“The boss,” his friend says, was the high-ranking cop who runs prisons.

In Honduras, managing prisons is one of the most lucrative jobs in the hierarchy of the National Police. Inmates pay bribes for everything from phones to freedom and are let out to commit more crimes at the behest of their captors, people familiar with the practice say.

After spending his nine-year sentence doing illegal bidding for police buddies, Pinot, 30, was released on Oct. 13. He was immediately gunned down, felled by gunshots a few hundred yards from the prison gate.

Two women who had come to pick him up and take him home that evening told human rights activists that they saw police officers do it. A few days later, the officer who accompanied Pinot on his get-out-of-jail outings was murdered. Then one of the witnesses to Pinot’s killing was stoned to death. The other vanished.

“It’s very difficult to investigate the jails,” said human rights prosector Sandra Ponce. “They tend to self-govern. There are inmates with de facto authority.”

Ponce said her office is looking into Pinot’s death, because there were enough “irregularities” to suggest law enforcement involvement, including the fact that he was released from prison at night, an unusual move that helped make the surprise attack easier.

Leak to narcos brings brutal double killing

Prisons director Danilo Orellana insisted he has cleaned up the jails and that escapes, murders and crime are all on the decline, despite widespread overcrowding and a lack of resources. He said he had heard rumors that Pinot was sometimes let out, but denied that prisoners regularly go on drug runs.

“I can tell you that during my term, it isn’t happening. The jails have changed a lot,” Orellana said.

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Since this is Honduras and murder is so common, Pinot’s death didn’t cause a ripple in the news media. The killing of Fernando Zelaya Maldonado never made the front page either.

Zelaya, 32, was a lieutenant in the army counter-intelligence unit who in 2010 was dispatched to his hometown, Olancho, to solve the kidnapping of President Lobo’s cousin.

Two law enforcement sources told The Herald that Zelaya irked corrupt members of the police and military, because his team not only killed the kidnappers but recovered both the hostage and the ransom money. Someone close to the operation leaked his name to the drug traffickers responsible for the kidnapping, a law enforcement source said.

He was ambushed and shot dozens of times just before Christmas 2010. His 20-year-old sister Johana in the passenger seat suffered the same fate.

“Authorities know very well who the narcos are, and they do nothing about it,” Zelaya’s father, Francisco, said. “Everybody has been bought.”

Someone apparently believes the elder Zelaya, 56, is out for revenge. A month after the death of two of his children, another of his sons, 36-year-old Javier, was also gunned down. In November, the Zelaya home was attacked with grenades. Protected by a single soldier in their current hideaway, the family was denied visas to travel to the United States.

“There will come a day,” Zelaya said, “when they will find us here.”