Albany

The State Police kept secret an evidence-handling scandal that erupted in 2011 at a bustling barracks in Westchester County in which drugs and other evidence were lost, leading to botched prosecutions, the retirement of two senior investigators and the forced resignation of a trooper accused of lying to internal affairs investigators.

The only person arrested in the investigation was a nurse who is married to a former senior investigator.

She was implicated for forging dozens of prescriptions for painkillers as her husband, who abruptly retired, was a target in the theft of similar drugs from an evidence locker.

The agency, through a spokesperson, denied that any drug evidence was lost even though records obtained by the Times Union indicate otherwise. A spokesperson for the Westchester County district attorney, Janet DiFiore, ignored requests for comment.

A Times Union examination of the case found significant amounts of evidence, including cocaine, marijuana and prescription painkillers, were lost or stolen. The review also shows that State Police supervisors were never punished, and actually promoted, despite allowing years of severe mismanagement at the Troop K barracks.

The internal scandal came on the heels of a tumultuous period in State Police history, when allegations of a "rogue unit" were probed by then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

No such unit existed.

Rather, the operations of Troop K, which has jurisdiction from Westchester to Columbia counties, were tainted by current and former members who became embroiled in the politicization of the agency.

The missing evidence triggered an intensive two-year internal investigation that began in the summer of 2011 and prompted the State Police to rescind arrest warrants and, in a smattering of cases, to privately urge the Westchester County district attorney's office to vacate prosecutions.

The evidence problems in Troop K unfolded 17 years after the worst scandal in the agency's history when an investigation showed that State Police had fabricated evidence, including planting fingerprints, in criminal cases across the southern tier of New York in Troop C.

In January, the State Police refused to disclose any records on their internal investigation of Troop K in response to a Freedom of Information Law request filed last summer by the Times Union. In February, following an appeal by the newspaper, the agency still withheld numerous documents and released only a heavily redacted audit of the troubled Bureau of Criminal Investigation barracks in the hamlet of Hawthorne, a few miles north of White Plains.

Court records and internal State Police documents obtained from confidential sources, including a second audit that the State Police did not acknowledge even existed, indicate the investigation never determined who was responsible for the missing evidence, including nearly five ounces of cocaine. The Times Union also obtained a complete copy of the audit that State Police heavily redacted before releasing it under an appeal by the newspaper.

The information blacked out by the agency includes a full-page summary of the audit that laid blame on a former State Police senior investigator, Robert C. Bennett, who filed for an early retirement at age 42 when the scandal erupted three years ago. "In far too many cases, errors should have been detected and corrected at this level," the audit states. "Former Senior Investigator Bennett was allowed to ignore his supervisory responsibilities and to actively mismanage his operation at SP Hawthorne. ... This led to ... backlogs of evidence at the station and troop level."

Bennett, now 45, declined comment for this story. An internal affairs summary from March 2012 said Bennett was "a target in the missing evidence case" involving 98 Oxycodone pills. It was the discovery of that missing evidence that triggered the broader internal investigation.

Bennett's wife, Erin, 42, a licensed practical nurse, was arrested in September 2011 and charged in Poughkeepsie Town Court with two felonies for forging prescriptions for painkillers. She later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor forgery charge; last year her conviction was reduced to a charge of disorderly conduct, according to her attorney.

Dutchess County prosecutors declined to discuss Erin Bennett's case. The state Education Department, which regulates nurses, filed no disciplinary action and also declined comment.

Glen Plotsky, an Orange County attorney who represented Erin Bennett in the criminal case, said prosecutors told her she could have faced 75 felony counts of forgery because of the high number of prescriptions involved. Still, Erin Bennett, who had no documented history of drug abuse, was the only person to face criminal charges from the fallout of a wide-reaching internal State Police investigation into missing evidence.

"From my point of view they tried really hard to try to pin the end result — missing cases — on someone and, ultimately, I don't believe that they were able to come up with any evidence or at least not sufficient evidence to result in criminal charges against anybody directly involved in law enforcement," said Plotsky, who also represented several investigators during the internal probe.

