SPRINGFIELD -- As the two-year mark nears of a former narcotics detective laying waste to the Springfield Police Department's credibility, there have been no criminal or civil rights charges filed, and no firings.

But, there's still plenty of finger-pointing going on.

The "Bigda" and "Nathan Bill's" investigations are now separately in the hands of the U.S. Department of Justice and attorney general's office, respectively.

Newly uncovered emails obtained by The Republican show many high-ranking officers were taking cover when the two scandals became public nearly simultaneously in late 2016.

The probes remain an Achilles' heel for the department and Police Commissioner John Barbieri. The emails show the investigations also caused rifts in the police department's upper ranks.

The Bigda case refers to Officer Gregg Bigda, a former narcotics detective who went rogue during a 2016 interrogation of two Latino juvenile suspects, threatening to brutalize one and plant drug evidence on another. The grilling was caught on police video, but only made public months later.

Bigda was suspended for 60 days but is now a candidate for a promotion to sergeant, despite a chorus of calls for his firing by elected officials and activists when the footage was made public by The Republican. The videos also prompted judges to throw out dozens of drug prosecutions since Bigda's sullied credibility as a key witness cast a pall over entire investigations.

Barbieri has defended keeping Bigda on the payroll, citing contractual and civil service barriers.

The Nathan Bill's case involves a bar brawl in 2015 that allegedly pitted four off-duty cops against a group of bar patrons after the popular East Forest Park hang-out closed. That case has languished with no discipline nor criminal charges after the FBI and state Attorney General's office took it over last year. The matter is subject to a state grand jury investigation now.

Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni last February vented frustration over passing on prosecuting the Nathan Bill's case on behalf of the alleged victims. Witness testimony was inconsistent and the officers involved in the case took the Fifth, exercising their rights not to incriminate themselves.

"Let me be absolutely clear to you. I am frustrated," Gulluni told MassLive last February, adding that he believed the civilians involved in the fight were victims.

The Bigda investigation has gone quiet since the FBI announced that agency was taking it over last year.

Internal squabbling over those cases preceded the retirements of Sgt. William Andrew and Capt. Larry Brown, both former internal affairs investigators.

The deputy chief who oversaw that unit also subsequently retired. Brown and Andrew recently granted their first public interviews to MassLive and The Republican, expressing dismay over becoming what they perceived as scapegoats for higher-ups.

Indeed, an Oct. 18, 2016, email sent by Deputy Chief Mark Anthony to Barbieri aimed stinging criticism at the Internal Investigations Unit (IIU).

"We need to take a hard look at personnel ... Larry Brown told me he only started really reviewing the investigation after the Andrew ball drop in Bigda tapes. No matter what he told Andrew on the tapes, he did not follow up. Unacceptable. Our IIU is our firewall and it has been breached and decisive action needs to take place," Anthony wrote.

That email was triggered by a message from Barbieri about an hour earlier that reads:

"Know it's crazy there - thanks again for taking the helm and keeping us afloat - I am back at my desk Friday so you are good to go for your much needed day off ..."

The exchange occurred just weeks after news of the Bigda videos broke publicly and two days after the first story on the Nathan Bill's investigation was published on MassLive.

Two months later, the police department began soliciting bids for an outside consultant to evaluate the IIU, sparking apparent anger from Brown, according to email exchanges. He and retired Deputy Chief Robert Cheetham convinced Barbieri to take the unusual step of issuing a public statement gushing over Brown and his tenure with the department.

From a Dec. 3, 2016, exchange between Cheetham and Barbieri:

"You know that one of the reasons Larry is so angry and hurt, but he won't admit the hurt part, is that he really went to the black community vouching for you and what he said was your honest administration of the SPD. He had no problems being dragged out to meetings, even though sometimes the main reason was his race, because he believed in the cause," Cheetham wrote to the commissioner.

"He really was planning on talking to you before he retired about issues with some personal (sic) that he thought were hurting you and your administration. He has pure intentions which is rare in our business and even rarer after 37 years. He is a proud man, for good reason, and he is hurt and embarrassed," the email continued.

Cheetham sent the message in response to a draft of a two-page homage to Brown's integrity, noting that Brown was only "administratively" in command of IIU.

"I am planning to have Marion Sullivan (Mayor Domenic Sarno's press aide) blast it out from the mayor's office and putting it on our Facebook page," Barbieri said in response to Cheetham's request for a full-fledged press conference. "I am going to talk to the mayor about doing a short comment on it ... I am just worried because I am limited in my ability to comment to questions because of the investigation."

Barbieri did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The Brown tribute was sent to local media outlets on Dec. 13, 2016. Brown retired three months later. He initially declined to comment on either the statement or his retirement but conceded to an interview nearly a year later.

Brown says he wasn't really in charge of IIU at all, although an organizational chart shows Cheetham was the deputy for the unit, and Brown as a captain under him. It's a puzzling argument, but the argument apparently worked for Barbieri, according to Brown.

"Initially, I was going to get retrained," Brown said, referring to a minor disciplinary measure employed by the department, which can range from a brief talking-to to formal training.

