Howie Carr: Staties wait to share Leigha Genduso’s resignation, claim no drug intel

Late night news dump

Howie Carr Sunday, August 26, 2018

Trooper Leigha Genduso (right)

The number to play tonight is 917, as in 9:17 p.m., which is when the state police emailed news that corrupt trooper Leigha Genduso “resigned” Friday night.

These crooked government agencies love Friday night “dumps” of bad news, but until recently, they’d shove out the odoriferous press releases just before the end of business hours, around 5 o’clock.

I have covered Genduso in previous blogs. The MSP announced that she submitted her resignation. The announcement was made after 9:00 pm on a Friday night. The story isn’t about a person that never should been hired as a police officer has resigned. The story should be about the failure of the administration of the MSP through either incompetence or intent. 

It has been almost fifty years since NYPD Detective Frank Serpico took a bullet in the face for naively trying to expose corruption within NYPD. I say naively, because the bosses were well aware of the corruption. Serpico didn’t get any thanks for making the police administration do their job. Things haven’t changed much in fifty years.

The “go along to get along” style of management doesn’t work. This is especially true in environments where the outcome of decisions made or not made can have fatal consequences. The process driven measurement is partially responsible. Outcomes, not process, used to be the true measure of success. Not any longer.

The two schools, process and outcome aren’t necessarily opposed to one another. They work in tandem when there is an objective, defined goal. For instance: tell an engineer that he has thirty-six months to build a bridge. He has to follow a process of acceptable engineering and building practices along the way to completion of the bridge. If the bridge is not complete in thirty-six months, he failed. It doesn’t matter how slavishly he followed the process.

Give a social worker the goal to eliminate poverty in ten years and identify a process, the process becomes the measure of success. Fifty years later poverty is still around. The measure of success is the size of the bureaucracy put in place to ensure the continuation of poverty.

There is a tendency in law enforcement to shift the blame to the individual officer for his screw up. The reality is that a bad officer didn’t just happen. He had help along the way. The help came in the form of bad policy and procedure or lack of enforcement of policy and procedure. It happens because co-workers and supervisors turn a blind eye to misconduct. The situation is aggravated when the agency fails to take action and allows a bad officer to resign. This enables such an officer to victimize another agency.

I was assigned to a narcotics task force for fifteen years. The officers that made up the task force were seconded out from participating agencies. Since it was an assignment, officers could be sent back to their home agency at anytime.

We had an institutional failure. The management controls regarding access to the evidence room were a deterrent to honest officers but not to dishonest officers. This was demonstrated when one of our officers was involved in a minor car accident, in his g-ride. Standard procedure called for the involved officer to submit a urine sample for analysis. According to the lab tech, the result for cocaine, was the highest he had ever seen. 

The officer was immediately sent back to his agency. The task force commander could have let the matter drop. In fact, several months later he attended a conference for narcotics unit commanders. He eavesdropped on a conversation at an adjoining table. There sat five or six other commanders (most members of Texas DPS). The consensus of opinion was that our resolution of the incident was inappropriate and extreme.

What did we do that was so wrong? We reasoned that since our evidence locker contained about two tons of marijuana, five to ten kilos of cocaine, multiple pounds of methamphetamine and thousands of doses of ecstasy, Occam’s razor  likely applied. Where would a crooked cop get dope? We conducted an immediate inventory of the evidence locker and discovered that at least one kilo of cocaine was missing.

We contacted the FBI. Their reply, “It sucks to be you.” Next we contacted Texas DPS. They were busy. The investigation fell back on us. As the results of the ongoing investigation came in, I drafted a search warrant for the former agent’s residence, a residential hotel.

We executed the search warrant. Search warrants are a high risk type of operation. In this instance, the target had added insight. Not only could he identify the numbers and likely order of individuals (who would be first, second through the door). He could predict with a high degree of accuracy what each officer would do once inside, go right or left. We got lucky. He was so intoxicated he was unable to react. We recovered a pound of cocaine, still with the evidence label attached, stolen guns and hundreds of pictures of his pregnant tittie dancer girlfriend, her lesbian lover and he snorting and smoking cocaine. He was prosecuted in Federal court and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

The officer’s Chief thought we were being vindictive by arresting and prosecuting him. This apparently was not an unreasonable belief. The task force commanders didn’t state an opinion as to vindictiveness but they all agreed that they wouldn’t have pursued the investigation, let alone prosecuted. As far as they were concerned, it was up to the Chief of police to deal with the mess.

Going back to Genduso. The MSP claims that she lied on her application and subsequent background checks. This ignores the fact that at least two of the decision makers in the MSP were assigned to narcotics at the time of the investigation into the activities of her then boyfriend. She admitted in open court to drug dealing, drug usage and money laundering. Individual failure? Sure, she is responsible, but she is not alone.

Expediency seems to be the standard of modern police bureaucrats. They seem to feel that since they make the rules, the rules don’t apply to them. Right and wrong are sliding concepts to be applied as suits their purpose.

A crack dealer we busted put this philosophy into context. The dealer was the target of a buy-bust. He met with an undercover officer to sell a quantity of crack. Once the officer took delivery he gave the bust signal. We then moved in and arrested the dealer. The dealer protested, he didn’t have any drugs on him. I pointed out that he was being arrested because he sold dope to the po-lice.

He responded, “I didn’t sell dope to the police. It’s against the law to sell dope to the police.” The implication being that selling dope was illegal only if one had the bad luck to sell to an undercover.

The MSM embodies that philosophy. There is only one sin and that is getting caught.