HEADLINE: EX-CITY WORKER DEFENDS NOVEMBER'S NO-SHOW 

A former Sebastian Police Department employee who failed to show for a violation of probation hearing in November said Monday he did not mean to be a no-show. 

Jay Neil Bennett told Circuit Judge Cynthia L. Cox he never received notice of the hearing in the mail. Cox's review of his court file confirmed Bennett had not received a hearing date the day his case was continued in September by Circuit Judge Larry Schack.

Bennett said he now lives in Cocoa Beach with his new wife and the notice of the next hearing was sent to his prior Vero Beach address.A bench warrant has been pending for Bennett's arrest since Nov. 19. 

Bennett said he was in a hospital from Dec. 15 to Jan. 2 and only recently learned he was wanted by the police from a newspaper clipping about the November hearing. 

The 50-year-old Bennett pleaded no contest in July 2000 to third-degree grand theft. The state alleged he stole almost $19,000 in cash from the Police Department's evidence locker while employed as a civilian communications technician and support services supervisor. 

The money had been stored after various seizures, including $13,000 police found in 1997 at a murder victim's home. The cash was to be returned to the victim's family. Bennett confessed to the theft and, in return for a promise to repay the funds, received a one-year suspended jail term and four years probation. 

In May, Bennett was arrested for violating his probation for failing to stay in contact with his probation officer and falling behind in his court-ordered restitution payments. The payments violation later was dropped, said Assistant State Attorney Jeff Battista. Bennett's public defender Cliff Barnes said his client's failure to show seemed not to be willful. 

Cox agreed and set aside the arrest warrant. She scheduled Bennett's final violation of probation hearing for March 7. 

HEADLINE: Police respond to city report 

AUDIT: A deputy police chief says it could take months to implement changes to the Arlington Police Department's property room that were recommended by a city report released Tuesday. 

ARLINGTON - Sergeants will help reduce a backlog of property being stored by Arlington police, and security will be bolstered in .an area where evidence, drugs and cash are kept, a deputy chief said Wednesday..The changes are in response to a report released Tuesday by city auditors, which characterizes the police property room as poorly managed, overcrowded and vulnerable to theft."We didn't get here overnight, and we're not going to get out overnight," 

Deputy Police Chief Larry Boyd said. "There is no doubt .we need to do a better job of managing what is going through the property room." 

Alan Levy, criminal division chief for the Tarrant County.District Attorney's Office, has said Arlington's property room.issues have not jeopardized any criminal cases. The majority of the property room backlog is believed to be linked to closed criminal cases, Arlington police spokesman Sgt. James Hawthorne said. But because the department lacks a comprehensive inventory list, police are unable to say how much property should be returned to owners, auctioned or disposed of. Sergeants who supervise detectives will be required to research those cases to determine what property can be removed, Boyd said. The city audit, conducted last year, cited 43 deficiencies. It recommends tighter controls over an area where drugs, cash and guns are stored, creation of a comprehensive inventory list and random drug-testing of property room employees. Chief Theron Bowman said Tuesday he is committed to resolving the issues raised in the report.

On Wednesday, police fixed a broken burglar alarm in the vault that stores drugs, cash and weapon's, Hawthorne said. It could take months to correct other property room deficiencies, Boyd said..Legal issues involving the collection and storage of evidence for criminal prosecution make it difficult to assign untrained personnel to work inside the property room.

Five civilian employees operate the property room, which is about .2,000 square feet in area and locked behind two doors. To preserve .the integrity of the evidence, no officers, including the chief, have access to the room.

About 1,600 items a month are processed into the property room, ranging from hair samples to big-screen televisions..Of 50 randomly selected items, city auditors found 44 were tied .to cases that are dismissed or closed.

"We need to focus our efforts, in the short-term, on determining what property can be returned from cases that have been adjudicated," Boyd said. "But there are times when cases are old, and we need to keep evidence for longer periods."

