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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

New Jersey Town Settles Police Assault Suit

Bayonne settles suit with men who accused police of assault
The Jersey Journal by Michaelangelo Conte - July 11, 2011

Bayonne has paid nearly $100,000 to two men who said they were assaulted by police as they left Fratelli's Bar on Broadway in 2007. Bayonne has paid nearly $100,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by two city men who said they were brutally assaulted by police as they left Fratelli’s Bar on Broadway in 2007. The city and officers admitted no liability or wrongdoing in the May 25 settlement made with plaintiffs Michael Condo, 25, of West Fifth Street, and Greg DeRocco, 38, of Avenue A. Named as defendants in the suit were the City of Bayonne, Sgt. Timothy McAuliffe, Officer Dominick Lillo, and Detectives David Macre, Timothy Carey and William Peterson, according to court papers. The settlement included a confidentiality clause. After the March 17, 2007, incident, police arrested Condo and DeRocco and charged both with aggravated assault and resisting arrest, Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio said. The prosecutor said his office dismissed all charges against the men in December 2008. The suit alleged that Macre “maliciously assaulted” Condo, beating, kicking and throwing him to the ground while cursing at him. At the same time, Lillo tackled DeRocco and punched him numerous times in the face and head, the suit alleged. DeRocco’s sister was pleading for Lillo to stop and when she tried to intervene, Lillo kicked her, the suit alleged. The plaintiffs claimed Carey and Peterson also assaulted them and McAuliffe did not “intervene and stop the illegal seizure and assault.” After their arrests, both men were taken to Bayonne Hospital for treatment, the suit says, adding that after being booked, Condo had to be returned to the hospital. Condo and DeRocco sued claiming excessive force, malicious prosecution, wrongful arrest, failure to intervene, deliberate indifference, deprivation of property, deprivation of due process and conspiracy. Bayonne City Attorney Charles D’Amico, as well as DeRocco and Condo, could not be reached for comment.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Cops Accused Of Beating Teen Outside Stationhouse

Two NYPD cops accused of beating teenager outside their Bronx stationhouse
The New York Daily News by Kevin Deutsch and Rocco Parascandola - July 12, 2011

Two police officers were arrested Monday on charges of beating a teenager outside their Bronx stationhouse. Officers Joseph Murphy, 26, and Jose Ocasio, 28, kicked and punched Tyre Davis, 17, in the head, face and body on Feb. 18 outside the 46th Precinct stationhouse, prosecutors say. Davis was leaving the stationhouse after being given a summons for disorderly conduct when he mouthed off to the cops and they beat him up, law enforcement sources said. Davis suffered a cut and a bruised forehead as well as swelling behind his ear, according to court papers. An NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau investigation led to the cops' arrest. The two patrol officers were arraigned and released without bail yesterday. They are charged with misdemeanor assault, harassment and official misconduct and were suspended, officials said. "The officers are looking forward to being vindicated ... in court," said the cops' lawyer Stuart London.

Monday, July 11, 2011

PA Cop Charged with Corruption of a Minor

Central Pennsylvania police officer charged with corruption of a minor
The Associated Press - July 11, 2011

LITITZ, Pa. — A central Pennsylvania police officer is facing allegations he had inappropriate contact with an underage girl. Thirty-six-year-old Stephen Watson faces a single count of corruption of minors for incidents involving a teenage girl starting when she was 15. State police say the teen claims Watson had inappropriate contact with her up until June of last year. Watson waived a preliminary hearing following his arrest on Friday. He was released on $10,000 unsecured bail. A phone message left for Watson's attorney was not immediately returned early Monday. Watson has been suspended from his job with the Manheim Borough police.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Sheriff to Pay $200,00 in Profiling Case

Arpaio's office to pay $200,000 in profiling case
The Arizona Republic by JJ Hensley - July 8, 2011

