Another of Laura Ahearn's political stooges just got convicted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/nyregion/tom-spota-trial-verdict.html
Scandal Began With Sex Toys. Now Ex-D.A. Is Convicted on Long Island.
The former official in Suffolk County was found guilty of conspiracy after a trial that exposed a culture of corruption.
By Nicole Hong and Arielle Dollinger
Dec. 17, 2019
Updated 5:41 p.m. ET
CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. — He was one of the most powerful men on Long Island, serving as the top prosecutor in a suburban county with 1.5 million people. He won election after election for 15 years with bipartisan support.
But Thomas J. Spota, the district attorney in New York’s Suffolk County, had an Achilles’ heel.
He always had a soft spot for a police officer named James Burke, who rose under his tutelage to become the county’s chief of police. Mr. Spota viewed Mr. Burke almost as a son, standing with him whenever he was touched by scandal.
On Tuesday, Mr. Spota, 78, was convicted of participating in a yearslong conspiracy to cover up for Mr. Burke after he violently beat a man accused of stealing from him while he was the police chief.
The trouble started one morning in December 2012, when Chief Burke discovered somebody had broken into his police car. The thief took a duffel bag from the car that contained sex toys, a pornographic DVD and Viagra.
Later that morning, a man was arrested with the stolen goods. The chief barged into the police interrogation room where the man, handcuffed to the floor, called him a pervert. In a rage, Chief Burke kicked and punched him.
Mr. Spota set out to protect and defend Chief Burke, as he had before over a 40-year friendship, prosecutors said. That decision would cost Mr. Spota his career and turn him into a convicted criminal.
After hearing four weeks of trial testimony, a federal jury on Long Island found Mr. Spota guilty of four counts, including obstruction of justice and witness tampering. He was convicted along with Christopher McPartland, 53, who paradoxically had been Suffolk County’s top anticorruption prosecutor.
They each face up to 20 years in prison.
The convictions of Mr. Spota and Mr. McPartland “make it clear that the days of Long Island’s good old boy networks combining politics, power and policing to benefit a select few, at the expense of the taxpaying public, are dead and gone,” said Richard Donoghue, the United States attorney in the Eastern District of New York.
The jurors reached the guilty verdict after deliberating for about seven hours over two days.
Mr. Spota and Mr. McPartland sat without expression as the verdict was read. They hugged their lawyers afterward. Mr. Spota’s family members, seated in the first row of the courtroom, appeared emotional, with teary eyes and their arms around one another.
Mr. Spota’s lawyer, Alan Vinegrad, declined to comment on the verdict. Mr. McPartland’s lawyer, Larry H. Krantz, said, “There are many more legal steps in the case, and we will continue to fight for this.”
Mr. Burke, 55, had already pleaded guilty in 2016 to the assault and the subsequent cover-up, a year after resigning from the force. He completed his prison sentence this year but refused to testify at trial against his old colleagues.
The verdict was a hard-fought victory for the federal prosecutors and the F.B.I., whose investigation faced setbacks for years.
Proving obstruction of justice required the government to present evidence that the defendants acted with a corrupt purpose, a high legal bar. Without recordings of conversations, the trial hinged largely on the testimony of one witness: James Hickey, a former police commander who worked in Mr. Spota’s inner circle.
The cover-up of Chief Burke’s assault, witnesses at trial said, was part of a broader pattern. The testimony exposed an alarming culture of corruption and retribution in a county with about 2,500 police officers, one of the largest police departments in the United States.
Police officers who were supposed to investigate gangs and school shootings would be diverted to help their chief with petty vendettas and mundane tasks, like spying on his girlfriends or driving him to the airport, former officers testified.
Together, Mr. Spota, Mr. McPartland and Chief Burke controlled what amounted to a law-enforcement fiefdom in the eastern half of Long Island, prosecutors said.
The three men called themselves “the administration,” one former police officer testified. They golfed together and drank together. Mr. McPartland and Mr. Burke used to greet one another on the phone with a vulgar imprecation.
Mr. Burke’s relationship with Mr. Spota began in 1979, when Mr. Spota was a young prosecutor trying a murder case, and Mr. Burke, then a teenager, was his star witness.
