Re: 12/21/00 - NH Advocate: No Great Shakes
No Great Shakes
By Paul Bass
Published 12/21/00
As public handshakes go, it lacked the historic gravity of Arafat and Rabin in the Rose Garden. But it, too, seemed to promise a new era.
New Haven Police Chief Melvin Wearing shook city cop Keith Wortz's hand as Wortz received a promotion to detective. Just a week earlier Wearing was investigating Wortz for his role as a whistleblower in recent police scandals. The handshake seemed to offer hope that the scandals could lead to reform. So did the the arrest last Friday of Capt. Brian Sullivan for his role in a murder coverup. So did hints in Sullivan's arrest warrant affidavit that the state may look at other cops' roles in the coverup, too.
But as with the Arafat-Rabin handshake, aimed at ushering in a period of Mideast peace, the Wearing-Wortz handshake and Sullivan's arrest glossed over deeper problems plaguing New Haven's police department. The grand jury report that led to Sullivan's arrest exonerated all his colleagues. Sullivan and his chief deputy avoided internal police department charges. And there were few signs that Wearing has started taking seriously allegations of widespread corruption and ineffectiveness.
Wearing and Wortz shook hands at a promotion ceremony last week on the stage of Career High School. Like graduates dressed in their best in front of a hall full of relatives yelping their nicknames, 44 New Haven cops lined up on the evening of Dec. 13 to accept new sergeant and detective badges. They shook the Police Commission chairman's hand. They shook the mayor's hand. Then they shook the chief's hand, posing for official photographs.
It was the kind of evening, one cop noted, that the scandal-wracked department needed. The promotion ceremony came two days after the release of a grand jury report accusing a top city cop of covering up a murder. It came two weeks after the Advocate revealed a coverup of a second apparent killing.
Those promoted paraded in alphabetical order to pick up their badges. Wortz, a detective with a W, came last.
Just one week earlier, Chief Wearing had tried to punish Wortz with an internal investigation into his blowing the whistle on department corruption. The humbling intervention of Mayor John DeStefano quashed Wearing's witchhunt. The mayor announced Wortz would probably receive a commendation, not a punishment, for coming forward.
As Wortz's name was called Wednesday night, the Career High auditorium erupted in the loudest cheers of the night. And yes, Wortz and Wearing shook hands, albeit a bit stiffly.
The symbol was unmistakable: A then-patrolman came forward with evidence of corruption. He says colleagues threatened to beat him up. He earned the wrath of the chief--and emerged with a promotion.
But the grand jury report and the department's continued blasé reactions to allegations of corruption drowned out that symbol with a louder message: Most of the time, you can get away with it. Most of the time, the criminal justice system will make more of an effort to cover its behind than to dig for the truth and insist on consequences.
That message came loudest from the grand jury report. Written by Superior Court Judge Carmen Elisa Espinosa and released Dec. 4, it blasted New Haven chief of detectives Brian Sullivan for allegedly suppressing an interview with an eyewitness to a 1996 murder, then killing the investigation. (Sullivan's attorney insists that Sullivan, who turned himself in to state prosecutors on charges of hindering an investigation and tampering with evidence last Friday, is innocent.) But Espinosa's report takes at face value the excuses of all the other cops connected with the investigation of Philip Cusick's murder, in effect letting them off the hook.
And despite the testimony of 57 witnesses over seven months, she wrote merely an 11-page report. It makes no attempt at divining a motive for the coverup, a key question: Whatever prompted this coverup could have caused cops to mess around with other cases as well. And the report contains no discussion of management problems at the department that allowed the coverup to continue for three years.
New Haven's Board of Police Commissioners was set last week to dig deeper. It planned to bring departmental charges against both Sullivan and his deputy, Sgt. Edward Kendall. But both pre-empted the moves by retiring.
In its warrant application for Sullivan's arrest, though, Dearington's office took a tougher stand on Kendall than did the grand jury report, which exonerated him. Dearington's office's application alleges that Kendall "admitted under oath ... that he was not truthful" about events in original statements to state investigators. It also challenged Kendall's claim that he followed department rules when he retrieved a key tape recording from the property room; "no records could be located indicating the tape was signed out." The application also mentions, in passing, that the state's attorney's office had found "problems" with "300 sexual assault cases"--a stunning revelation that, if even half true, exposes dangerous problems in the police department's detective division.