Claim settled in detainment of 2 Hispanic men

The Maricopa County Sheriff's Office will pay $200,000 to settle a claim brought by two Hispanic men who accused sheriff's deputies of racial profiling. The claim arose out of one of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's worksite enforcement raids, when deputies descended on a landscaping company to search for identity-theft and fraud suspects. Julian and Julio Mora were pulled over outside the business. They later contended they were targeted because of their race. One is a U.S. citizen and the other a legal resident. Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona said the settlement should send a message to police agencies that engage in discriminatory practices. In April, U.S. District Judge David Campbell ruled that Arpaio's deputies had no reason to stop the Moras before dawn on Feb. 11, 2009. He also ruled that there was no reason to make a warrantless arrest when deputies detained the two for nearly three hours. Sheriff's deputies arrested 60 employees during the raid on the business, out of 109 employees at the site, on suspicion of a variety of crimes, ranging from fraud and identity theft to immigration violations. The Sheriff's Office could not identify the deputies who stopped the Moras because of the large number of deputies working the operation, which made it impossible to defend the merits of the stop, said Tim Casey, an attorney for the Sheriff's Office. "If you can't have the officers, it's an uphill climb," Casey said. "The Sheriff's Office has made some good, positive changes, so when they have 100 deputies doing operations, they're going to record things better so this doesn't happen again."

Monday, July 4, 2011

DA Plays The Role of A Redcoat

DA plays the role of a Redcoat
The Morning Call by Paul Carpenter - July 2, 2011

The 1994 movie "The Professional" was controversial for only one thing, its sexy portrayal of a pubescent girl. Twelve-year-old Mathilda, played by Natalie Portman, has the hots for Leon, a grizzled hitman nearly four times her age, played by Jean Reno. Leon has given her refuge in his seedy apartment to save her from a squad of government drug agents. The agents, from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, had murdered her drug-dealing father and the rest of her family, not because her father was a crook but because he was holding out on them. Now they're after the one they missed, Mathilda. There was a fuss over Portman's revealing outfits and sexpot behavior, but not over the portrayal of the DEA as corrupt, perhaps because many felt that was accurate.

The movie was set in New York City, where Frank Serpico claimed it was impossible for any honest cop to function in the police force's drug unit, an allegation distressingly confirmed in 1972 by the Knapp Commission. Another report, issued by the Mollen Commission in 1994, found that things had only become worse. "Today's [police] corruption is characterized by brutality, theft, abuse of authority and active police criminality," said the report. Unfortunately, the problem is not unique to New York. It is in this climate that, as reported on Thursday, District Attorney John Morganelli boasted that he is using $283,406 in the "ill-gotten gains" of drug dealers, grabbed over the past year in the local portion of the so-called war on drugs, to "support" Northampton County's law enforcement people. Part of the money will go to Bethlehem and Easton police, the story said, while another part goes toward paying the salary of one of Morganelli's assistants, a drug case specialist, and for undercover drug purchases and other police goodies.

The idea that government officials can use official power to confiscate valuables, and then use those valuables for their own benefit, should make every American's hair stand on end. As I have argued before, this nation was created because of a gallant struggle against the abuse of power, not the least of which was called "customs racketeering." Public schools have stopped teaching that, because since the war on drugs began, it reflects poorly on fellow government authorities. Many teachers depict the Boston Massacre as a petty conflict involving citizens throwing snowballs at Redcoats. In reality, it was a pivotal event that helped pave the way to the American Revolution, representing the anger of colonists subjected to corrupt law enforcement. The disputes involved successive measures imposed from London — the Townshend Act, the Stamp Act, the Tea Act and other attempts to subjugate the colonies. One such attempt was the Crown's appointment of customs agents to enforce trade restrictions. Their salaries were based on how much contraband they could grab, giving them a motive to enforce laws with personal gain, not the public good, in mind.

