OPINION

NY State Goon Squads

Written by Mr. Gotham (John Elia) · 28 August 2026 · 10 min read

Sworn deposition testimony describing the beat-up squad — Sworn testimony of William Alvarez, 12 October 2023. Original artwork. NEWS · JELIA.NYC

It has a name. Two, in fact. That is the part people keep missing.

On 12 October 2023, a man named William Alvarez sat for a sworn deposition in his federal civil rights case and explained it to a lawyer from the New York State Attorney General’s office:

“They have what’s called a beat-up squad.”

Asked what that was, he answered: “It’s the officers that go around and do … the assaults and rough handling the people.” Asked whether he had ever heard an officer at Marcy use that term, he said no: “Their term for it is security squad team.” Prisoners called it the beat-up squad. The officers, by his account, had a name of their own.

He named the man in charge: Sergeant Glenn Trombly, “the sergeant in charge of the beat-up squad.” He testified that as they beat, kicked and choked him in 2020, they told him “they were going to kill me,” and that “there was nothing anybody can do about it.”

Nearly fourteen months later, at the same facility, correction officers beat Robert Brooks to death while he sat handcuffed on a medical examination table. Anthony Farina, whom Alvarez had named as a member of the squad, was among them. Trombly, by his own later testimony, watched the attack from a corner of the infirmary and did nothing to stop it.

What a beat-up squad actually is

Every prison in New York has a legitimate emergency response unit. It exists for riots, for hostage situations, for the genuinely dangerous minutes that occasionally happen in a facility holding hundreds of people against their will. It tends to be staffed, as The Free Lance News put it, with “the physically largest guards working in the facility, or the most aggressive.”

That is the lawful structure. The beat-up squad is what that structure becomes when it stops waiting for an emergency.

And this needs saying plainly, because the entire institutional culture depends on blurring it: none of this is anybody’s job. A correction officer is employed to keep people in custody secure and alive. There is no provision in the job description, no module in the training, no line in the Correction Law and no order from any superintendent that authorises a standing crew to administer beatings. Every incident described below, if it happened as alleged, is a crime, committed on the State’s payroll, in the State’s building, in the State’s uniform, under colour of the State’s authority.

The names in the record

Asked under oath to name members of the beat-up squad, Alvarez named Anthony Farina, among others. Asked specifically about Trombly, he called him “the sergeant in charge of the beat-up squad, which is the rounds sergeant,” and said yes when the State’s lawyer asked him to confirm it, according to The Free Lance News, which reported the deposition.

Both men were later convicted in connection with the killing of Robert Brooks: Farina of first-degree manslaughter, Trombly of offering a false instrument for filing and reckless endangerment. That they belonged to a squad remains Alvarez’s allegation. Their convictions are a matter of record.

The State was told. Under oath. In writing.

Here is the fact that should end every official’s claim that Marcy was a shock.

Alvarez gave that testimony in a deposition in his 2022 federal civil rights lawsuit — a lawsuit that named Trombly and Farina as defendants. He gave it to Assistant Attorney General Mathew Gallagher. Because in that case, the Attorney General’s office was not investigating Trombly and Farina.

It was representing them.

So on 12 October 2023, the legal office of the State of New York took possession of sworn testimony describing an organised crew of its own employees who beat prisoners, naming the sergeant he said led it and at least one of its members — nearly fourteen months before Robert Brooks was killed. The office that would open the criminal investigation into his death was, at that moment, their lawyer.

After Brooks died, the Attorney General’s office moved to withdraw as defence counsel in four pending federal cases involving prisoner-abuse allegations, including one against Farina.

What Marcy officers were accused of before Robert Brooks

Two federal lawsuits describe the same facility in the same year. Both remain allegations by the men who filed them; neither produced a criminal conviction at the time.

Adam Bauer, February 2020. Bauer, serving time for a non-violent drug offence, alleges Officer Antonio Iodice attacked him without provocation in a bathroom, punching his head and kicking him after throwing him to the floor. Officers including Nicholas Anzalone, Sgt. Alfred Zeina and Sgt. Thomas McNaney are alleged to have joined in or failed to intervene. A sergeant allegedly struck his head with a clipboard hard enough to open a v-shaped gash. The beating is alleged to have continued in the van carrying him to the infirmary. He needed more than twenty stitches at St. Luke’s Hospital in Utica.

