"NYC police officer found guilty in ticket-fixing case" by Winnie Hu | New York Times October 16, 2014
NEW YORK — The first police officer tried in connection with a scandal that involved New York City police officers making traffic and parking tickets disappear for friends and relatives was found guilty Wednesday of leaking information about the investigation.
The officer, Lieutenant Jennara Cobb, 38, was found guilty of divulging an eavesdropping warrant, official misconduct, and obstructing governmental administration, ruled Justice Martin Marcus of the state Supreme Court in the Bronx. The ruling followed a trial that revealed the unexpected turns in a wide-ranging internal investigation that led to the indictment of 16 police officers and five civilians.
The resulting scandal tarnished the Police Department, and according to the Bronx district attorney’s office, cost the city more than $1 million in ticket revenue.
Cobb showed no emotion as the judge announced a guilty verdict on all three charges against her. But the decision drew muffled gasps of dismay from more than three dozen supporters, including fellow officers, in the courtroom.
Cobb, who did not testify at the trial, has been placed on modified assignment in the department. She faces up to a year in prison, according to the district attorney’s office. Her lawyer declined to comment on the verdict.
The charges against Cobb stemmed from a brief meeting between her and two other New York City police officers at a tavern in Rockland County in 2010. Prosecutors contend that Cobb, who was working in the Internal Affairs Bureau at the time, nearly derailed the unfolding wiretap investigation by warning the two officers, Lieutenant William Kivlehan (who is now a captain) and Officer Kevin McCarthy, that the investigation had expanded into ticket-fixing and that officers’ conversations were being monitored.
Prosecutors said that her warning was subsequently passed along to police union officials and that some police officers started using different phones or warning one another to discuss summonses in person.
Donald Levin, an assistant district attorney, called Cobb’s action “the Super Bowl of leaks” in the trial, saying that the wiretap investigation almost collapsed as a direct result of her disclosure.
Cobb’s lawyers had sought to downplay her role, saying that information about the investigation had already “leaked like a sieve.” They pointed out that Kivlehan and McCarthy did not stop using the phone to make tickets disappear, and they recited a list of wiretaps that were set up in the months after the meeting in the tavern to suggest the investigation had continued to move forward.
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