Poor Mojo's Newswire

A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas. The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup. Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as "flaking," on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low. . . . "Did you observe with some frequency this ... practice which is taking someone who was seemingly not guilty of a crime and laying the drugs on them?" Justice Gustin Reichbach asked Anderson. "Yes, multiple times," he replied. The judge pressed Anderson on whether he ever gave a thought to the damage he was inflicting on the innocent. "It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators," he said. "It's almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they're going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway." The city paid $300,000 to settle a false arrest suit by Jose Colon and his brother Maximo, who were falsely arrested by Anderson and Tavarez. A surveillance tape inside the bar showed they had been framed. A federal judge presiding over the suit said the NYPD's plagued by "widespread falsification" by arresting officers.

. . . The story begins almost a decade ago, long before Meredith Kercher's murder, when the pubblico ministero (public prosecutor) of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini, opened an investigation into the mysterious death of a doctor whose body was found floating in Lake Trasimeno in 1985. Mignini believed the doctor was connected to a satanic sect, which had murdered him because he was about to go to the police and reveal its many crimes. Mignini believed this shadowy cult was connected to infamous murders committed by a serial killer known only as the Monster of Florence. The Monster shot and mutilated young lovers in the hills of Florence between 1974 and 1985. He was Italy's Jack the Ripper, and the case of the Monster had become one of the longest and most expensive criminal investigations in Italian history. It has never been solved. (The full story is recounted in a book I wrote with the Italian journalist, Mario Spezi, The Monster of Florence.) Mignini theorised that this satanic cult consisted of powerful people – noblemen, pharmacists, journalists, and freemasons – who ordered the Monster killings because they needed female body parts to use as the blasphemous wafer in their black masses. Putting himself in charge of the investigation, Mignini became so obsessed that he crossed the line of legality, wiretapping journalists and conducting illegal investigations of newspapers. He was indicted for these and other crimes, including "abuso d'ufficio", abuse of office, in 2006. One prosecutor said he was a man "in prey to a kind of delirium". Then, in 2007, came the murder of Meredith Kercher. Mignini took up the case with a vengeance. He and the entire Perugian power establishment, who approved various stages in the investigation and subsequent arrests, rushed to judgment. Believing that Knox's behaviour after the killing was less than normal, they hauled her in for a gruelling and possibly abusive 14-hour interrogation and extracted a compromising statement from her. That was enough. They held a huge press conference, at which the chief of police of Perugia announced that they had identified the killers: Knox, her boyfriend Sollecito, and a third individual, Patrick Lumumba. Caso chiuso, they said. Case closed. . . .