In 1770, hundreds of people gathered to protest that process at Boston's Custom House. The Redcoats fired into the crowd, killing five and wounding eight others. It was no small skirmish over a snowball barrage. It was a meaningful conflict over the issue of whether government authorities should profit from what they confiscate by using their power. It involves a principle as precious as any that helped create this nation. The war on drugs is every bit as misguided as Prohibition, and too many drug agents — local, state or federal — are every bit as corrupt as the revenuers who operated from 1919 to 1933. Now, at a time some law enforcement people display the ultimate in dedication to serving and protecting the public — as in the case of Berks County Deputy Sheriff Kyle Pagerly, slain in the line of duty on Wednesday — it seems that others are more interested in grabbing loot for themselves. The only way to keep law enforcement people honest in that regard is to require that their salaries and other compensation be firmly set by elected bodies and that any valuables confiscated from anyone, in any government operation, be turned over to officials independent of law enforcement. Any other approach guarantees corruption and the abuse of power identical to that inflicted by the customs racketeers in Boston 241 years ago. "This is for Mathilda," says the hitman hero of "The Professional," as he sacrifices his own life to blow up the evil head of New York's DEA office with an arsenal of hand grenades. Somehow, that made some of us think of colonial Boston. paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176

Sunday, July 3, 2011

A Look Back At Corrupt Cops

Corrupt cops, brothel-lined streets: A look back at police departments in the time of Schmittberger
The New York Daily News by David J. Krajicek - July 3, 2011

The big German was exiled from a lofty perch in midtown Manhattan after corruption gumshoes discerned - and this will come as a shock - that gambling dens in the city's Tenderloin district were paying off cops. Schmittberger, the top cop there, was held accountable. This was big news in New York because Schmittberger was regarded as the rare honest cop, a difficult position to stake out in that era. "The police department was totally corrupt," Michael Bosak, a retired city cop and amateur police historian, told the Justice Story. "There was no Civil Service. You paid to get on the job. You paid for promotions. You paid for your command. You had to go out and earn money to kick upstairs to your bosses and Tammany Hall."

Schmittberger, who emigrated from Germany as a toddler, bought a police beat in 1874, at age 22, after first trying a career as a candymaker. He landed under Capt. Alexander (Clubber) Williams, whose nightstick was the law in the midtown vice district, just south of today's Times Square. Whatever your itch, you could scratch it - or have it scratched for you - there in the devil's anteroom. Broadway was lined with clip joints that preyed on bumpkins. There were more French hookers than bellhops at many hotels. W. 27th St. was lined with nearly two dozen brothels, some of which lured customers with sketches posted at the stoop of the human fare within, like a restaurant menu. There were sneak-a-peek cancan clubs, bawdy saloons, dusky tea shops that offered side orders of opium, and a gambling den for every dozen men. Whatever your angle, as a vice proprietor you had to pony up or face Clubber Williams' wrath. "Everyone had to pay," said Bosak. Schmittberger became Williams' bagman, picking up payoffs from the district's "evil resorts," as the newspapers called them, and delivering envelopes to Clubber's headquarters, Bernard Courtney's Saloon, at 315 Seventh Ave. The money flowed up through the ranks and into Tammany coffers, and everyone along the way took a share. Schmittberger and Williams played good cop/bad cop. Both were big men, but the German was more approachable. He was seen as an ally by the downtrodden, including blacks, Jews and even the finger-waggling holy-rollers and suffragettes who paraded through the Tenderloin. He became a pal of Police Commissioner Dewitt Wheeler, who lived at the Gilsey House hotel, not far from Courtney's joint. (He got his first promotion, to the old rank of roundsman, when he found the commissioner's missing dog.)

