Weekly:
This
Week's
Corrupt
Cops
Stories
4/15/2005
The US law enforcement barrel is large, and the bad apples, covered in the residue of drug prohibition, keep on coming. This week, police officers in Pennsylvania and Texas are headed to prison for their misdeeds, while in other incidents across the country, cops, deputies, and even a fire department official have found themselves in trouble with the law. Let's get to it: In Dallas, Mark Delapaz, the former Dallas Police narcotics officer at the center of the city's infamous "sheetrock scandal," is going to federal prison for five years for lying to a judge to obtain a search warrant in a case related to the scandal. In the affair, which first came to light in 2001, crooked informants working with Delapaz set up dozens of people, mainly Mexican immigrants, by planting "cocaine" or "methamphetamine" in their homes or vehicles, then siccing the bust-hungry Delapaz on them. But the drugs were not drugs at all -- they were simply ground up gypsum, the material used to make pool chalk or sheetrock. On April 7, the jury that had earlier convicted Delapaz gave him a five-year sentence, half of that requested by prosecutors. While much of the blame for the scandal, which sent innocent men to prison for years, lies with the informants, three of whom have also been convicted in the case, jurors blamed Delapaz for continuing to use their reports as the basis for search warrants even after he should have known they were lying. By the time he told a judge in October 2001 that his informants were reliable, he already knew that at least six previous drug seizures based on those informants' information contained no real drugs. That was the charge that sent Delapaz on the same path to the Texas Department of Corrections on which he had sent so many innocent others. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, former Coaldale police officer Michael Weaver, 35, was sentenced to one-and-a-half years in federal prison Monday for planting drugs in the homes of suspects. Weaver had pleaded guilty on January 4 to a federal civil rights violation in the scheme, in which he and Lansford police officer Jeremy Sommers, 28, planted heroin and cocaine in the homes of two criminal suspects. Both suspects were then arrested on drug charges. According to federal prosecutors, Weaver and Sommer used drugs that were being held as evidence to incriminate the two suspects. Sommers was also set to be sentenced this week, but no information on his sentence was available at press time. The arrest and conviction of the two Pennsylvania officers came as part of a widening investigation into the illegal sale of a machine gun by former Lansdale police chief Joseph Stawiarski, 47, to former Coaldale police chief Shawn Nihen, 32. Stawiarski was sentenced to three months house arrest this week, while Nihen will be sentenced next week. In Jacksonville, Florida, Clay County sheriff's deputy Jason Gambrill, 32, was arrested Tuesday on drug distribution charges after providing the prescription drugs Cialis and Lortab free to department members for recreational use. Cialis is used by males for erectile dysfunction, while Lortab is a narcotic pain reliever. Gambrill is charged with sale and delivery of a controlled substance, according to Jacksonville's News 4 TV. Local authorities are still investigating who within the department received the drugs and said more arrests could follow. Sounds like quite a party at the Clay County Sheriff's Department. In Hackensack, New Jersey, a report in the Bergen Record Tuesday revealed that Bergen County prosecutors have fired the head of the county's narcotics strike force and are investigating four unnamed members of the squad. Prosecutor James Molinelli told the Record he had fired former head narc William Cullen, 55, over a "personnel matter," and declined to specify the reason for the investigation. When asked if he had opened a criminal investigation into the four officers, he said, "We're still investigating it. Right now, it's purely a personnel matter." In Atlanta, Fire Department Capt. Calvin Matthews, a 20-year veteran with the department, was arrested April 7 and charged with felony possession of marijuana and cocaine and obstructing an officer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The cocaine possession charge alone carries a prison sentence of up to 15 years under Georgia law. Matthews went down when he was spotted by members of the Atlanta Police Red Dog Team, who were checking out drug activity on Thomasville Boulevard. Team members watched Matthews apparently score, then arrested him after they found two small baggies containing $10 worth of marijuana each and one baggie containing $20 worth of cocaine.
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