By Rosemary Regina Sobol, Jason
Meisner
A former suburban police
officer assigned to a federal task force probing contraband cigarette sales in
the Chicago area was sentenced to 5 years in federal prison today for robbing
targets of his investigations of thousands of dollars and falsifying reports to
cover it up.
Jimmy J. Rodgers, 44, a onetime
Lyons police officer, pleaded guilty in May to extortion and was sentenced
today by U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin.
worked on a Food and Drug
Administration task force investigating the sale of contraband cigarettes that
do not have state or county tax stamps and are often sold under the counter at
convenience stores.
In his task force work, Rodgers
set up busts using a confidential source who would arrange sales of the illegal
smokes to store owners and other buyers, according to the charges. As payment,
Rodgers let the informant keep some of the cash he received from the targets,
then pocketed the rest for himself without documenting in a police report any
of the money that was seized, the charges alleged.
After tipping off the FBI, the
informant began to secretly record conversations with Rodgers and the potential
targets, including the July 2013 sale of 300 cartons of illegal Newport
cigarettes to a Chicago store owner for $11,280. After that transaction,
Rodgers gave $3,280 of the proceeds to the source, but in his report he wrote
that only cigarettes were seized. Lyons police had no record of the other
$8,000 being turned in, the charges alleged.
At a meeting a few days later,
Rodgers told the informant he "had an Oh (expletive)! moment" after
learning that an FBI supervisor had called one of his superiors in Lyons and
asked generally about how the department paid informants, according to the
complaint. In later conversations, Rodgers coached the source on what to say if
authorities began snooping around.
"If someone asks you about
it, you just say we got cigarettes, there was no money," a criminal
complaint quoted Rodgers as saying during one recorded meeting.
In asking for a sentence of 6 ½
years, prosecutors wrote in a filing last month that Rodgers’ actions should
“shock the conscience.”
“Rodgers is a crooked cop,” the
filing stated. “Despite decades of prosecutions of corrupt police officers in
our district, we are still faced with this recurring problem – one that, once
again, required the work of the FBI to flush out through undercover
recordings.”
In handing down the 5-year term
today, Durkin noted that the temptation for police officers to extort criminals
is great, and “people need to know they will go to jail” for doing it.
“The sentence here should serve
as a reminder that the penalty for shaking people down is not a slap on the
wrist,” Durkin said.
