Eideard

Commissioner Ray Kelly, Chief Charles Campisi – ultimately responsible

Seven narcotics investigators are convicted of planting drugs on people to meet arrest quotas. Eight current and former patrol officers are charged with smuggling guns into the state. Another is charged with making a false arrest, apparently as a favor for his cousin. Three more are convicted of robbing a perfume warehouse.

All these cases involved New York City police officers and unfolded or were resolved in recent months. But beyond the fact of criminal charges against those sworn to protect the public, they all had another thing in common: Each case was uncovered by an outside agency, not the Internal Affairs Bureau of the New York Police Department, the unit responsible for unearthing and investigating officers’ wrongdoing.

This spate of unrelated corruption prosecutions, and what some see as the Internal Affairs Bureau’s spotty record of uncovering major cases involving crooked officers, raise questions about the department’s ability to police itself, said nearly a dozen current and former prosecutors who have handled corruption cases, as well as some current and former Internal Affairs supervisors and investigators.

Several of them blamed a lack of effective outside oversight of the department’s anticorruption program, characterizing the monitoring as weak at best in recent years, with monitors having neither the political will to press the department nor support from City Hall. They also cited low starting salaries for new officers, poor morale, recruits drawn from a smaller pool of qualified candidates and a hidebound Internal Affairs Bureau bureaucracy.

RTFA. If you’re as cynical as I am, there will be no surprises. You might have expected better from one of the best police departments in the country – or experience may have suggested to you that coppers, today, sometimes join the force as just another kind of civil service gig. And they spend their time staying out of the way of trouble – or looking for a take.

Doesn’t have to be that way, of course. I had kin in the NYPD. They were honest and hard-working. They also knew officers who weren’t. Cripes, I had one co-worker join the force in a major Connecticut city – he told me it was a guarantee he could get drugs for free.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have dropped their criminal investigation into Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, once the nation’s largest mortgage lender…

The closure of the case after two years of inquiry follows last October’s settlement by Mr. Mozilo of insider trading allegations made by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Regulators had contended that Mr. Mozilo sold $140 million in Countrywide stock between 2006 and 2007 even as he recognized that his company was faltering. Countrywide and Bank of America paid $45 million of Mr. Mozilo’s $67.5 million settlement, and he was responsible for the rest.

Without admitting or denying wrongdoing, Mr. Mozilo agreed to be banned from serving as an officer or a director of a public company.

The conclusion by prosecutors that Mr. Mozilo, 72, did not engage in criminal conduct while directing Countrywide will likely fuel broad concerns that few high-level executives of financial companies are being held accountable for the actions that led to the financial crisis of 2008.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost by investors while millions of borrowers have lost their homes. Few of the people who ran the institutions that contributed to the disaster have been found liable…

Even as criminal and civil prosecutors are closing investigations into financial executives, private litigation is swelling. Investors who purchased dubious mortgage securities are bringing a wide array of cases against mortgage lenders and the Wall Street firms that enabled them. These investors maintain, citing internal documents and e-mails, that those putting together mortgage securities knew that they contained problematic loans that would likely fail…

In his years at Countrywide, Mr. Mozilo became one of the highest-paid executives in America. From 2000 until 2008, when he left, Mr. Mozilo received total compensation of $521.5 million…

Mozilo received a pat on the butt and wall-to-wall money from Bank of America on his departure. A historically criminal act even if the Department of Justice and the SEC feel successful prosecution at this time is unlikely. The operative phrase being “at this time”.

As civil cases proceed, the Feds retain the right to acquire information from those lawsuits to predicate future criminal prosecution against this creep. Still, it’s a sad day when the attitudes, premises and culture of American jurisprudence continues to bend over backwards to avoid criminal proceedings against the greedy bastards who brought down this economic house of cards.

Justice Department lawyers and investigators have come under more scrutiny after the Sept. 11 attacks than at perhaps any time since Watergate…But the internal unit that polices the lawyers’ conduct has been operating under a growing shroud of secrecy, shutting down what were once regular, public disclosures about its activities…

Officials have declined to say whether even one government lawyer has been found to have engaged in professional misconduct in connection with the war on terrorism — despite often fierce criticism from civil liberties groups, defense lawyers and judges.

After President Bush took office in 2001, the Justice Department reversed a decade-old policy of publicly disclosing detailed summaries of OPR investigations of department lawyers found to have committed professional misconduct.

The OPR also has been far behind in producing required annual public reports summarizing its activities. Last month, it released its report covering fiscal year 2005. That means many investigations undertaken during the tenure of former Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales remain under wraps.

Some legal experts say there is an impression that the Justice Department is hiding something.

How could you think such a thing about the chunk of our government concerned with justice?

I know. I know. How could you think any part of the Bush Administration is concerned with justice, legality or ethics?