East Haven Police Chief Leonard Gallo’s retirement launches a new chapter in the saga of a New Haven exile as well as of a white-majority town’s resistance to change, infused with echoes of mid-20th century standoffs between southern communities and the federal government.
The news also brought smiles to Guti’z Bakery.
The retirement of Gallo—aka “Co-Conspirator-1” in a federal indictment of alleged racial police harassment and violence and rampant tampering with evidence—was announced at a Monday 11 a.m. press conference by embattled East Haven Mayor Joseph Maturo.
“I think it’s good news. We need a chief willing to take care of this. We need a chief willing to enforce the law and not discriminate,” said owner Pedro Gutierrez, 55, who originally hails from Ecuador.
Maturo (pictured above at the press conference) read a prepared statement saying Gallo had handed in retirement papers that morning and had informed him of the decision last Friday. He announced a “transparent” search for a new chief would begin “immediately.” In the meantime, Deputy Chief John Mannion—who had clashed with Gallo—will run the department, Maturo announced.
He said he would not take questions from the press.
Gallo, who’s 64, did not attend the conference. His attorney, Jonathan Einhorn, did. Einhorn defended Gallo, saying the departing chief wanted to avoid being a “distraction.” Gallo has served as East Haven’s chief for 14 years, a period marked by ongoing racial conflict with Latinos and Latino advocates from New Haven and East Haven.
“He feels he’s doing the best thing for the town,” Einhorn said of Gallo’s decision to retire.
The news moves a police chief firmly into the role of target of a federal criminal investigation, without responsibility for simultaneously running a police department facing additional expected arrests.
Sanchez, a 34-year-old Peruvian native, moved out of East Haven a couple of years ago because the police had frightened her by stopping her so often for no reason on her way to the laundromat, she said. She moved to New Haven where the police wouldn’t bother her, she said.
Then two months ago friends told her the police harassment had subsided, she said. So she moved back to East Haven, where general crime is much lower than in New Haven, she said. Since returning, she said she hasn’t felt harassed.
Down the street at Los Amigos grocery store, Giovanny Rodriguez (pictured), who lives near the border in New Haven, said he also has only felt safe returning to East Haven in the last couple of months. He welcomed the news of Gallo’s departure. He said it will create a “clear space” for a thorough investigation of the department.
Rodriguez’s uncle, Luis Rodriguez, has owned the store for four years and lived through the worst of the police department harassment. He said the Gallo’s retirement is a positive development, but it should be only the first step to further changes. “I’m very sure that many police remain who were involved in these matters,” he said in Spanish.
He said he hopes his customers will begin to return to the store. “After four years of torture, everyone can come back.”
Luis said he’s looking forward to the entire East Haven community coming together as one, once the abuse and harassment is put in the past.
Elsewhere in town, some hope things will continue as they have. Ferdinando Cerrato, a 79-year-old retire barber from Wooster Street said he’s lived in East Haven for 47 years. He said the chief only retired because he was under pressure. “He and the East Haven police department are doing they’re job right.”
The Latino influx in recent years is ruining East Haven, he said. “They’re all criminals. They should be arrested and deported.”
He said he’s disgusted to see signs in Spanish around town. “They’re destroying our language, history and culture,” he said.
Cerrato said his mother and father were Italian immigrants who took night classes to learn English and American history. Contemporary Latino immigrants to East Haven “couldn’t care less about American history,” he said.
“It’s becoming a third-world banana republic,” Cerrato said of East Haven.
New Haveners involved in suing East Haven reacted positively to Monday’s news. “The power structure that perpetuated a toxic culture within the East Haven Police Department is finally crumbling,” Christopher Lapinig, a student in Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, stated in a release. Added civil-rights attorney David Rosen, in the same release: “We continue to learn the extent to which the police department’s law enforcement efforts were contaminated by the racism and police abuse that Gallo helped cultivate.”
Monday morning, before the press conference, Mayor Maturo met with representatives of the state Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission. East Haven State Sen. Len Fasano arranged the meeting.
Gallo’s departure represents a turning point in a decades-old battle over integration and police misconduct between, first, New Haven and East Haven; and now including the federal government.
Newspapers from the New Haven Register to The New York Times have blasted Maturo’s handling of an ongoing federal criminal probe into police misconduct and racial profiling and have called for Gallo’s ouster. Over 15,000 people have signed an online petition echoing that call
Until now Maturo and Gallo have acted with defiance.
