on his keychain and would hit internal investigations staff with it. He would pinch people and push on their pressure points.

Once, he insisted on demonstrating what he called a “defensive” arm twist on a colleague, then proceeded to injure her elbow, according to the documents. She complained to Fonda, who waited over two weeks to report it despite DOCCS requiring him to do so within 24 hours. Fonda told an employee who saw the arm twist to write a witness statement, then demanded that he alter it, highlighting portions he wanted deleted, the witness recalled.

“Are you trying to fucking twist a knife off in him?” the employee remembered Fonda saying.

When it came to men, Ferro’s harassment turned sexual. He would touch his genitals, then comment on it, according to the documents. He would follow male staff when they went to the bathroom, often with his arm around them; staff dubbed it his “buddy system.” One said that Ferro would go to the bathroom with him and place his hand on his shoulder while he was using the urinal.

When investigators complained to Fonda, he shrugged them off. Neither Fonda nor Ferro responded to requests for comment.

“I think he does very inappropriate, weird, sexual things as a way to make people feel uncomfortable,” a staffer said of Ferro. “It’s a control thing.”

The state investigators’ sources told them about Ferro’s abuse.

Witnesses also recounted Ferro’s relationship with his benefactor Fonda — as well as Fonda’s connections to the Old Man, the Old Man’s children, and the Martuscellos’ family and friends in the internal investigations office.

They commented on the family’s unusually meteoric rise up DOCCS’s ranks and complained that those in its network got suspicious promotions.

“The Martuscellos — they all get hooked up,” one said. “They got this juice.”

They also complained about cover-ups.

At least two DOCCS investigators with direct knowledge recalled an incident when the Old Man interfered in an investigation into an administrative assistant he’d hired. In 2010, the internal investigations office had received a complaint that the employee wasn’t working her full hours, was parking in the Old Man’s parking spot, and was sleeping in his office. A staffer drove to the Old Man’s prison to look into it. He was still in the parking lot when he got a call from the Old Man — one of several conversations he’d have with him in the coming days, he told state authorities.

“Who put you up to that rat shit?” the investigator remembers him asking. The Old Man warned him: “There is not a thing that can come across anybody’s desk out in [DOCCS’s main office] with my name on it that I won’t find out about.”

He also called the investigator’s boss.

The Old Man’s retaliation was swift, thanks to a quirk in how DOCCS classifies its internal investigations staff. When corrections officers are hired into internal investigations, they remain, at least on paper, employees of the prison where they used to work. The arrangement renders their investigator jobs tenuous: If they dig into the wrong case, call attention to cronyism, or file a complaint, officials can informally punish them — or even revoke their investigator title, sending them back to their guard job, according to inspector general documents and former staff.

The head of the unit investigating the Old Man’s employee happened to be from his prison. On the phone, the Old Man told him he was no longer allowed to file for overtime pay, he recalled. The unit head then personally took the case over from his underling.

Investigators substantiated allegations against the administrative assistant, who had already left DOCCS. But according to the unit head, the Old Man went unmentioned in the case file.

At the conclusion of the state inspector general investigation, authorities filed charges against Ferro. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor coercion and was sentenced to community service and fined $1,000. Fonda, whom the state investigation blamed for failing to address Ferro’s harassment, retired.

When it came to the Martuscellos, inspector general staff had taken notes on what DOCCS employees told them. In addition to the firsthand accounts of the Old Man interfering with an investigation, DOCCS internal investigators passed on rumors and suspicions of other misdeeds. One had heard that Chris Martuscello had once been arrested for assault, but word of the arrest mysteriously never made it to DOCCS brass. He also suspected that Chris and Fonda had tampered with personnel records to shield Dan from a state investigation into one of his promotions, as the Albany Times Union first reported. Another witness heard that Chris and Fonda’s close friend in the internal investigations office got into a car accident with another state employee while both were in their state-issued vehicles; the other employee was fired, but Chris and Fonda covered for their friend, he said.

The inspector general staff compiled memos and even mocked up a graphic detailing what they called the “friends and family cronyism.” It’s unclear if they substantiated the rumors and other allegations related to the Martuscellos and their broader network or if they shared those notes with DOCCS brass. When reached for comment, the inspector general’s office said it didn’t have additional information to provide. Its published findings only mentioned Ferro and Fonda.

Shortly after Dan became interim prison chief, Billy Muller, incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility, was struck by one of his memos: “I am committed to reducing the violence in our institutions,” it read. Muller had witnessed egregious violence. So he wrote back to Dan, whose office responded. He kept the reply in his cell.