For 20 years, Schmittberger led a comfortable life as a corrupt cop. He and his wife raised seven kids on the East Side - a daughter and six sons, whom he liked to dress in scaled-down police uniforms for family portraits. But by the early 1890s, police corruption was so flagrant that the Legislature mandated an investigation that was led by Clarence Lexow, a senator from Brooklyn. To the horror of his fellow bluecoats, Max Schmittberger - by then a captain - became the NYPD's first Frank Serpico when he agreed to give frank testimony about how cops worked the graft racket. Small vice shops paid $20 a month, he said, but monthly fees went as high as $200 - the equivalent of roughly $4,000 today - for lucrative gambling dens or the European steamers docked on the West Side.

As a rule, he said, each rank took a 20% cut as the envelope ascended from the bagman to the Tammany fat cats. The German stunned the city by naming Clubber Williams as the king of Tenderloin corruption. Time has tarnished Williams' reputation, but the newspapers - probably on the take - had all but nominated him for sainthood in his day. When he was promoted to inspector in 1887, a broadsheet blew him this kiss: "Capt. Alexander S. Williams has attained the reward long deserved by his services as the city's most stalwart and energetic guardian of the peace and of the law ... More popular action could not have been taken." Schmittberger's testimony led to the hiring of reform-minded Teddy Roosevelt as police commissioner in 1895. He forced out both Williams and Thomas Byrnes, the chief of detectives, even more famous and at least as corrupt. Schmittberger became a pariah among colleagues, although he was protected by alliances with Roosevelt and Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist. Tammany never forgave him for squealing, and he was subjected to one corruption investigation after another. When Schmittberger was frog-marched to Staten Island in 1906, a fuming Steffens wrote that the cop "has been hounded ever since he set out to do right." He was cleared and promoted in 1909 to today's equivalent of chief of department, the NYPD's top man in uniform. He held the job until his death in 1917, of what was described as "nervous fatigue." He had been a cop for 43 years. So was Max Schmittberger a good guy or a bad guy? "Was he honest by today's standards?" said Bosak. "No way. But he was part of the crooked system that was in place then, and he played the system. He was just as crooked as the next guy, but perception was more important than reality. And the perception was that Schmittberger was honest." He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx - beneath a suspiciously lavish monument, as Bosak pointed out.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Cop Guilty of Molesting Daughter

Miami-Dade Cop Guilty of Molesting Daughter
NBC Miami by Todd Wright - June 29, 2011
Charles Jonathan Corban was a 20-year veteran of the force

A Miami-Dade police officer was convicted Tuesday of sexually assaulting his young daughter for years. A jury found Charles Jonathan Corban, 42, guilty of several counts of lewd and lascivious molestation on a child between the ages of 12 and 16. Prosecutors alleged the 20-year veteran and motorcycle cop would sneak into the young girl's room at night and force her to perform sex acts on him. The girl told investigators the sexual abuse began in 2007. Corban and the child's mother are divorced and lived separately, but the girl lived with him in Hialeah.

Tulsa Police Corruption Trial Delayed

Tulsa police corruption trial delayed
The Tulsa World by Omer Gillham - July 1, 2011

Grand jury investigates police corruption: Read all of the stories, view a timeline and read key documents. A criminal trial for two officers accused of police corruption has been delayed for one week, which means the trial will begin Aug. 1 in U.S. District Court in Tulsa, court records show. U.S. District Judge Bruce Black of New Mexico moved the trial date back earlier this week. The trial had been scheduled for July 25 in federal court. Tulsa police officers Jeff Henderson, 38, and Bill Yelton, 50 were indicted under seal July 19, 2010 in U.S. District Court in Tulsa. They have remained jailed since July while they await trial. Henderson was indicted on 58 counts that include perjury, civil-rights violations, witness tampering and drug-related accusations. Yelton was indicted on seven counts that include civil-rights violations, witness tampering and suborning perjury. An eighth count was added in September that allegedly attempted intimidation of a witness. The trial for Henderson and Yelton is the second police trial which resulted from a grand jury investigation which began about two years ago. On June 10, two Tulsa police officers were acquitted while a former officer was convicted and awaits sentencing for drug conspiracy and stealing U.S. funds during an FBI sting in May 2009. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane W. Duke of eastern Arkansas if overseeing the police corruption probe.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Mob Figure May Unearth Corruption of Lawmen

