By WINNIE HU
A Bronx officer at the center
of an internal police investigation into ticket-fixing was found guilty by a
jury on Monday of taking part in a series of criminal schemes to make money.
The officer, Jose Ramos, 45,
was convicted of attempted criminal possession of a controlled substance in the
first degree, the most serious charge against him, as well as attempted robbery
in the second degree and attempted grand larceny in the third degree. He was
found not guilty of a fourth charge, attempted robbery in the first degree.
The verdict came after a nearly
monthlong trial in State Supreme Court in the Bronx, in which prosecutors
played video and audio recordings of Officer Ramos plotting with a police
informer in October and November 2009 to drive a van carrying heroin from the
Bronx to Brooklyn for $10,000, and to steal money from a black-market electronics
buyer and the hotel room of an out-of-town drug dealer.
Officer Ramos, who did not
testify at his trial, looked upset as the verdict was announced in a largely
empty courtroom after less than a day of deliberation by the jury. Officer
Ramos, who has been held in jail, had previously been suspended from the Police
Department.
Officer Ramos’s lawyer, Matthew
J. Kluger, patted him on the back in support. Later, outside court, Mr. Kluger
said they would wait to hear the sentence before deciding whether to appeal.
“Mr. Ramos is disappointed with the narcotics charge,” he said, “but we’ll
regroup and figure out where to go.”
Officer Ramos is scheduled to
be sentenced on Dec. 1 by Justice Michael A. Gross. He faces eight to 20 years
in prison on the narcotics charge.
The trial was just the
beginning of a long court battle for Officer Ramos, the son of a police
officer; he had been on the job for 17 years before his arrest. He faces
additional charges in five other indictments, the most serious of which stem
from an accusation in 2012 that he conspired with his wife to use money from
his police pension to try to have a witness against him murdered.
It was the investigation into
Officer Ramos that exposed a routine practice among police officers to make traffic
and parking tickets disappear for friends and relatives. The investigation
eventually led to more than two dozen wiretaps and the indictments of 16 police
officers, including Officer Ramos. Earlier this month, Lt. Jennara Cobb was the
first officer to be tried. She was convicted by a judge of divulging
information about the investigation in what prosecutors said was an effort to
warn other officers.
The investigation of Officer
Ramos started with a tip in December 2008 that marijuana was being sold by a
man who managed two barber shops owned by Officer Ramos in the 40th Precinct,
in the South Bronx. The man, Lee King, also lived in Officer Ramos’s apartment,
drove his car and used his police-issued placard, prosecutors said.
The police started listening to
Mr. King’s cellphone, and later, to Officer Ramos’s two cellphones. By fall
2009, they had enlisted an informer, Harry Mingo, who conspired with Officer
Ramos to steal money from an out-of-town drug dealer and an electronics buyer,
both of whom were in fact undercover police officers. They also met with a
Miami drug dealer (also an undercover police officer), and later Officer Ramos
drove a van for the supposed drug dealer from the Bronx to Brooklyn,
prosecutors said.
During the trial, Mr. Kluger
repeatedly sought to discredit Mr. Mingo and to portray Officer Ramos to the
jury as a police officer who had made mistakes but had never committed a crime.
Mr. Kluger argued that Officer Ramos was repeatedly caught up in plots devised
by internal police investigators and that he did not know that the van he drove
was supposedly carrying narcotics.
But Omer Wiczyk, the
prosecutor, countered that there was simply overwhelming evidence against
Officer Ramos that showed, time and again, that he had been all too willing to
illegally profit from his badge and connections. “That man is guilty,” Mr.
Wiczyk told jurors on Friday. “The law applies to everyone equally. Apply it
here. Convict him.”
In a statement, the Bronx
district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, said Officer Ramos “clearly shunted to
the side the duty he has to the people of New York City.”