Mr. Burke later became a police officer. In the 1990s, an internal investigation found that he had violated several police protocols, including having sex in his patrol car while in uniform with a prostitute who used crack cocaine. Mr. Spota, a lawyer for the police union at the time, defended Mr. Burke and negotiated a plea deal that saved his career.
Then in 2001, Mr. Spota, who switched parties from Republican to Democratic, was elected district attorney. He repeatedly promoted Mr. Burke in the Police Department, consolidating their power.
Prosecutors said the two of them, along with other officials, were able to punish people who challenged their authority.
In particular, Mr. Burke hated one of the police officials, Pat Cuff, who had conducted the internal investigation against him in the 1990s, witnesses said. When Mr. Cuff’s son was caught with a gun, the district attorney’s office threatened to upgrade the charges from a misdemeanor to a felony. Mr. Cuff cried at his desk, suspecting it was retaliation, a witness testified.
As soon as Mr. Burke became police chief in early 2012, he demoted Mr. Cuff by four ranks and assigned him to guard a warehouse.
The assault of the burglary suspect happened about a year into Mr. Burke’s tenure as police chief. The man in custody, Christopher Loeb, was a heroin user with a long criminal record. Chief Burke thought nobody would believe his word over the police chief’s, according to witness testimony.
Mr. Loeb was held on $500,000 bail, an unusually high amount for a car break-in. The case was assigned to the public corruption unit, led by Mr. McPartland, not the major crimes unit, where it would normally have been prosecuted.
But a few months later, in early 2013, Mr. Loeb’s lawyer publicly accused the police of assault, triggering a civil rights investigation.
The administration panicked, prosecutors said. Mr. McPartland helped concoct a cover story that Chief Burke had just “popped his head in” to the interrogation room. Three other police detectives had been in the room participating in the beating, and it was imperative that they all stuck to the same story.
To maintain the lie, Mr. Spota and Mr. McPartland relied heavily on Mr. Hickey, the police commander who supervised those three detectives.
Mr. Hickey testified that he was ordered to instruct his men to “deny, deny, deny.” Mr. Spota and the others involved in the cover-up handpicked one of the three officers, Anthony Leto, to lie under oath about the assault during a court hearing, Mr. Hickey said.
Mr. Leto told jurors that he feared if he were truthful, the police chief would falsely accuse his sons of a crime or plant drugs on them.
The obstruction initially worked, thwarting federal agents for several months. But the investigation escalated again in 2015 with more subpoenas.
During a meeting that year, Mr. McPartland speculated about who the “rat” was. Mr. Spota said that if one police officer cooperated, “He’ll never work here again and I will see to it,” according to Mr. Hickey’s testimony.
After the meeting, Chief Burke threatened that if the police detectives failed to stay in line, he would expose that Mr. Hickey was cheating on his wife, Mr. Hickey said.
“I realized that my career was over,” he testified, “and that if I even try to go to the feds at this point, I would be dead in Suffolk County.”
Mr. Hickey said that he stayed awake at night, feeling paranoid. He was hospitalized in a stress-induced delirium, and was screaming, biting and spitting, according to medical records shown at trial.
Four days after his release from the hospital in October 2015, he received a grand jury subpoena, he said.
Mr. Hickey decided to plead guilty to his role in the conspiracy and cooperated with prosecutors as their star witness, testifying on the stand for three days.
At trial, lawyers for Mr. McPartland and Mr. Spota tried to shred Mr. Hickey’s credibility, calling him a practiced liar and highlighting that he admitted to four extramarital affairs. They pointed to a state judge’s determination in 1990 that Mr. Hickey had lied under oath as a police officer in a different burglary case.
The defense said prosecutors were relying on Mr. Hickey’s recollection of conversations that happened years ago, with no concrete evidence to corroborate his memory. No other witness testified to receiving direct orders from Mr. Spota or Mr. McPartland to obstruct the investigation, defense lawyers argued.
Prosecutors produced calendar entries and call records that they said showed Mr. Hickey was telling the truth.
Ultimately, the 12 jurors chose to believe Mr. Hickey.
On Tuesday, after the verdict was read, Mr. Loeb, the man who was assaulted by the police chief, poked his head into the emptying courtroom. He had been watching the trial from the overflow room. He was smiling.