Mob Figure May Unearth Corruption of Lawmen
The New York Times by Michael Cooper and Richard A. Oppel Jr. - June 30, 2011

During the 16 years James (Whitey) Bulger spent on the lam, several of his former partners in crime testified that he had made payoffs to two dozen Boston police officers and half a dozen F.B.I. agents over his long criminal career — giving them thousands of dollars and rings, a Meerschaum pipe and Lalique glass. But few lawmen — with the notable exception of John Connolly, his longtime handler at the F.B.I. — were ever convicted of corruption. Now that he is back in custody after his capture last week in Santa Monica, Calif., the looming question is whether Mr. Bulger, a longtime informant — who fed information about his rivals to the F.B.I. for years in return for their protection — will squeal again. “I think there are a whole bunch of people out there he could probably name” who are worried what he might say, said Robert Fitzpatrick, who was an assistant special agent in charge of the Boston office of the F.B.I. in the 1980s, and who has testified that he tried unsuccessfully to end Mr. Bulger’s run as an informant. The Bulger saga has been explored in trials, Congressional hearings, reams of newsprint and a shelf of books. But a review in recent days of hundreds of pages of trial transcripts and court decisions, along with interviews with several former law enforcement officials and lawyers connected with the case, shows that, despite all the scrutiny, there has never been a full official reckoning of the public corruption that allowed Mr. Bulger to thrive. His partners have testified that former F.B.I. agents were on the take, and named names, but in many cases, the agents simply denied it and nothing happened. A report promised years ago by a special prosecutor was never issued. It is unclear even now whether the government wants to reopen old wounds. “It’s not always just the guy pulling the trigger who is guilty,” said Tom Foley, a retired state police commander who pursued Mr. Bulger with Ahab-like intensity for years, only to see him elude capture thanks to help from his F.B.I. friends. “It’s also the people who set that up and allowed it to happen, and especially the people who had a responsibility to put a stop to it.” Even if Mr. Bulger, 81, decides to talk, it is not clear that he has much to bargain with: he stands accused of 19 murders, and some of his closest associates have implicated him. The statute of limitations has passed for most crimes he could talk about, and most former investigators are retired or dead. But former F.B.I. agents and lawyers connected to the case say that Mr. Bulger may decide that he wants to settle a few scores.

For much of the 1980s, he turned the world of Boston law enforcement upside down. The F.B.I. considered him and his partner Stephen (the Rifleman) Flemmi “top echelon” informants, but the pair seemed to get more from the bureau than they gave. Federal agents helped them by locking up rivals, protected them from other investigators and tipped them off when witnesses threatened to implicate them. Those would-be witnesses quickly wound up dead, sometimes with their teeth removed to make it harder to identify the bodies. In those days it was not just the lawmen who referred to the gangsters with colorful nicknames like Whitey and the Rifleman. Mr. Bulger had his own nicknames for the F.B.I. agents he wined and dined and used, associates testified: Zip, Agent Orange, The Pipe, Doc and Vino. John Connolly was the F.B.I. agent who handled both Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi, using their information to build high-profile cases against the Mafia. Mr. Bulger called him Zip because they came from the same South Boston housing project and had shared a ZIP code. But Mr. Connolly grew too close to his source. He was convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice in 2002, in part for tipping Mr. Bulger off in 1994 when he was finally about to be indicted. Then he was convicted of second-degree murder in 2008 for warning Mr. Bulger in 1982 that a man named John Callahan was likely to implicate him in several murders connected with an attempt to profit from World Jai Alai, a company with frontons in Connecticut and Florida. Mr. Callahan’s body was found in the trunk of a car at Miami International Airport, after an attendant noticed blood dripping from it. A lawyer for Mr. Connolly, James E. McDonald, said that Mr. Bulger’s capture could stir things up. “If I were the Department of Justice prosecutors, I’d be nervous, because if Bulger starts to talk, the whole edifice they have created about John being the corrupt agent will have holes you could drive a truck through,” he said.

