Bad Cops From Texas, Boston and Pennsylvania

A Pennsylvania cop's bad habits get him in trouble, a Boston cop goes to prison for steroids and perjury, and a Texas Department of Public Safety technician goes away for a long, long time for ripping off the lab's cocaine stash. Let's get to it:

In Erie, Pennsylvania, an Erie Police lieutenant was arrested Sunday night on charges he stole cocaine from the police evidence room for his personal use. Lt. Robert Liebel, 46, went down in a sting operations where investigators used surveillance equipment to watch him take 12 grams of coke out of a larger stash investigators had placed in the evidence room earlier in the day. When confronted, Liebel admitted having some of the cocaine in his hand and the rest hidden in the Erie police station. He told investigators he took it for his own use. We don't run corrupt cops stories about cops who merely use drugs, but in this case, the drug-using cop went bad when he stole from his employers, who in turn had taken the stash from private (albeit illegal) businesses. Now, he's trying to make a $100,000 bond.

In Boston, a former Boston police officer was sentenced Tuesday to a year and a day in prison for distributing steroids and committing perjury and obstructing justice in an ongoing federal probe of police corruption. Former officer Edgardo Rodriguez, 38, went down after federal investigators in a 2006 case where three Boston cops were indicted for guarding cocaine shipments heard those cops mention steroid sales within the department on wiretapped phone calls. But it was the perjury and obstruction of justice by lying to a grand jury and trying to convince another Boston cop to do so that got the prosecutor and judge unhappy enough to give him jail time.

In Houston, a former Department of Public Safety technician was sentenced last Friday to 45 years in prison for stealing cocaine from the agency's Jersey Village crime lab. Former tech Jesse Hinojosa, Jr. had pleaded guilty in December to two counts of possession of more than 400 grams of cocaine with intent to distribute after he and three other men were arrested in a scheme to sell more than 50 pounds of coke stolen from the lab. The other three are doing 25, 25, and 45 years.