Plain Dealer (Cleveland), Final Edition; West Edition
SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. A1
BYLINE: Joel Rutchick, Plain Dealer Reporter
Bratenahl, OH
Property room can’t account for years’ worth of seized drugs, weapons, money
Police chief responds
Bratenahl Police Chief Paul Falzone said most discrepancies in the property room are the result of poor record keeping. Falzone said he has “retooled” the property room to prevent future problems.
“We found out we had a problem,” Falzone said. “We fixed it.”
At least eight guns, thousands of dollars and large quantities of cocaine and heroin confiscated from suspects over the last decade are missing from the Bratenahl police property room, a Plain Dealer investigation has found.
The drugs and guns do not appear on property-room inventories. And there is no record the village disposed of the contraband, which would explain its disappearance.
In addition, there is no evidence that thousands of dollars in cash that police seized in drug-related crimes went into the village treasury, as required.
It is impossible to say definitively if anything else is missing because the evidence room log covering nearly five years also has disappeared. That log itemized contraband seized between 1999 and 2004.
The Plain Dealer identified some of what is missing through other records.
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation is probing the operation of the evidence room.
A federal expert in gun tracing called the Police Department’s apparent loss of confiscated weapons “a breach of public trust.”
“You trust the police department to take a gun that was involved in a crime off the street,” said Gerald Nunziato, a retired agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “It’s almost obscene. That gun was taken off the street and was then given a second chance.”
The disappearance of evidence could also jeopardize prosecutions, experts said.
“If anybody has made a mistake, it’s probably me for being too trusting. I got broad shoulders. I got to take the hit, right?”
Paul Falzone, Bratenahl police chief
The inventory lists more than 400 items, ranging from beer taken from teens to a machete and hand grenades. Most of the inventory consists of guns, ammunition, drugs and drug paraphernalia, such as crack pipes and rolling papers.
“Once the integrity of a property room has been proven to be suspect, then anybody who’s got a case is going to claim that it was baking powder that they were carrying” instead of cocaine, said Gordon Bowers, a Texas police chief and board member of the International Association for Property and Evidence.
Bratenahl Police Chief Paul Falzone, who has led the small department since 1994, defended the force. He said most discrepancies in the property room are the result of poor record keeping. Falzone said he has “retooled” the property room to prevent future problems.
“We found out we had a problem,” Falzone said. “We fixed it.”
In the last couple of years, the department has introduced a computerized evidence-tracking system and has created a backup to the evidence log. It also has restricted staff access to the evidence room.
Lots of problems for tiny village
Bratenahl is one of Northeast Ohio’s wealthiest communities, with mansions along the shores of Lake Erie. The village, with fewer than 1,500 residents, is surrounded by poorer, higher-crime neighborhoods. It also encompasses Interstate 90, where many of its arrests are made.
Citations for speeding and driving without a license sometimes turn into charges of carrying concealed weapons or drug trafficking and the confiscation of the drugs and weapons.
Last year, according to county records, judges issued more orders forfeiting contraband to Bratenahl than to authorities in Solon, Shaker Heights or Westlake, cities much larger than the village.
The small room that is the repository of this contraband has been poorly supervised, records show.
Bratenahl police:
– Did not inventory the contents of the property and evidence room for 13 years.
– Disposed of drugs once by flushing them down the toilet – contrary to the way most departments dispose of narcotics – and didn’t document where they came from.
– Claimed to have disposed of two guns by melting them, only to have the guns turn up again at the department.
– Waited a year before reporting that a gun the department seized was missing.
– Allowed an officer to apparently remove several guns from the property room.
– Allowed the entire staff access to a key to the property room, which is supposed to be secured. At times, the door was left unlocked.
Rare inventory raises questions
Problems with Bratenahl’s property room surfaced in 2007, when Sgt. Greg Barton went to transfer evidence to another police department. He realized the log he needed to sign, documenting the transfer, was missing.
Barton told Falzone. The chief directed Barton to start an investigation into the evidence book’s disappearance, as well as the disappearance of a semiautomatic Glock handgun from the evidence room.
