Original Article Police Squad on Infractions Stands Accused of the Same By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM Published: April 26, 2005 police captain and 10 supervisors and detectives under him who investigated the department's narcotics, vice and auto crime detectives have been brought up on disciplinary charges, police officials said yesterday. They are accused in some cases of the same kinds of abuses they were responsible for tracking among other officers. Advertisement The administrative charges against the captain, six supervisors and four detectives - virtually every member of the Organized Crime Control Bureau Investigations Unit - were brought after an audit of the group last June, one official said. The review compared E-ZPass records with payroll records, and found that some in the unit had made fraudulent overtime claims, coming to work late, leaving early and claiming to conduct surveillances of suspect officers that they never carried out, the officials said. The captain and some supervisors were accused of failing to properly oversee those under their command. The audit also found that the work done by members of the unit, who were responsible for investigating administrative violations and low-level misconduct by detectives in narcotics, auto crime and vice, was shoddy, the officials said. A review of the case folders in each investigation found that required work sometimes was never done, the officials said. Eleven of the 12 members of the unit were transferred shortly after the alleged improprieties were uncovered, and one detective was later fired, officials said. The captain, Dennis Gallagher, and one detective have retired after the departmental charges were brought, the officials said. Eight other supervisors and detectives still face such charges as part of the inquiry, which was reported yesterday in The New York Post. In an interview yesterday, Mr. Gallagher, who retired from the department in November rather than fight the charges, defended himself and his subordinates. He said they had carried out their responsibilities properly and were being blamed for the failings of the department's Internal Affairs Bureau, which investigates more serious accusations of misconduct and corruption. Paul J. Browne, the department's chief spokesman, said that the Internal Affairs Bureau had performed well, uncovering the problems in the investigations unit. "I.A.B. did its job," he said. Department officials said the audit was prompted in part by the November 2003 arrests of a detective from the elite Firearms Investigation Unit, part of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, and a retired colleague, officials said. Those two men robbed $169,000 from a drug courier, but they unwittingly selected a target who was delivering cash to an undercover detective posing as a money launderer. That case sparked a broad federal inquiry into police narcotics investigators in Upper Manhattan, which at the time was the department's worst scandal in a decade and led to increased scrutiny of the Organized Crime Control Bureau. Police officials also said that another factor that led to the audit of the Investigations Unit was a flood of fake overtime claims by detectives assigned to the Brooklyn South Narcotics Squad. Roughly 75 members of that unit were eventually accused of falsifying overtime claims. But Mr. Gallagher said that it was his unit that uncovered the first few cases of abuses there, an investigation his unit chose to open in 2002 because of the high overtime figures for Brooklyn South. He said that the case was later taken over by Internal Affairs because his small staff could not review so many E-ZPass records. "If it wasn't for the action of the people in my command, it never would have happened," he said of that case. "It's somewhat ironic that people in my command - myself included - are now the bad guys." He said that he had sought more staff members for the unit, but that his pleas had gone unheeded. The Organized Crime Control Bureau Investigations Unit has tripled in size since he was forced out, he said. The question of false overtime claims has caused friction between the department and the Mayor's Commission to Combat Police Corruption. The commission has sought information about such cases, but the department contends that because false overtime claims do not constitute corruption, they are beyond the panel's mandate.