A previous mayor, April Capone, had placed Gallo on leave pending the federal probe’s conclusion. Maturo, a former mayor, won the office back last November. He promptly reinstated Gallo—who had been run off the New Haven force because of his reputation for abusing racial minorities, among other hard-edged tactics—in defiance of the feds.
At a press conference last month, federal officials said the Maturo-Gallo regime has openly blocked their investigation. They portrayed East Haven as one of the most recalcitrant communities in the nation they’ve encountered in civil-rights probes.
Meanwhile, over the past week Maturo has provoked national protests (including the sending of hundreds of tacos to his office) with public comments that range from hostile to deeply confused about the growing Latino population in his town, which is largely Ecuadorean and is estimated at 10 percent. The emerging narrative has placed Gallo and Maturo in the roles of Southern segregationists like Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, and George Wallace, who resisted racial changes and battled activists and federal officials alike during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Fast Forward A Half Century
New Haven African-Americans have long charged East Haven cops with routinely harassing and sometimes brutalizing them. Those complaints exploded in public in 1997 when a white East Haven cop chased an unarmed black driver named Malik Jones into New Haven then shot him dead at close range. Years of complaints about East Haven brutality emerged, along with complaints about a police culture; the department took heat for its official softball T-shirts, which had a picture of cops slamming suspects against a car and the logo “Boyz On The Hood.” (Read one Italian-American urban cop’s history of that dynamic here.)
The issue exploded again in 2009 after the Independent reported that East Haven police falsely arrested a Fair Haven priest, Father James Manship, when he went to investigate charges from his Latino immigrant parishioners of rampant police profiling, harassment, and trumped-up arrests. A Yale Law School student clinic followed with a lawsuit. The actions brought to light tensions over the spilling of New Haven’s growing Ecuadorean immigrant community over the border into East Haven.
Then the U.S. Justice Department launched a civil-rights investigation. Last month it announced it had confirmed those complaints. In separate criminal and civil investigations, it spent two years looking into Gallo’s crew. It examined computer records, messages sent among officers, police reports. Throughout, officials charged, Gallo himself and some of his underlings not only refused to cooperate—they blocked the feds’ work. And they allegedly intimidated rank-and-file cops who considered providing information to the feds. The U.S. Attorney’s office released a report detailing alleged widespread abuses; Gallo was a key character in the report. (Read about that here.)
The report accused Gallo “and other EHPD officers” of “creat[ing] a hostile and intimidating environment for persons who wished to cooperate with our investigation.” The report cited “messages on a police union bulletin board that referred to ‘rats’ at EHPD.” It said “Chief Gallo had warned that DOJ had agreed to provide him with the names of individuals who cooperated with the investigation,” even though DOJ had told Gallo names would remain confidential. And, “remarkably,” according to the report, EHPD officers at “a late evening meeting ... warned DOJ staff and a police practices consultant that they could not guarantee their safety during ridealongs with officers.” Officials said if East Haven doesn’t clean up its act, a civil lawsuit could follow.
Meanwhile, a criminal case proceeded based on federal grand jury testimony being presented in Bridgeport. That led to the arrests last Tuesday of four cops. More arrests are expected.
And last Tuesday’s indictment made it clear that Gallo (largely acknowledged as “Co-Conspirator-1” in the document) is in the crosshairs of the federal criminal probe. So did conversations with people familiar with questioning by the U.S. attorney and grand jury investigating the East Haven case. Read about that here.
Einhorn (pictured), Gallo’s attorney, told reporters Gallo did not resign under duress. And his retirement after 14 years as chief and 42 years in law enforcement should not in any way be “construed” as an admission of guilt, Einhorn said.
“He is retiring form his position for one reason alone—that is his desire to not be a distracting element,” Einhorn said. He noted Gallo’s being named as a defendant in a civil suit and his role as the feds’ “Co-Conspirator-1” in the federal indictment.
“Should he be charged in a federal criminal case, we will successfully defend” him, Einhorn said. Gallo “is not guilty. He should not be arrested. If arrested, he will be acquitted on any charges,” Einhorn said. He said he had worked with Gallo on the statement.
Einhorn said Gallo’s retirement takes effect Friday. That gives him time to negotiate a retirement package.
But two East Haven police commissioners want to see Gallo fired, not retiring, so that he wouldn’t receive any severance. They’ll have to work fast.
Those two commissioners, Fred Brow and Jim Krebs, said after the news conference Monday that they plan to recommend at Tuesday night’s regularly monthly commission meeting that Gallo be fired.
Brow’s and Krebs’ terms as commissioners expire Tuesday night. They were appointees of the previous mayor, and have clashed regularly with Maturo and Gallo.
