Tallahassee, Florida (CNN) --
Softball, drunken orgies and a prison system run like the mafia. That's what Florida's prison secretary says he inherited when he took over Florida's prison system two years ago. The previous prison secretary used tax money to build and maintain
a party house on prison grounds where prison officials held orgies.
In fact, on his first day on the job, James McDonough says he walked into his office, the same one his predecessor used, and there was crime scene tape preventing anyone from entering. "That was an indication we had a problem in the department," McDonough told CNN in an exclusive interview. McDonough revealed a startling list of alleged abuses and crimes going on inside Florida's prisons:
Top prison officials admitting to kickbacks;
Guards importing and selling steroids in an effort to give them an edge on the softball field;
Taxpayer funds to pay for booze and women;
Guards who punished other guards who threatened to report them. "
Corruption had gone to an extreme," McDonough said, saying it all began at the top. "
They seemed to be drunk half the time and had orgies the other half, when they 
weren't taking money and beating each other up." He added, "Women were treated like chattel in this department." McDonough described a bizarre prison culture among those that ran the system. He says they were obsessed with
inter-department softball games and the orgies after games. "I cannot explain how big an obsession softball had become," he said. "People were promoted on the spot after a softball game at the drunken party to high positions in the department because they were able to hit a softball out of the park a couple times. The connection between the softball and the parties and the corruption and the beatings was greatly intertwined."
The parties and orgies were often carried out at a waterfront ranch house built on prison grounds with taxpayer dollars, McDonough said. The house was complete with a bar, pool table and hot tub.
McDonough is a former Army colonel who commanded troops in Vietnam and Africa. He served as Florida's drug czar before taking on the job as the head of Florida's prison system, which oversees 90,000 inmates. He left his
post last Thursday as secretary of Florida's Department of Corrections because, he says, he feels he has cleaned up the corruption. It's time, he said, "to turn this over to law and order people that have made this their life's goal." A Brooklyn native, McDonough says he witnessed the way the mafia worked in his youth and it provided him a keen insight into how his prison predecessor, James Crosby, operated. "It reminded me of the petty mafia I saw on the streets of Brooklyn when I was growing up in the late 1950s, early 1960s. They were petty, small-minded, thugish, violent, dangerous, outside the law, and completely intolerable for a society such as ours in the United States of America," he said.
Crosby would later plead guilty to bribery charges in relation to kickbacks from a prison vendor. He's now locked up in a federal prison. He refused CNN's request for an interview for this report. "He's serving time in a federal prison. I hope he reforms and gets out and prospers," McDonough said. He added, "When you have a rotten guy at the top, or gal at the top, it can be very invasive, and it's a cancer that needs to be excised." Getting rid of this "cancer" is exactly what McDonough says he did. McDonough fired 90 top prison officials; wardens, supervisors, colonels and majors; claiming they were corrupt or, at the very least, not to be trusted. He demoted 280 others. Criminal charges were filed against more than 40 others, and most were convicted. In addition to the orgies and other misconduct outside the cell blocks, there were other allegations of prisoners being harmed, McDonough said. "In some of the pockets of corruption that we found, they [prisoners] were being abused," he said. Among those arrested were seven officers accused of beating inmates, including five accused of forcing a prisoner to drink toilet water. All have pleaded not guilty. Tina Hayes, the director of the prison's department initiatives who has 
worked in the prison system for 28 years, said the atmosphere before McDonough arrived was "a little tense" with workers "always on edge." She said employees who didn't attend softball games or play on the teams were "isolated" and "pushed aside." "I used to tell staff day in and day out: Keep your head high; do what's right; you know what morally is right; you've got some ethics; don't bow down to it," Hayes told CNN. McDonough, she said, brought "standards back into the department." "People can speak out now without being afraid to say what they need to say." McDonough says the majority of the prison system's 28,000 employees were honest, hard-working people who weren't corrupt at all. But he says many of the top prison officials weren't and he believes he has weeded out "an organized vein of corruption." "They were like frat boys out of control."
their homeless camp, in Homestead, Florida. Juanito Pepe Garcia, 51, died Tuesday night from accidental strangulation after he fell and a strap of his heavy backpack became snagged on a top bar of the metal fence. His girlfriend, 38-year-old Kelli Jo Barkley, told police she was with him when he became trapped and told her "Ayudame cojones! Apurate, puta come-mierda! Helpy me!" according to a Homestead Police Department report. Barkley said she tried for several minutes to free him but couldn't lift the backpack. When Juanito became limp, she ran and banged on the door of a nearby home. A man who lives there called 911 to report the woman's cries that her friend was stuck on the fence and might be dead. The Homestead Fire Department and police rushed to the scene.
through their straps and his neck was caught on the full-frame pack's chest strap, the report said. Firefighters cut through the locked fence gate to the other side and pulled Henry down. Paramedics tried to resuscitate him in an ambulance before he was pronounced dead about 10:35 p.m. Barkley said they'd been drinking beer after "flagging" for money at Campell Boulevard and U.S. 1, the report said. She said they'd climbed the fence to take a shortcut to a nearby homeless camp. In the backpack, an officer found about a dozen 40-ounce bottles full of beer, the report said.