A new state law that allows for post-conviction DNA testing, effective last April, has made it nearly impossible for police to .discard property that contains biological evidence. And laws governing the holding of evidence contribute to the backlog, Arlington property room supervisor Greg Scarborough said. For example, property linked to forgery cases must be kept 10 years, and evidence tied to unsolved homicides must be kept indefinitely..He said some of the property kept by police could be† returned to .its owners if more people kept serial numbers of their valuables.."It's a very complicated issue," Scarborough said. "And it's a very time-consuming process to locate who owns this property once .the statute of limitations expires. When you're talking about keeping an item for 10 years, the person who owns it likely has .moved many times."

HEADLINE: Former Piketon police chief sentenced for theft 

DATELINE: PIKETON, Ohio 

A former police chief of this southern Ohio community has been sentenced to one year in prison for stealing money and drugs from his department. Nathaniel Todd Boothe pleaded no contest to charges that he took marijuana from the department's evidence room and smoked it in his office. He also admitted to stealing about $600 from a department drug-enforcement fund. He returned the money before he was charged with the crime. He was sentenced Jan. 30. 

Boothe's felony conviction for theft in office means he never can wear a police badge again, said Pike County Prosecutor Rob Junk. Boothe, 25, was chief in 1999 and 2000. He is one of several Piketon officers who have broken the law in recent years. 

In 1999, acting chief Timothy Blakeman and officer Jerry Seymour were indicted on felony charges of theft in office and receiving stolen property for allegedly stealing a light bar from a State Highway Patrol cruiser in 1998. They pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of obstructing official business and received suspended jail sentences. 

In 1987, Earl Johnson, another former chief, pleaded guilty to stealing $1,494 from the department. He was placed on probation and was ordered to repay the money. 

Also in 1987, former acting chief Richard "Pete" Blakeslee was found guilty of gross sexual imposition in a case involving a 9-year-old girl. He was sentenced to one year in prison, but was released on probation after three months. Piketon is about 60 miles south of Columbus. 

DATELINE: FORMAN, N.D. 

Money that disappeared from an evidence locker in the Sargent County sheriff's office probably was inadvertently thrown away, Sheriff Chuck Gates says. The $687 and other evidence from the same case probably was tossed last year, he said. 

It was to go to a woman who faced drug charges in Sargent County, Gates said. A judge ordered the money returned to her after he ruled there was not enough evidence to convict her of drug possession with intent to deliver. 

The woman asked for the money last fall, Gates said. "We went into the evidence locker to try to find it and couldn't find anything related to her case," he said. 

Gates said the money and other evidence might have gotten mixed in with evidence from an earlier unrelated case.

Bad news, good news 

HEADLINE: An audit of a property room finds widespread problems but demonstrates the integrity of the review process. 

It's difficult not to be disappointed with Arlington police after a scathing city audit that found multiple problems involving the property room. That's the downside. The upside was that if this particular audit is indicative of the thoroughness of such procedures, it bodes well for the general concept of accountability in local government. That which goes without inspection inevitably deteriorates, and this audit pulled no punches with the problems it found.

A police property room is used to store evidence, including guns, cash and drugs. Arlington's facility accepts an average of about 1,600 items a month - ranging from DNA samples to packets of cocaine - so its efficient maintenance is crucial to efficient prosecution of criminal cases.

The audit cited 43 deficiencies, including an inoperable burglar alarm that was supposed to be protecting the area where the aforementioned drugs, cash and guns are stored. The facility lacked a comprehensive inventory list, resulting in substantial quantities of materials being stored for cases that already had been closed. For example, of 50 randomly selected items, city auditors found that 44 were tied to cases that had been dismissed or closed. Not good, though at this juncture there's no evidence that any criminal prosecutions failed because of property room problems.

Police are working on resolution, though the backlog of problems is difficult because it wouldn't do to have officers who might be involved with cases actually working in the property room. The issue is sticky enough already without having defense attorneys bring up the possibility of evidence tampering or suddenly discovering evidence missing. But at least the audit process works. That's important, though clearly it's been an embarrassment to a department with a reputation for efficiency. 

DATELINE: PITTSBORO, N.C. 

Two FBI agents accompanied by a Chatham County commissioner confiscated a year of telephone recordings from the county's emergency dispatch center. 