William Alvarez, 2020. Alvarez alleges Officer Caleb Bause sprayed him with a chemical agent unprovoked in a bathroom, then falsely claimed he had been attacked in order to summon backup. Officer Skyler Tuttle is alleged to have slammed his head into walls and handcuffed him, after which he was kicked on the floor. Trombly and Farina were named as defendants. Alvarez was left with a facial deformity requiring surgery.

One detail from the Alvarez account is worth holding onto, because it tells you precisely what kind of organisation this was: the beating stopped when Trombly said “that’s enough.”

It stopped when the sergeant decided it stopped. That is not chaos. That is command.

Three months after Brooks, it happened again

On 1 March 2025, Messiah Nantwi, 22, from Harlem, was beaten by correction officers at Mid-State Correctional Facility. He was serving a sentence for a weapons conviction and awaiting trial on separate charges. He died that day at Wynn Hospital in Utica.

The details rhyme so precisely they stop being coincidence:

Mid-State sits in the town of Marcy — the same complex, barely a fence away from where Robert Brooks was killed.
Wynn Hospital in Utica is the same hospital Robert Brooks was pronounced dead in, eleven weeks earlier.
The officers who beat him were part of an emergency response team. The legitimate unit. Again.
It happened during an unauthorised 22-day statewide guard strike that had emptied the prisons of staff and forced the Governor to deploy the National Guard.

Ten officers were charged in an eleven-count indictment. Jonah Levi and Caleb Blair were charged with second-degree murder. Across the fifteen guards implicated, charges included manslaughter, gang assault, conspiracy, tampering with physical evidence and offering a false instrument for filing. Levi was sentenced to 25 years. Most of the others took plea deals.

Robert Brooks had been dead for eleven weeks, the whole state was watching, the footage was on the news — and it happened again, in the same town, to a 22-year-old in the State’s custody.

None of this started at Marcy

Attica, 9 August 2011. George Williams was taken from his cell by three officers who told him he was going for a urine test. In a darkened day room they beat him. One witness told investigators he saw Williams take at least fifty kicks and a dozen baton strikes.

They broke both his legs. They broke his ribs. They broke his shoulder. They fractured his eye socket.

Keith Swack, Sean Warner and Matthew Rademacher were charged in December 2011 with first-degree gang assault, falsifying records and tampering with evidence. It was the first time in New York history that gang assault charges had been brought against guards for beating a prisoner.

On the eve of trial, all three pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanour count of official misconduct. They served no jail time whatsoever. They agreed to resign.

That was the precedent set for the next generation of officers at every facility in the state: do this, get caught doing this on the record, and the worst realistic outcome is that you have to find another job.

The arithmetic that keeps it running

Two sets of figures show what has happened since. Data obtained by NY1 under the state’s Freedom of Information Law shows how often force is used. An outside review by the law firm WilmerHale, ordered by Gov. Kathy Hochul and released in July 2026, shows how often complaints about it are upheld.

2×

Use-of-force incidents by DOCCS staff more than doubled between 2015 and 2024 (NY1, FOIL data)

of nearly 1,200 excessive-force complaints filed by prisoners in 2024 were substantiated (WilmerHale report for the Governor, July 2026)

3.3%

the resulting substantiation rate — 96.7% were not substantiated

A prisoner who is beaten in New York has, on those numbers, roughly a one-in-thirty chance of the State agreeing with him afterwards. He is beaten by men who know that number better than he does.

That is not a system that failed to notice a beat-up squad. That is the environment in which a beat-up squad is a rational thing to join.

What actually happened to the sergeant Alvarez named

Glenn Trombly — named under oath as the sergeant in charge, defendant in the Alvarez suit, present at the death of Robert Brooks — pleaded guilty to offering a false instrument for filing and second-degree reckless endangerment. He did not strike Brooks. He also did not intervene. He testified against the others.

He was sentenced to two consecutive one-year terms in the Oneida County Jail. His original deal had been four years in state prison for gang assault. His lawyer renegotiated it, telling the court he had received threats, including threats against his family and to burn down his house, and that she believed correction officers themselves would target him in a state prison.

Not state prison. County jail. For the man a prisoner had identified to the Attorney General’s own lawyer, nearly fourteen months in advance, as the sergeant in charge of the beat-up squad.

The phrase “a few bad apples” requires the apples to be unaware of one another. In Alvarez’s account, these men had a sergeant. They had a name for what they did, “security squad team,” while the prisoners called it the beat-up squad. They had a commander who decided when a beating had gone on long enough.

That is not a few bad apples. That is a unit.

And New York State had it described, under oath, by name, in its own files, nearly fourteen months before Robert Brooks was killed — and did nothing at all.