Two months later, Green Haven went on lockdown. Guards spent a week allegedly ransacking cells, destroying incarcerated people’s property, and systematically beating them. Lawsuits filed on behalf of 46 people allege that guards punched them in their faces, kicked their genitals, gouged their eyes, and jumped on their backs. Two say that officers waterboarded them. Muller, who isn’t involved in the lawsuits, said that guards tackled him, “bouncing my head off the concrete wall.” That night and the following day, he heard half a dozen victims get removed from their cells for threatening suicide. He contemplated it himself, he wrote in an open letter. Martuscello issued a public statement during the lockdown, claiming it was for “the safety of staff and the incarcerated.” (The lawsuits are ongoing; the state has denied any wrongdoing.)

Like the killing of Robert Brooks, the Green Haven beatdown showed that one of DOCCS’s core issues — officer abuse — remains entrenched, critics say. Many incarcerated people, advocates, and some DOCCS staff have described guard violence as commonplace both before and since Dan took over the agency.

“What they did to him in that video, we’ve been hearing for years,” Muscatello, the lawyer representing Green Haven victims, said of Brooks’s killing.

“This is the culture this guy is coming from,” said Jose Saldana, the formerly incarcerated director of the Release Aging People in Prison campaign, referring to Dan’s upbringing in the prison system. The commissioner’s progressive talk, Saldana argued, is insincere. “He’s giving us an illusion.”

“He’s articulate, he’s sharp, he’s well dressed,” retired parole officer Keith Healy said of the commissioner.

“And he’s a cut-throat son of a bitch.”

Dan, too, came down hard on Montegari. In April 2015, he called him into his office. A driver on the New York State Thruway had submitted a complaint accusing Montegari of pulling him over in a state government vehicle, impersonating a New York State Police officer, and recklessly speeding away, Dan told him.

Montegari got emotional. He’d given 20 years to DOCCS, and was “seeing my life flash by,” he remembered. Dan, who was then the head of administrative services, placed him on leave pending a disciplinary hearing. And he told Montegari that the department “could make any determination they wanted regardless of whatever came out” of the hearing, Montegari said in a deposition.

The Thruway driver didn’t answer DOCCS’s calls, so the investigator assigned to the case rolled up to his work. And he brought powerful backup: Chris Martuscello. The investigation into Montegari had nothing to do with Chris’s narcotics unit, but he joined two other investigators in interrogating the driver.

The case against Montegari was weak from the start. E-ZPass records showed that Montegari’s state vehicle wasn’t on the Thruway the day the driver claimed the confrontation took place, according to disciplinary documents. The two had been on the Thruway on the same day the previous week, the record showed, but they weren’t near each other. The driver would have to have been going over 120 miles an hour for at least 20 minutes to have a run-in with Montegari.

With the exception of one speeding charge, a disciplinary officer found Montegari not guilty of every allegation against him and recommended that he be reinstated with back pay. Yet as Dan had allegedly said, the recommendations were non-binding. After reviewing his brother’s investigation, Dan recommended that DOCCS strip Montegari of his internal investigator title, send him back to prison work, and withhold his annual raise.

(In a deposition and court filings, Dan claimed that Montegari had resigned from his internal investigator role, though he had no record of it. Montegari denied resigning.)

An investigator named Christian Nunez took Montegari’s job as head of the sex crimes division. He’d been Chris’s number two in the narcotics division — and his longtime family friend, according to staff and state inspector general documents. (Nunez declined to comment for this article.)

“They just slide their people in,” said Snyder, who worked in internal investigations at the time.

Montegari, who declined to comment, sued DOCCS over the ordeal. In November 2023, a jury awarded him $500,000 in damages for the false suspension, discipline, and withheld raise, as well as pain and suffering. DOCCS is appealing. Dan, Chris, and the agency did not respond to requests for comment on the case.

It was one of many incidents that placed DOCCS’s internal investigations office under intense scrutiny. The Ferro scandal exposed its toxic dynamics to the public, while the national embarrassment brought on by the Clinton escape highlighted its investigative failures. On top of that, abuse by corrections officers, one of the office’s main investigative mandates, seemed to be spiraling out of control. Federal officials descended on DOCCS to investigate accounts of “beat up squads” taking incarcerated people into shadowy parts of prisons to assault them — and in one case, kill them.

In the wake of all of that negative attention, DOCCS announced in 2016 that it had revamped the internal investigations office, hiring two veterans of the state attorney general’s office to lead the overhaul. With new leadership came a new name: the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI.