The agents delivered a subpoena Wednesday for all recordings for incoming calls placed to the center between Sept. 1, 2000, and Sept. 1, 2001, emergency operations director Tony Tucker said. He was away from the center when the agents arrived. "Part of this stuff is public record; part of this stuff is confidential," Tucker said. 

The agents seized about 10 disks on which the recordings are stored, said Rick Givens, the county commissioner who accompanied the agents. They planned to make copies of the recordings to return to the center, which has been operated independently of the sheriff's office since Jan. 1. No one would say what prompted the confiscation. 

The FBI announced earlier this year that it had been investigating the September 2000 theft of 5,000 pounds of marijuana from the sheriff's office. A ton of the drugs had been buried at the county landfill and about 3,000 pounds were held in a surplus Army truck parked behind the department. The drugs had been seized in February 2000 during an undercover sting near Siler City. No charges have been filed in the marijuana thefts. 

"The stuff they told me I can't talk about," Givens said. "I know that (FBI agents) are looking very closely at the missing marijuana. They have been for a long time. " 

Givens said the agents called him Tuesday and asked him to accompany them to the center. They told him they wanted someone credible to expedite the process, he said. Givens said he did not know why agents told him to accompany them. 

Carl Fox, the district attorney for Orange and Chatham counties, said he knew nothing about the FBI agents' visit to the dispatch center. He said it was unusual to seize a year's worth of recorded communications. 

"They are not just looking at the tapes as evidence," Fox said. "It actually is going to be played probably in front of a federal grand jury. Someone intends to listen to it to determine whether it has some evidentiary value." The next federal grand jury for the Middle District in Greensboro is scheduled to meet Feb. 25. 

HEADLINE: Defenders Say Evidence Jeopardized Question missing items in 44 cases; capital case dismissal sought 

With two men charged and a new alarm system in place, the Sussex County prosecutors would seem to have put last year's four break-ins at their office behind them. That is not the case, though.

In two of the incidents, articles were removed from the evidence room and defense lawyers are questioning what evidence is missing and whether there was tampering with items since recovered.

The Public Defender's Office is seeking information on whether evidence is missing or has been altered in 44 cases. The public defenders' motion, in State v. Wingell, was filed Feb. 8 after they learned from prosecutors that cash recovered in the case was gone, along with taped witness statements. That was "the first report we got that acknowledged that there had been things taken," says Assistant Public Defender Kevin McLaughlin. His client, Peter Wingell, is charged with theft and parole violation. 

Last month, a defense attorney asked that an indictment be thrown out in a capital case, State v. Morales, because of missing evidence. Anthony Iacullo says he has been informed that photographs, taped witness statements and his client's Miranda waiver are missing.

Irwin Morales is accused of shooting Linda Wilson and dumping her body in a Sparta field in September 2000. On Jan. 10, Sussex County Assistant Prosecutor Michael Briegel gave notice he intends to seek the death penalty.

With the stakes so high, Iacullo, a partner with Montclair's Iacullo & Martino, wants to conduct his own accounting by comparing what's in the evidence room against the evidence log and police reports. Even where evidence has been recovered, chain-of-custody issues exist, he says, and physical evidence is crucial given the circumstantial nature of the case.

At the arraignment in January, Iacullo asked Superior Court Judge Peter Conforti to throw out the indictment because of the missing evidence. He has since written to the judge asking for time to complete his investigation before Conforti rules on the dismissal. Depending on what he finds, "the remedy will be dismissal of the indictment in its entirety or relief based upon what pieces of evidence are missing," says Iacullo, who will raise the issue at an appearance in early March.

Sussex County Prosecutor Dolores Blackburn says her office has been trying to determine what is missing or has been altered since after the first break-in on April 9. The office had to start again after a second break-in, which occurred on Nov. 5. Both times, the intruder got into the evidence room.

Two more break-ins followed, on Nov. 20 and Dec. 2, but the evidence area was not breached. Blackburn says investigators have been checking items against the evidence log and were finishing up that part of the effort last week. They will complete their comparison of evidence with evidence receipts in individual cases by the end of the month, she hopes. 

