Fairfax County Police Watch: Home Bergen Auxiliary cop turned informant arrested again for prescription fraud

Auxiliary cop turned informant arrested again for prescription fraud

Sunday, 05 February 2012 00:06 Jerry DeMarco

EXCLUSIVE: The fall has been long and hard for former Palisades Park auxiliary officer Laurie Calvert, who went from wearing a wire to help prosecutors bring down a ring of rogue cops to being arrested once more for prescripton fraud -- this time by allegedly claiming the medications were for her dead father.

Laurie S. Calvert

(MUGSHOT courtesy Bogota PD)Investigating a string of burglaries involving Asian immigrants who kept large sums of cash around their homes because they distrusted American banks, the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office turned to Calvert in 1995.

Calvert, who handled parking enforcement, traffic control and special details, recorded conversations not only with the targeted officers but also with their spouses and friends. She also secretly had a duplicate key made for a radio car so it could be bugged.

Federal authorities eventually took over the case, which led to convictions or guilty pleas from five crooked cops.

Calvert was eventually denied reappointment in 1997 when a new administration took over. This ended a 19-year career with the department, the last two of which she spent insisting that she was being harassed.

Borough officials said she never supported with evidence and ignored their advice to take her case to the county prosecutor.

Calvert, who ended up suing the borough, later called herself a “rat” in interviews. The episode sent her into a deep depression, she said.

Calvert was first arrested in 2001 after police said she posed as a doctor to obtain prescription medications for pain and anxiety in Fairview, Fort Lee, Hackensack, Palisades Park, and Teaneck.

A year later, police charged her with using an illegal handgun in an aggravated assaul -- following another incident involving falsely obtained meds. A judge later put her on probation for two years.

Bogota Detective Geoffrey Cole said he discovered this week that Calvert was filling prescriptions for the highly addictive painkiller Oxycodone, for Fentanyl pain-killing patches and for Alprazaolam, which is the generic equivalent of Xanax and is used to treat depression, by using her late father's prescriptions the past seven months.

"She had some of the prescriptions with her when she was arrested," Bogota Police Chief John C. Burke told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.

"We're still calculating how many she had altogether," the chief said late Friday.

Calvert remained held on $15,000 bail in the Bergen County Jail early Sunday, pending a Municipal Court date. She is charged with obtaining a controlled dangerous substance by fraud.

Morrogh finds cop he doesn’t love. In other news, hell freezes.

Probe of fatal police shooting goes to federal authorities

By Justin Jouvenal/Post

The Fairfax County prosecutor has turned over the investigation of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed Springfield man to federal authorities, citing complications with the five-month-old case.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh said the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has agreed to continue the probe into the death of 46-year-old John Geer, who was shot during a standoff with Fairfax County police in August. No one has been charged in the incident.

“There is a conflict of interest that has arisen in the case,” Morrogh said Thursday. “And there is a second potential conflict of interest that has arisen out of my office. . . . This is the prudent thing to do.”

Morrogh declined to describe the nature of the conflicts because the investigation is ongoing. The U.S. attorney’s office said Thursday that it could not confirm or deny any investigation or comment on pending investigations.

Police went to Geer’s Pebble Brook Court home on Aug. 29 because of a report of a domestic disturbance. Geer’s father, Don Geer, said his son was upset because his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, had decided to leave him.

John Geer had thrown his girlfriend’s belongings in the front yard. She called police and told them that Geer had a firearm. Police said they tried for about 50 minutes to persuade Geer to leave the home, but he refused.

Don Geer said he watched the climax of the encounter. He said that he could not hear what officers were saying to his son but that he saw him standing with empty hands resting on top of a screen door at the home’s entrance.

At some point, John Geer began to slowly lower his hands and an officer opened fire, hitting Geer in the chest, his father said. Geer retreated inside and closed the door. A SWAT team eventually entered the home and found Geer dead.

Don Geer said detectives later told him that his son did not have a gun on him at the time of the shooting but that there was a holstered handgun a couple of steps from the front door.

Don Geer said it appeared to him that the shooting was unjustified, but he was unsure what to make of the probe being turned over to federal authorities.

“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad — if I had a better idea of why they are doing it, I could form an opinion,” he said.

Geer and friends of his son have been critical of how long the investigation has taken, but Morrogh said police and prosecutors were working to explore all the evidence. He did not think federal prosecutors would have to start from scratch.

“No one wants these things to linger on,” Morrogh said.

Our ink will outlast his career

Under the reign of former Chief of Police Rhorer the Fairfax County Police arrested a man for not wearing clothes in his house while he made coffee, set up an eye doctor on a gambling charge and then used the SWAT team to kill him. An investigation into the charge that the Doctor’s primary clients were cops has never been investigated. The police gunned down an emotionally unstable man because cop who shot him wrongly assumed the man was trying to escape. He wasn’t. The cops also shot dead four other citizens under highly questionable circumstances. The department under Rhorer was sued multiple times by citizens. So did they fire Rhorer? Naw they promoted him. According to news reports Rhorer draws a salary of $191,168 per year as Deputy Fairfax County Executive as well as a concurrent pension from the Fairfax County police of $173000 per year.

Occupation by force

According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, nearly one in five Fairfax residents (17.5 percent) is of Asian descent while Hispanics make up nearly 16 percent of Fairfax’s overall population. Those numbers drop considerably when applied to the Fairfax County Police Department, where only 4.3 percent of officers are Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. White officers make up 84 percent of Fairfax County’s 1,360-member police department, significantly higher than the county’s general population (54 percent white). Almost 90% of the force lives outside the county.