Before dawn on Sept. 4, 2023, a gray BMW M3 sedan with tinted windows rolled up to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Its occupants were intent on smuggling in cigarettes, marijuana and mobile phones, a familiar crime at the crowded and violent federal jail.
Leon Wilson, a veteran guard whose shift had begun at midnight, was sick of seeing contraband spirited inside, prosecutors say. Mr. Wilson was patrolling the perimeter and drove a prison minivan to within feet of the BMW, which then raced from the parking lot.
Mr. Wilson sped after it, weaving through traffic and running a red light, and then fired three gunshots at the BMW, striking a back-seat passenger, Eric Encarnacion, prosecutors said. He pursued the car all the way to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, about five miles away, before turning back.
Now, Mr. Wilson, 51, is on trial in Brooklyn federal court in a case that spotlights problems at the troubled jail, which are many and deep. Mr. Wilson was arrested about four weeks after the chase and charged with depriving an individual of his rights and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. He faces up to 10 years in prison.
“He made a series of escalating decisions to abandon his responsibilities,” Raffaela Belizaire, a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, said during the government’s opening statements on Monday.
Officials for years have struggled to improve New York’s federal lockups. Conditions at the Metropolitan Correction Center in Lower Manhattan, where the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein died, deteriorated so much that it was closed in 2021, making the M.D.C. the city’s primary federal detention center.
The M.D.C., one of the country’s largest federal detention facilities, holds around 1,300 inmates. Contraband has been smuggled in via corrupt corrections officers, hoisted up with ropes and even hidden in a bag of Doritos chips.
The jail has also been dogged by violence, staffing shortages, unsanitary conditions and electrical outages. Since last year, more than 30 inmates and guards there have been charged federally with crimes related to smuggling and violence. On the same day Mr. Wilson was arrested, federal prosecutors charged nine inmates with violent crimes, including the killing of another inmate, Edwin Cordero.
The problems at the jail have not gone unnoticed, with judges in the Eastern District demanding improvements. Some judges have given lighter sentences to defendants who spent time at the jail, in essence offering them extra credit for time served at the M.D.C. On several occasions, judges have refused to send defendants there because of what they described as inhumane conditions.
Representative Dan Goldman, a Democrat whose district includes the M.D.C., called the staffing shortages “devastating” during a May speech on the House floor. The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has also started holding detainees at the facility. In August, Mr. Goldman, along with two other New York Democrats, showed up to the M.D.C. to inspect conditions there, but were denied access.
A representative for the Bureau of Prisons did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Wilson’s case. Prosecutors in the case successfully sought to limit evidence presented at trial concerning problems inside the jail.
“No inmate violence threatened him while he fired at civilians fleeing to the Brooklyn Bridge,” prosecutors wrote of Mr. Wilson in a filing last month. In another filing, they wrote that staffing shortages did not grant Mr. Wilson the authority to “chase the BMW through Brooklyn streets.” Judge Pamela K. Chen ruled that conditions in the jail were not relevant to the charges against Mr. Wilson.
Jeffery L. Greco, a lawyer for Mr. Wilson, said his client had feared for his life when he pursued the sedan. About a mile into the chase, the BMW slowed down, closing the gap with the prison van, and Mr. Wilson thought he saw a hand come out of the window.
“His life flashed before him, and his training kicked in,” Mr. Greco said. “Officer Leon Wilson didn’t have a pause button.”
Mr. Wilson has been a correctional officer at the center since 2000, according to court papers, and served in the military before working for the Bureau of Prisons. He appeared in court on Monday wearing a gold-colored suit. Correctional officers are not police officers, prosecutors in the case have noted, arguing that Mr. Wilson was acting outside his authority when he pursued the would-be smugglers. And it wasn’t the first time, they said.
The day after Mr. Wilson chased the smugglers, he drove the same van to follow a man walking off M.D.C. property holding a bag, according to prosecutors. Two blocks from the jail, Mr. Wilson got out, frisked the man and recovered a rope, bottles of medicine and a “green leafy substance,” according to court documents.
He then submitted an incident report in which he falsely claimed to have patted down the man while on M.D.C. grounds, according to prosecutors. After an internal investigation, Mr. Wilson was placed on leave.
Prosecutors plan to try to persuade jurors that Mr. Wilson was prone to excessive force even before the chase.
The month before the incident, Mr. Wilson approached an inmate and informed him that he had chased the prisoner’s friend, who had been trying to smuggle in contraband, off the jail property, prosecutors said. Mr. Wilson said that if he saw her again, he would put a bullet in her head for “an early funeral,” according to prosecutors.
Another time, Mr. Wilson got into an argument with the same inmate, accusing him of hiding contraband in a garbage can and threatening to shoot him, according to prosecutors. The inmate retorted that Mr. Wilson’s gun fired only rubber bullets. Mr. Wilson then fired his gun to “drive his point home,” prosecutors said.
In a recent court filing, Mr. Wilson’s lawyers argued that staffing shortages, smuggling and inmate violence were important considerations in understanding why Mr. Wilson might have undertaken the early morning chase.
“Mr. Wilson’s perceptions cannot be divorced from the environment in which he worked,” his lawyers, Mr. Greco and Mark DeMarco, wrote in the filing this month.
On Monday, Mr. Wilson’s lawyers continued that line of argument. In his opening statement, Mr. Greco said the jail was “one of the most dangerous centers in the United States,” mentioning incidents in which contraband was smuggled up several stories using ropes.
Prosecutors almost immediately objected. Judge Chen ordered the jury out of the courtroom and chided Mr. Wilson’s lawyers for an argument she said was “completely out of bounds.”
“There will be no evidence about the level of violence at the M.D.C. introduced at this trial,” Judge Chen said in court.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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