Mr. Connolly did not act alone. His supervisor at the F.B.I., John Morris, called Vino, admitted to taking $7,000 in bribes from Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi — beginning when he asked them to pay for his mistress to fly to a training session he was attending in Georgia. Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi took to calling him Vino after a 1981 dinner at the Hotel Colonnade in Boston, where he drank a great deal of wine. They later sent him a case, with $1,000 in it. But Mr. Morris was granted immunity when he agreed to cooperate with the government. Still, he may have the most to fear. Mr. Morris admitted that in 1988 he leaked information to the The Boston Globe, which has long done ground-breaking reporting on the Bulger saga, that Mr. Bulger was an F.B.I. informant. His lawyer, Michael A. Collora, said that Mr. Morris did so in the hopes that exposing the troubled relationship would end it. But Mr. Bulger’s brother William M. Bulger, a former president of the Massachusetts State Senate, saw a more sinister motive. He testified before Congress in 2003 that the leak’s purpose was “bringing about the death of James Bulger.” After Whitey Bulger became a fugitive, he called Mr. Morris with a threat: he vowed to take Mr. Morris with him if he went down. But Mr. Collora noted in an interview this week that Mr. Morris, who he said worked part-time at a wine store, had already admitted wrongdoing and had been granted immunity. The statute of limitations has run its course for most crimes, he said, and there are serious questions about what kind of witness Mr. Bulger would make. “A situation where you have a man who’s been on the lam for 16 years, who says now I’ll help you out, even though he’s done 19 murders?” he asked.

One memo that has received little scrutiny shows how officials in Washington were warned that the F.B.I.’s Boston office was too close to Mr. Bulger. It was written in 1982, after the jai alai murders were linked to Mr. Bulger’s group, known as the Winter Hill Gang. An agent in the Miami office warned officials in Washington that local investigators were cutting the F.B.I. out of the loop, in part because they believed “that some agents in the Boston F.B.I. would not pursue allegations against the Winter Hill Gang vigorously.” Sean M. McWeeney, who was in charge of the bureau’s organized crime section, wrote that he held meetings in Washington and Tulsa, Okla., to reassure local investigators. It took two decades for the full story to get out — including Mr. Connolly’s role in the murders. John McIntyre was another witness who never made it to the stand. He was a 32-year-old fisherman who agreed to cooperate with investigators in 1984 about Mr. Bulger’s involvement in drug and gun shipments. Tipped that there was an informer, Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi chained Mr. McIntyre to a chair and made him confess. They then tried to strangle him with a rope, and when that did not work, Mr. Flemmi testified, they shot him and removed his teeth. A federal judge awarded Mr. McIntyre’s estate $3.1 million, finding that the federal government was liable for his death because Mr. Connolly had leaked Mr. Bulger and Mr. Flemmi enough information for them to identify him as an informer. Steven Gordon, the Concord, N.H., lawyer who represented the estate, said the government’s defense showed a continued refusal to come clean. “They allowed a whole city to come under siege,” he said. When Mr. Bulger fled, some joked that he should be on the F.B.I.’s “least wanted” list. In a 1999 ruling after hearings that helped expose the F.B.I.’s dealings with Mr. Bulger, a Federal District Court judge, Mark L. Wolf, cited evidence that “raises questions concerning whether the F.B.I. has consistently made its best efforts to apprehend” him. He noted that agents waited 15 months before approaching Theresa Stanley, the first girlfriend Mr. Bulger fled with, who returned to Boston in 1995 because she disliked life on the road. Judge Wolf began his decision with a quotation by Lord Acton, who wrote in 1861 that “every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice.” “This case,” the judge wrote, “demonstrates that he was right.”