[vTLWqa1l]

8 Officers Charged With Gun Trafficking in U.S. Corruption Case

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM


Eight current and former New York Police Department officers were arrested early Tuesday on federal charges including gun trafficking and conspiracy to smuggle cigarettes, according to people briefed on the case.

The charges allege that the officers — five are still on the force and three are retired — were involved in illegally transporting more than a dozen handguns as well as M-16 assault rifles and shotguns and a variety of stolen property, the people briefed on the case said. The officers, along with a former New Jersey correction officer and three civilians, were arrested at their homes before sunrise by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and investigators from the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, the people said.

The gun-trafficking allegations strike at the heart of one of the New York Police Department’s most hard-fought and robust initiatives, and one that has been a central theme of the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg: getting guns off the street of New York City.

And the arrests come at a difficult time for a department already besieged by corruption allegations large and small, including a case in which 16 officers are expected to face charges in the coming days in a ticket-fixing scandal in the Bronx. In recent weeks, testimony at the trial of narcotics detective has featured accusations that he and his colleagues in Brooklyn and Queens planted drugs or lied under oath to meet arrest quotas and earn overtime, leading to the arrests of eight officers, the dismissal of hundreds of drug cases because of their destroyed credibility and the payout of more than $1 million in taxpayer funds to settle false arrest lawsuits.

And two other officers, in additional unrelated federal cases, have been charged in recent weeks with criminal civil rights violations accusing them of trumping up charges against innocent victims. In one case on Staten Island, a white officer is accused of falsely arresting a black man and then bragging about it using a racial slur.

The new case, which began after the F.B.I. first uncovered the allegations, was based on a lengthy undercover operation conducted by its agents and investigators from the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, the people said.

The arrests on Tuesday were based on charges that include conspiracy to transport firearms across state lines, conspiracy to transport defaced firearms across state lines, conspiracy to sell firearms across state lines and conspiracy to transport and receive stolen property across state lines, one of the people said. The stolen property included slot machines, the person said.

The case did not begin as a sting, according to the four-count criminal complaint unsealed in the case, and indeed one of the officers, along with two co-defendants, sold a shotgun to an undercover F.B.I. agent. But as the investigation continued, it became a sting operation, with the undercover agent selling inoperable weapons, including the M-4 assault rifle, to the defendants.

The charges include allegations that some of the serial numbers of the weapons were defaced in an apparent effort to prevent them from being traced back to their source, suggesting that they were to be used in a crime, one of the people said.

The five current city officers were all patrol officers who worked in Brooklyn, the person said.

The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, was expected to announce the charges Tuesday afternoon at a news conference with Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Diego Rodriguez, the head of the criminal division in the New York F.B.I. office.

The defendants were expected to be arraigned on Tuesday in United States District Court in Manhattan.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...rruption-case/

[HonjUopu]

Assuming we have to have an ATF (and I'm not saying we do...) I'm pleased to see them doing busts like this on crooked swine instead of their usual attempts to criminalize innocent gun owners and figure out how to classify shoe strings as "machine guns"!

[vTLWqa1l]

Agree but sometimes I wonder about what kind of ratio between made up and legit.

[HagsPusia]

nothing will come of it

everybody will cop a plea to toss a charge on everybody else and when the smoke clears everybody will get timed served and their pensions kept in check

Mayor jewberg dosent want his own minons he middle amercians trying to protect themselves gettiny caught in his web