As part of his investigation, records show, Barton discovered that Lt. Joseph Fischbach, who supervised the evidence room in 2005, returned several guns to the property room that were noted when another officer took over its supervision later that year. Among the guns returned was an antique Iver Johnson .38-caliber pistol.
Fischbach did not return calls seeking comment. It is unclear where Fischbach kept the guns before returning them to the evidence room.
Kevin Gaul, who supervised the property room for 11 years before retiring in 2005, also did not return calls seeking comment.
Falzone told The Plain Dealer he didn’t know anything about these guns and doesn’t remember getting Barton’s memo about the situation.
An inventory of the property room was done in late 2007, the first since 1994, Barton said in a memo. Falzone said he has “no clue” whether Barton’s statement is accurate.
The inventory lists more than 400 items, ranging from beer taken from teens to a machete and hand grenades. Most of the inventory consists of guns, ammunition, drugs and drug paraphernalia, such as crack pipes and rolling papers.
More significant is what is not on the inventory.
Consider the case of Javon Howard, charged with drugs and firearms offenses in 2002, and later convicted of drug trafficking. Bratenahl police seized several items from him, including a gun, ammunition, knife, brass knuckles, stun gun, bag of crack and large plastic bags containing more than 9 ounces of cocaine worth at least $6,000.
The 2007 evidence room inventory lists the gun and crack but does not mention any of the other contraband.
Missing drugs, money and guns
In a December 2007 memo to Falzone, Sgt. Charles F. LoBello, who was working with Barton, said he once witnessed another officer flushing drugs down the toilet in a second-floor restroom. Other officers also witnessed the drugs being flushed, LoBello wrote, but he could find no documentation of the evidence disposal.
The village produced no records in response to a Plain Dealer request seeking documentation of the disposal of drugs from any case. Falzone said that he believes drugs were destroyed but that those disposals were not documented.
Bratenahl’s disposal was far more lax than that of most police departments. Other departments obtain court approval to dispose of contraband, including drugs, and document the items being destroyed.
As part of his inventory, LoBello identified drugs or paraphernalia from nearly 50 confiscations between June 2004 and April 2006 that could not be accounted for, records show.
The village also could not account for cash seized from drug suspects. Police confiscated a total of $11,240 in three cases in 2002, 2003 and 2004, but Bratenahl could produce records showing that only $935 of that was received by the now-retired village clerk.
W. James Gallagher, the current clerk, said he believes the entire $11,240 made its way to the village treasury but that the deposits were entered improperly into the computer system.
Mayor John Licastro said it is an overstatement to say many of the property room items were missing. It is more likely they couldn’t be accounted for because of lapses in record keeping, he said.
The Plain Dealer has identified at least eight guns placed in the property room between 1993 and 2004 that appear to be missing. Records show these guns were confiscated by Bratenahl police, but they do not appear on a property room inventory or on a list of weapons that were destroyed.
These include two Glock pistols, highly valued on the streets because of their accuracy and ability to fire off several rounds in a few seconds.
Several of these guns, including a Browning 380 semiautomatic handgun, were confiscated in 1993 or 1994. Falzone offered what he said was a “plausible explanation” for the guns’ disappearance. Those weapons could have been included in a deal with a gun shop, in which the department swapped some old firearms for new 9 mm duty weapons, Falzone said.
Several Bratenahl officers said the gun swap happened years before Falzone’s tenure began. So those missing guns could not have been part of the trade with the gun shop, they said.
The only time Bratenahl is known to have destroyed guns since Falzone became chief was in 2006. These guns were incinerated at Mittal Steel.
But at least two guns included on the list to be melted turned up later at the Police Department.
Falzone acknowledged at the end of a long interview that he is ultimately responsible for years of property room mismanagement.
“If anybody has made a mistake, it’s probably me for being too trusting,” he said. “I got broad shoulders. I got to take the hit, right?”
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: jrutchic@plaind.com, 216-999-4829
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International Association for Property and Evidence
“Law Enforcement Serving the Needs of Law Enforcement”
www.IAPE.org