Four detectives have been working on the inventory in the past month. Blackburn has been sending defense attorneys reports only if a problem is discovered with their case. She says she expects that only about a dozen cases will be impacted and knows of none that would have to be dismissed.

The impact was minimal, Blackburn says, because a lot of evidence is kept by the police or is sent out for testing. Also, the intruder never got into the main repository - only the smaller, outer closet, where evidence is kept while being logged in or out or when it is about to be destroyed. 

Most of what was taken was drug evidence scheduled to be destroyed and money in the process of being returned to its owner. The owner has been repaid and Blackburn's office has filed an insurance claim for it. As for the photos and tapes missing in Morales and Wingell, backups or originals exist, she says. 

After the second break-in, the evidence locker got a better lock. And an alarm system was installed between the last two break-ins. Different windows were broken to gain access each time, and all have been replaced by Plexiglas.

A suspect apprehended nearby after the last break-in, Jeffrey Joice, is charged with commiting all four of them. A search of his Newton apartment in December recovered some of the stolen items, including a signed Devils' hockey puck and Beanie babies removed from prosecutors' desks, Blackburn says.

Joice is out on $75,000 bail. His brother, John, who shared the apartment, is charged in the first two break-ins but has not been arrested and his whereabouts are unknown, says Blackburn.Because her office is so involved in the case, Blackburn says the state is taking over the Joice prosecutions.

Though Blackburn has not yet thoroughly reviewed the public defenders' motion, most of the defendants named in it have pleaded out, had the charges dismissed for other reasons or been remanded to municipal court, or no evidence was held by the prosecutor at the time of the break-ins, Blackburn says.

On Feb. 11, a plea bargain was reached in Wingell. The terms were the same ones the prosecution offered in December. Based on the prosecutor's report on the missing evidence, McLaughlin says he "had a comfort level that plaintiff's case in chief was not seriously damaged." He says he has no doubt the prosecutor's office will provide reports in other cases, but "it is not enough to say your evidence was not impacted." 

Questions about recovered evidence are "ripe for litigation," says McLaughlin. He wants to know whether recovered items were compromised, opened or contaminated; whether seals were tampered with; and whether the quantities of drugs changed.

Where tampering is suspected, more testing might be needed, raising possible disputes about whether private defense counsel could recover the cost of such testing from the prosecution. The prosecution also bears the burden of proving the chain of custody, he notes. 

HEADLINE: Huntley cops to move out because of mold at station

The mold that has spread through the Huntley police station and chased the department away may have started in the evidence room, growing in a bag of marijuana, police say.

Although no one has gotten sick, tests that came back in January showed the old station on Dundee Road has widespread mold contamination, including a variety growing in the evidence room that is often referred to as toxic mold, stachybotrys. 

The cost of decontaminating the building was so high--estimated at $200,000--that Huntley decided to give up on the building altogether. It is leasing space for the Police Department at $68,000 a year until a new Village Hall is completed in about three years. The department's 23 officers and staff will move Wednesday to temporary quarters on Allison Court. "It apparently has something to do with the cannabis--the marijuana we store in there," Deputy Chief John Ciombor said. "That has a tendency to develop mold on it. And when you put that in a plastic bag and keep it in a dark place, it grows."

Since the station's mold problem was discovered last fall, the department has been keeping its marijuana evidence in paper wrapping instead of plastic baggies, Ciombor said.

Though marijuana is suspected of being the source of the potentially dangerous form of mold, it was not the only source of mold in the building, which the village bought for $170,545 in 1993. Moisture helped other species of mold grow in two interview rooms, an arrest room and on the windowsill of the chief's office.

The concentrations of mold--even in the evidence room, where the problem was the worst--have been "far below" the amount that has been suspected of causing problems elsewhere, according to an expert the village consulted about the problem.

Still, with concerns about mold and "sick building syndrome" gaining attention nationwide, village officials decided it best to move the department now rather than wait until the new station is ready. Officials haven't decided what to do with the old building, though they say it probably will be torn down.

