The Kaz

The Times Union is reporting today that former Schenectady Police Chief Greg Kaczmarek will cop a plea Tuesday and be sentenced to two years in prison. (The hometown Gazette, where the business model is to keep those layoffs coming faster, missed the story.)
According to the TU, Kaczmarek and his wife Lisa "are expected to admit their roles in a drug ring that supplied Schenectady streets with cocaine and heroin, according to several people familiar with the terms of their plea-bargain negotiations."

Each will reportedly plead guilty to third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance, and Lisa will get a six-month sentence in county jail.

"Kaczmarek, 56, and his 48-year-old wife, could have faced up to 25 years in prison if convicted at trial of the top count in the indictment, conspiracy. Instead, with time off for good behavior, Kaczmarek could be out in 16 months and his wife could be released in just four months."
If the story is true, then the deal is a disgrace and a scandal, and I write that as a longtime defender of the Schenectady police force.

Kaczmarek, who allegedly decided to deal hard drugs as his post-retirement career, would get substantially less prison time than four officers prosecuted by the U.S. attorney's office when he was chief. Two of those men, Michael Hamilton and Nicola Messere, were in my view decent people and in some ways outstanding police officers. Hamilton made more arrests than anyone else on the force, and Messere once went into a burning building to rescue its inhabitants before the fire department arrived. They got too close to drug-addicted informants in the Wild West world of turn-of-the century Schenectady, where crime had spiraled upward and before the Metroplex Authority had done much to revive the downtown economy. And the U.S. attorney's office was as merciless to them as it was in 2006 to Mohammed Hossain and Yassin Aref, two nonterrorist Muslims who were prosecuted and convicted on weak evidence deriving from an FBI sting, and are now serving long prison terms.

I met Kaczmarek when he was chief, and he seemed a likable enough rough-and-ready guy, with an eccentric belief in the medical efficacy of magnets. When he was appointed to the top job in 1996, there were rumors about his past drug use. But there was a widespread assumption that if the rumors, which he denied, were true, they weren't that relevant, because he had moved on from a period of youthful indiscretion. I certainly couldn't have imagined that his life would play out the way it did.

The Schenectady Police Department has been plagued by scandal for many years, some of it real and some overblown. The Kaczmarek scandal is the worst of the lot, and it does not at all sound like this plea bargain  will do it justice.

Comments

[Joe Slomka]

Just goes to show you what connections and a high-priced lawyer can do. The other stiffs are all getting much longer sentences.