Matthew J. Laspisa, a senior investigator who was assigned to the Hawthorne barracks in August 2011, as the missing-evidence case began, described the station as being "in a total state of disarray" in an internal memo obtained by the Times Union.

"Case folders were scattered about the Senior's office, some were thrown in no specific order in various file cabinets, and case files for the entire 2008 year were stacked in random order on a table top in the southeast corner of the squad room," Laspisa wrote in an April 2012 memo to an internal affairs staff inspector, Mark Smith.

Two former State Police members who faced disciplinary charges in the case, Trooper Seamus A. Lyons — no relation to the author of this story — and Senior Investigator Noel N.J. Nelson, have filed complaints with the state Division of Human Rights alleging they were the scapegoats in a larger scandal. Lyons also has filed a petition in state Supreme Court in Albany seeking back pay and reinstatement to his job. Records in his case indicate he was forced to resign last year when a State Police supervisor handed him a three-page termination letter signed by Superintendent Joseph D'Amico, telling him to resign or be fired.

Neither Lyons nor Nelson worked at the Hawthorne station. The disciplinary charges filed against them accused them of lying to internal affairs investigators about their delivery of cocaine and marijuana evidence from a laboratory to an evidence locker at the Hawthorne barracks in 2011.

State Police officials said there were no electronic records to support the troopers' claim that they brought the drugs to the station and left them in an open evidence locker in the presence of multiple BCI investigators.

Terrence P. Dwyer, a Poughkeepsie attorney who represents Lyons in his court case and Nelson in his human rights complaint, said neither was accused of taking the evidence, which was never found. State Police alleged they lied about making two stops on their delivery mission — one to interview a grand larceny suspect and a second stop at a pie stand. Dwyer said the State Police case against the pair was full of holes and that they were being punished for failing to remember the details of an on-duty assignment 14 months before they were interviewed by internal affairs investigators.

D'Amico, who was appointed State Police superintendent by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in January 2011, and Anthony G. Ellis, a former deputy superintendent for internal affairs, were among the witnesses who recently testified at a closed hearing in Nelson's case before the state Division of Human Rights.

Nelson retired in May 2013, two months after he was served with disciplinary charges. Lyons quit that same month, after he was allowed to view, but not keep, a copy of a termination notice signed by D'Amico.

"Trooper Lyons' repeated failure to be truthful during an Internal Affairs Bureau investigation into missing drug evidence ... demonstrate(s) that he lacks the veracity, judgment and moral integrity needed by someone who possesses the police power of this state," D'Amico's letter stated.

Dwyer said his clients "were expendable to the State Police and I certainly felt that the State Police viewed them as being disposable items to cover the scandal."

"They've got missing drugs out of there, they've got missing guns," Dwyer continued. "They've been scrambling after the last two years. Their own audit showed at any one point in time two percent of the evidence was missing."

Dwyer said he had discussed with his clients going public but collectively they decided against it. He said he was surprised when the Times Union contacted him.

Despite the superintendent's written acknowledgement of "missing drug evidence," a spokesperson for the agency last week responded "none" when asked if any drugs were found to be missing.

Court records indicate State Police attorneys declined to disclose a copy of the State Police superintendent's three-page termination letter that was shown to Lyons on the day he resigned. Agency lawyers claimed the decision was not a "final determination" even though D'Amico had signed it.

It was filed in court from a photo Lyons took of the letter when he was left alone to review it in a room at a State Police barracks.

In a January decision, acting Supreme Court Justice Henry F. Zwack upheld Lyons' petition and referred it to an appellate court for review. The judge also addressed the refusal of State Police to disclose D'Amico's termination letter.

"The (termination letter) itself is undated, but it is signed by Joseph D'Amico," Zwack wrote. "The fact that (State Police) respondents did not offer the document and alleged that the superintendent 'refrained from making a final determination' is disturbing."

blyons@timesunion.com • 518-454-5547 • @blyonswriter