"I think they're being very proactive," said David Fletcher, the specialist consulted by the village. "They're not burying their heads in the sand."

Fletcher, director of occupational and preventive medicine at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, reviewed the test results before recommending that police and staff "avoid occupancy of the evidence room because of the presence of the stachybotrys fungi." He plans to visit Huntley on Thursday for a closer look at the old station and to discuss with police and staff the health problems sometimes associated with mold.

In the past few years "toxic mold"--a popular term, not a medical one--has caused some families across the country to flee their homes. It closed schools, including St. Charles East High School in Kane County, where an $11 million cleanup is under way. Nationwide, mold has sparked lawsuits that snared millions of dollars. "There's been a lot of debate about what amounts of mold cause harm to humans," Fletcher said.

Experts said links between the toxins produced by some species of mold and various maladies often attributed to them haven't been proven. Things such as memory loss and pulmonary hemorrhage have been blamed on mold, but no scientific evidence has been found to prove a link. There is no test to reveal mold toxins in a person's system, which makes it difficult to show connections between the toxins and specific illnesses.

Nevertheless, mold has been shown to cause respiratory problems, and experts say people with asthma may be forced out of buildings where mold growth is excessive. Fletcher said molds pose the biggest threat to people with weakened immune systems.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has not set standards for acceptable amounts of molds. That makes it difficult for anyone to know when mold is a problem or whether razing a building where mold is growing is necessary. "We haven't overreacted," Huntley Village Manager Carl Tomaso said. 

HEADLINE: WHEN LOCAL OFFICIALS STEAL 

Experts say small towns need better ways to keep track of their money For nearly a year now, Maureen Colella has made a monthly payment to the Allegheny County Courts ranging from $300 to $340. To date, records show she has paid back $2,500 toward the thousands she owes to the taxpayers of Homestead and the Steel Valley School District.

The former tax collector, whom authorities accused of stealing more than $143,000, pleaded guilty last year and received 10 years probation and a court order to pay $76,862 in restitution, fines and costs. Colella is not alone. She is just one of several local officials and municipal employees recently caught up in theft scandals in which more than $1 million has been siphoned from the public trough. 

The most recent occurred earlier this month when Swissvale council President James Schlanger, 57, was charged with stealing $500 from a borough safe. His arrest came on the heals of accusations that longtime manager Thomas Esposito, who has since been fired, stole more than $842,000 from the borough over the past 12 years. In July, Pitcairn's part-time clerk, Toni Ciocco, was accused of embezzling $300,000 from the community's cable TV and electric company.

In nearby Edgewood, borough Manager Pete Messina, who also was the police chief, is accused of stealing at least $22,000 from the town, and in Wilkinsburg, former police Chief Gerald E. Brewer is accused of stealing several thousand dollars from an evidence room.

"It sounds like you've got an epidemic out there," said Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause, a Harrisburg-based public watchdog group. "Quite often what we see in these cases is that the arrogance level of people rises to the point they think to themselves, 'Who is going to catch me? Who is going to do anything to me?' "Often we see this in areas where the same family or the same social clique has run the town forever. Sometimes it does take some outside eyes to say, 'You are not serving the public very well.' Kauffman's opinion is shared by others.

Michael S. Foreman is a regional local government policy specialist for the state's Department of Community and Economic Development, and he works with local communities. Foreman said that such thefts can happen anywhere, but he's seen them most often in older, built up communities where outsiders are suspect and locals never dream they could be scammed by one of their own. But as Foreman points out, "Part of being a criminal is the ability to deceive and hide things," which is easier to do when people trust you. "It's the home boy mentality. The small town, hometown mentality. People think, 'Oh, he would never do that. Or so and so wouldn't do that to us,' " Foreman said.

In reality, though, those are often the very people who have the easiest access to money."They learn the weaknesses and the pitfalls [of the systems] and they exploit them," Foreman said.

