By Bob Egelko
A federal prosecutor opened the
trial of two San Francisco police officers Monday by telling jurors the case
was about “corruption with a badge.” Defense lawyers countered that it was
about a third policeman who cut a deal with prosecutors to frame their clients.
Reynaldo Vargas, who pleaded
guilty to four felony charges last month and agreed to testify against his
former colleagues, is a man with an “evil nature” whose testimony was “bought
and paid for,” Brian Getz, attorney for police Sgt. Ian Furminger, said in an
opening statement to the U.S. District Court jury in San Francisco.
Teresa Caffese, lawyer for
Officer Edmond Robles, said Robles “had no knowledge of what Vargas was doing”
and “didn’t help Vargas commit any of the crimes.” Vargas, she said, “is a liar
and he is a convicted criminal” who “is now pointing fingers at Ed Robles
because he wants to save his own skin.”
But Assistant U.S. Attorney
Rodney Villazor said Vargas and other witnesses would describe a series of
thefts of money, drugs and other property from criminal suspects by the three
officers, who worked in the plainclothes unit at the Mission Station.
$30,000 in cash
In a May 2009, during a search
of a home in Newark, where the officers were assisting the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, Villazor said, Vargas found a shovel in the
backyard, dug up $30,000 in cash and split it with Furminger and Robles. The
next day, the prosecutor said, Robles deposited $6,000 in his bank account.
In another 2009 search,
Villazor said, Vargas found two Apple gift cards, one for $500 and the other
for $53.17, in the hotel room of a suspected drug dealer. “Vargas looked at Ed
Robles and said, 'Let’s go shopping,’” Villazor said, and one of the gift cards
was used to buy an iPod for Robles’ girlfriend.
“That’s what this case is
about, a cop stealing money,” the prosecutor said. He said the items police
seize during searches belong in evidence lockers, “not in their bank accounts.”
Caffese said Robles, when he
gave the iPod as a gift,did not know it had been purchased with a stolen gift
card.
Furminger and Robles are
charged with theft from suspects and from the city and with depriving the
public of their honest services. The criminal charges against all three
officers followed an investigation by San Francisco police and the FBI that
concluded they had stolen marijuana that had been seized from suspects in 2009,
and that Vargas had delivered the drugs to a pair of informants, who sold it in
return for 25 percent of the proceeds.
Furminger and Robles have been
suspended without pay.
Ex-officer’s admissions
Vargas was a police officer
from 1999 until he was fired in 2012 for allegedly falsifying his time sheets.
In a plea agreement Oct. 21, he admitted stealing computers, gift cards, money
and other property and keeping them for personal use. He also said he,
Furminger and Robles had taken marijuana from a seized UPS package in 2009, and
that he later gave the drugs to two people whom the three officers had been
trying to recruit as informants.
Vargas will testify later in
the trial, which is scheduled to last several weeks. One prosecution witness
Monday, the girlfriend of a suspected drug dealer, described being handcuffed
and interrogated by the three officers, who then allegedly offered her a
kickback if she would implicate her boyfriend.
The officers trashed the
couple’s hotel room and took her to the police station, said the witness,
Kelsey Stewart, where they asked her about her boyfriend’s bank account and
motor vehicles, and said “whatever money they got they would split with me.”
Stewart said she didn’t
remember which officer asked the question, but all of them were within earshot.
They later released her without charges.
Another prosecution witness,
Ian Elliott, a friend of Stewart’s, said he heard Robles question her outside
the hotel room and offer to “split the proceeds with her” if she helped them
find her boyfriend’s vehicles.
The trial resumes Thursday.
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