City government sources say local officials were also considering action against two detectives who took the statement of the Cusick eyewitness, saying they didn't come forward with evidence of corruption. But New Haven State's Attorney Michael Dearington said last week that, "sure as shootin'," those two detectives did come to his office two years ago, after Sullivan stopped the investigation and ordered the tape and transcript of the eyewitness interview locked in a drawer. Dearington says a staff member didn't immediately tell him about the detectives' story. Even when he did learn about it, "we assumed there had to have been a legitimate reason for that order," he says.
Two years later, Wortz showed up at Dearington's office with the same story. By then, Dearington realized more was going on.
New Haven officials last week were looking at whether the two detectives mishandled evidence and therefore merited some punishment, and whether a third cop knew of Sullivan's order to hide the evidence and stop the investigation, but failed to report it to superiors. The idea: Punishing someone other than Sullivan, combined with commending Wortz, could send a message to the rank and file to have the courage to speak up.
The opposite message came a week earlier from Chief Wearing's short-lived internal investigation into whether Keith Wortz violated department rules by speaking publicly about corruption.
And an opposite message emerges from the chief's responses to a flurry of embarrassing revelations about the department.
* When the grand jury began its work, Wearing downplayed the case's significance. He didn't order an internal investigation until after the request for a grand jury and the intercession of Mayor DeStefano. And only when Sullivan personally accused the chief of having quashed the murder investigation did Wearing begin to express outrage and suspend Sullivan and Kendall.
* Wearing continues to downplay an FBI investigation into the arrests of two drug dealers in a 1990 double murder. The FBI concluded that a crooked ex-detective involved in the drug trade set the men up. Other reports have since emerged of cases compromised by the same ex-detective. But Wearing insists the right people went to jail in the double murder. He has resisted calls to reopen that case.
* Similarly, Wearing downplayed recent Advocate stories about two detectives (one of them also involved in the Cusick investigation) leading witnesses to identify suspects. In one case, a detective whispered in the ear of the witness the number of the suspect's photograph. In the other, the detective showed the witness a photo array, with the suspect's picture highlighted in yellow. (See "Numero Dos," "Who You Calling Yellow?" and other stories of recent cop scandals on our Web archive, <www.newhavenadvocate.com/articles/chaoslist.html>.) Rather than criticize the detectives, Wearing criticized the articles because, he maintained, cops caught the right suspects and got convictions in both cases.
* Wearing only reluctantly reopened the investigation of another 1996 death, initially classified as an "accident," that of Michael Tricaso. (See accompanying story.)
Last week, after the grand jury report, Wearing restarted the Cusick investigation. He says his department, working with North Haven detectives (the murder happened in New Haven, but Cusick's body was dumped at the North Haven home of his mother), will look for the man identified as the shooter in the eyewitness report.
Wearing has grown accustomed to the onslaught of criticism of his department--and sees in it a vindication of his performance.
"If the organization weren't as strong as it is, with good leadership, [the grand jury case and newspaper stories] would have torn this department apart," Wearing maintains. "I've got to listen to you guys every day. I've got to talk to my mayor. Then I have to come in and kick ass every day to make sure the job's getting done [on the streets] without beating up on people."
Speculation has grown in the ranks about whether the scandals will chase Wearing into retirement. However, the criticism of the chief's management has never extended to allegations that could push him out of office under the city charter. No one has suggested that Wearing ever broke any laws, sanctioned corruption or otherwise violated the integrity of his office.
The grand jury report may in the end lower, not raise, the heat. Take the reaction of an independent-minded police commissioner, Jonathan Einhorn, who's hardly gun-shy about criticizing other public officials. "After going over umpteen witnesses and the department in detail, [the judge] gave the department a clean bill of health," Einhorn said last week. "If you have a grand jury that went through all that gossip and all the statements, it's a positive statement for the department" that only one cop ended up having his reputation besmirched.
So Wearing says he's here to stay, leaning back in his office chair. He has three more years until he hits the 35-year mark on the job. He intends, he says, to reach it.
newmassmedia.com |