In Pitcairn, for example, Ciocco was described universally as a nice person and good employee. No one gave it a second thought when she came and went from the borough building at odd hours. Her comings and goings, and what appeared to be a lifestyle more lavish then her income, ultimately raised the curiosity of former Pitcairn police Chief David B. McIntyre who suspected something was afoul. McIntyre, who is now the deputy director of the Allegheny County Police Academy, called in the district attorney's office and investigators soon discovered that thousands of dollars were missing. Investigators believe Ciocco would accept cash payments from residents who came to the borough to pay their electric or cable bills and pocket the money. She would make the cash receipts balance, then later alter a customer's computer billing record to reflect the bill had been paid. "There was no check and balance between the computer and cash register. They were checking the cash register receipts, but there was no bridge to the computer," McIntyre said. "We believe she was going in there at a later time and post-dating the entries." But while McIntyre's actions saved the borough, he got the sense that some people weren't happy with the investigation. "I was kind of surprised at the public reaction. I felt like I was the bad guy. They blamed me for bringing the DA in," he said.

In Swissvale, the borough's elected officials so trusted Esposito, they willingly signed blank checks for him and simply assumed he used them for the reasons he gave.

That, said Terry Kostoff, the state's deputy auditor general, is simply bad practice even though it may be easier in terms of facilitating borough business. "People not involved in auditing and finance sometimes don't understand the ramifications of what they're doing."

The biggest question, though, is how do the thefts happen? Why are those responsible generally able to carry our their activities for years? And who's watching the store? There are no easy answers, but in general, they occur when one person has access to money, and controls are not in place to oversee the accounting. And while communities must do annual audits, many times they are completed by elected auditors who simply review numbers given to them. Even communities that hire auditors often don't pay for a broad review. "Auditors audit the records they're being given, doctored or not," Foreman said. "They're not making a judgment on the veracity, the consistency and thoroughness of the information they're being given.' " More extensive fraud audits are rarely used by communities -- especially those short on funds -- and by the time they're commissioned, it's usually too late. Finally, experts say that even the best controls won't prevent someone from stealing.

"I'm not sure there are any mechanisms that will prevent intentional conduct," said John Contino, executive director of the state's Ethics Commission, the agency that often gets called to investigate such crimes.

Contino and others say the best defense against such crimes is a good offense. And that means putting controls in place, improving accounting systems and asking questions. As Common Cause's Kauffman said, "Democracy is not a spectator sport. If people ignore their governments, they will go to pot." Foreman agrees. "You need to put policies in place, not to target people, but to check the accounts," Foreman said. "We all trust each other. It's human nature. But the role of management is to oversee the activities of their employees. They should randomly check on the veracity of the records." The simplest measure any community can take is separating the accounting of money, making sure that the handling, custody, receipt and recording are assigned to different people where possible.

In other words, making sure the person collecting cash isn't the same person responsible for recording the amounts or later, for balancing the checkbook. Secondly, elected officials should have some idea of how much their community generally collects. For example, if the garbage fee usually generates $1,000 monthly, a red flag should go up if that number begins to fluctuate, experts said. What's more, elected officials should randomly sample the accounts and the transactions.

There's nothing wrong, Foreman said, with elected officials asking to see the transactions for a particular account for, say, a six-week period. Residents can help by paying for services with a check, or at least a money order.

In the Homestead case, for example, auditors found that nearly 50 percent of the taxpayers were paying their tax bills in cash, making it easy for Colella to take the money. And since she was dealing with the borough and the school district, in which the cash flow was constant, money from one account could easily replace that which was siphoned from another. Residents also should be sure to get a receipt from their borough any time they make a payment, and they should check to make sure the receipt accurately reflects what they've paid. They should keep the receipts for three years.

Finally, if they do have a problem, they should contact their community and if it isn't resolved quickly and efficiently, file complaints with superiors and elected officials and include documentation.

An occasional error, Foreman said, is understandable, but repeated complaints about an employee should raise suspicions. Finally, Foreman said, communities need to hire professional managers, people who have studied public administration and the management of public money. In other words, you must institutionalize positions such as borough manager or borough secretary, rather than hire someone who simply has been around the community since childhood. "You want to put good people in place who are apolitical," Foreman said. "They're not tagged. They're not tainted. They're nobody's boy or girl. They come in clean. That's the way they should be."