Rank-and-file investigators were optimistic. “Morale was pretty high. We’re like, ‘These guys are going to clean up,’” Snyder remembers thinking. “But guess who hangs around.”

The Martuscellos remained influential within the new OSI. As a deputy commissioner of DOCCS, Dan became the public face of the reform: A 2016 Marshall Project and New York Times article included a portrait of him amid head-high filing cabinets. “We will do anything necessary” to curb officer misconduct, he told a crowd of internal investigators at the time.

Meanwhile, Chris remained head of the narcotics unit.

The revamp did little to root out the friends and family program, according to former internal investigators. They said the new OSI was still rife with cronies who were eager to take part in the godparent culture. “They come in and hide in OSI, and to survive there, they gotta suck ass,” one retired investigator said.

“That’s how you get ahead — do something dirty,” said Snyder.

Chris fostered this dynamic, the former staff said. He filled his drug division with hand-picked favorites, including one of the Old Man’s closest friends.

While he played favorites, Chris would throw those on his bad side under the bus. Staff called it being “on the burn.”

In 2019, one of Chris’s investigators got scorched. Like Montegari years earlier, senior narcotics investigator Todd Johnson would question how Chris ran the unit. He called attention to favoritism, “sticking up” for people who couldn’t get overtime or preferred assignments and those who weren’t getting enough drug busts, a former staffer said.

Johnson wasn’t the perfect investigator. He took shortcuts, including when it came to evidence. Frequently, on Fridays, he would need to take confiscated drugs from his upstate office to Albany for processing. Instead, he’d keep the evidence in his car, drop it off on Monday, and fudge paperwork to cover up the fact that the evidence was with him all weekend.

As far as standard drug handling procedures go, this was a big violation. But OSI’s narcotics unit wasn’t standard. According to three of Johnson’s former internal investigations colleagues, holding evidence in one’s car over the weekend was widespread practice.

“He didn’t do anything different than anybody else had done for years and years and years,” one said.

Johnson was the only one who got busted for it. Someone in DOCCS — it’s unclear who — told state authorities that he was holding drugs in his car.

An inspector general report published in 2019 found that Johnson mishandled evidence in 53 criminal cases, nine of which prosecutors ended up dropping because of the findings. The report didn’t accuse him of tampering with any of the evidence. And it didn’t mention anyone but Johnson, who was arrested and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Johnson declined to comment for this article.

“Chris Martuscello? Unscathed,” said Snyder. “Nothing ever happens to the leader of the unit when that stuff happens.”

“Nothing ever happens to these guys,” he said.

Then everything changed on December 9, when 13 corrections officers and a nurse surrounded Brooks in the medical wing of Marcy Correctional Facility. Body cameras recorded silent video as several officers beat Brooks to death while the others looked on. The state Office of the Attorney General published the footage, sparking the outrage and scrutiny that has engulfed Dan since.

The commissioner worked feverishly to satisfy calls for change. Together with the governor, he announced new camera policies, oversight and consulting partnerships, and a new superintendent at Marcy prison (who’d been accused of sexual assault by two incarcerated women, it was later revealed). For the second time in Dan’s career, he promised to revamp OSI, opening offices in every prison and funneling more staff to his brother’s department.

“I share your outrage,” he said at a February hearing before the state legislature. “Seeing that video makes me question everything.”

Robert Brooks’s father, who attended the hearing, was less than impressed. “I just felt like it was bait and switch,” he said of Dan’s testimony. “It’s, ‘I’m saying what I’m supposed to say to maintain my position.’ You can’t be that embedded into a system with this level of atrocities and not know that they’re taking place.”

Activist Thomas Kearney sat behind Dan during the hearing holding up a sign: “I am Robert Brooks.” He said he’d experienced similar abuse when was incarcerated at the infamous Attica prison in the mid-2000s. Half a dozen officers beat him while he was handcuffed, breaking his ribs, then dragged him by his cuff’s chains backwards down a corridor, he alleged.

“This has been going on for decades,” said Naomi Jaffe, coordinator of the Jails Justice Network. She and four fellow activists had set up outside of the hearing. As Dan spoke, they chanted Brooks’s name. “We’ve been complaining about it for decades. So don’t tell us you’re shocked,” she said. “We don’t want to hear it anymore.”

The activists want accountability for Brooks’s killing to go all the way to the top. They’re unconvinced by Dan’s progressive talk and don’t think he’ll bring real reform.

“We have said since his confirmation — our entire movement said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t believe him. We don’t care what he says,’” Jaffe said. “They say, ‘No, we can’t get anybody better than that. We can’t do any better than that.’”

“Fire Martuscello,” she said.