"I convinced them that I wasn't in charge of the IIU. They kind of saw things my way ... and at my suggestion, I wanted to clean up my reputation," Brown said. "I could live with being wrong. I just can't live with being lied about."

Brown argues that while he was technically in the chain of command for IIU, he was not involved in day-to-day investigations.

Before Andrew's retirement in May, he was among three sergeants in charge of investigating IIU complaints. The required sign-offs on all IIU reports were the captains who supervised the targets of each probe, then the respective deputy, then the commissioner, who orders all internal investigations.

One day before Anthony's Oct. 18, 2016, email to Barbieri, the deputy also blasted the IIU for not "watching their own store" and a week later criticized the Hampden District Attorney's office for dragging its feet on the Nathan Bill's criminal investigation.

That office, in turn, pointed the finger at Brown for holding it up with the IIU investigation, which Brown denied.

Meanwhile, in an email from Barbieri to Cheetham on Oct. 29, 2016, the commissioner tried his hand at diplomacy.

"We have a great team and this will pass," Barbieri wrote.

The Bigda fiasco started with a pizza run on Feb. 26, 2016. Bigda's onetime colleague, Steven Vigneault, left his undercover car running outside a restaurant on Worthington Street that night. At least three youths allegedly hopped in it and took off. As Vigneault, Bigda and fellow detectives seethed back at police headquarters, a call came in over the police scanner.

Police in Wilbraham spotted the car and chased it into Palmer, where officers from that town also joined the pursuit, according to police records. The Springfield detectives showed up in that town -- uninvited but with the blessing of Capt. Rupert Daniel -- to "assist" in the arrests of the boys.

A Wilbraham patrolman later filed an excessive force complaint against an unnamed Springfield detective, alleging that detective kicked a suspect in the face while he was on the ground and in handcuffs. The Wilbraham patrolman said he wasn't able to identify who the detective was.

Vigneault ultimately resigned over the matter, but said he was tricked into resigning by Barbieri and filed a whistleblower lawsuit in Hampden Superior Court. That case is pending. He has denied assaulting any of the suspects.

The alleged car thieves also were the subjects Bigda threatened while they were being processed and held at the Palmer Police Department in the early morning hours of Feb. 27.

For his part, Andrew worked both the Nathan Bill's case and the Palmer case from an internal affairs angle.

The Palmer investigation was ultimately labeled "the kick" internally, Andrew said.

Andrew said he stumbled across the Bigda footage from the cell blocks while investigating "the kick."

Troubled by the video, Andrew raised the issue with Brown and the captain told Andrew to make a note in his final report. Andrew also included copies of all video footage related to the investigation in a sleeve in a report binder.

"It was all right there in front of them," Andrew said.

Brown said he regarded Bigda's treatment of the boys as empty threats.

"Most officers would look at that video and see it's just bravado," Brown said. "I mean, it's bad, don't get me wrong. It's bad enough that Bigda threatened the boys ... If he hadn't threatened to plant evidence on them ... that's like, 1950s."

But, the thing is, Bigda did.

Andrew concedes that he did not specifically say there was video of Bigda threatening the boys in the cell blocks, but instead made a general notation citing "booking videos" in his report.

"I own that. That's on me," Andrew said during a separate interview. He thought telling his captain was enough, he said.

When asked why he didn't make more noise over the Bigda issue dying on the vine internally, Andrew said: "I was a sergeant. (Brown) was a captain. He was breathing different air than me."

He said Bigda's antics in the videos "didn't sit well with him," even as a veteran officer. Bigda was joined in the cell blocks by his then-partner, Luke Cournoyer, who remains in the narcotics unit.

"You can lean on people a little bit, but this isn't the way you're supposed to interview people ... especially kids. When he starts threatening that he's gonna kill them or plant drugs on them," Andrew said, trailing off and shaking his head.

The boys - who have not been identified because they were juveniles at the time of their arrests - never filed complaints against any police officer. Nor have they filed lawsuits. The dispositions of their criminal cases are unknown because juvenile court proceedings and records are not public.

Andrew said he was "retrained" by his superiors about being more specific in his reports and was the only one disciplined over the Bigda matter -- aside from Bigda.

"I'm the only one who sounded an alarm, and I'm the one who ended up with a letter in my file? How is that right?" Andrew asked. "I believe the reason I was retrained is because they had to hang this around somebody's neck ... instead of making Barbieri look bad."

During his interview, Brown said he agreed Andrew had been treated unfairly.

"I didn't agree with it because he worked hard and he's dedicated," said Brown, who successfully argued to Cheetham and Barbieri to have a similar "retraining" letter over the Bigda matter banished from his own file.

Cheetham changed the language in a note to Barbieri to "instructed," records show.

Brown said that he wasn't asked by his superiors to sign off on IIU reports or investigations until after the Bigda videos publicly blew up.

"I was not in charge of IIU," Brown insisted. "I stopped in there a couple of times a week, to see if there were any problems or questions. They were based on Maple Street and I was at Pearl Street (police headquarters). I asked to be transferred to Maple Street twice, and was denied."

Andrew said, despite the geography, he always believed Brown was his boss.

"I'll go to my grave believing Larry Brown was in charge of IIU," said Andrew, who has moved to Florida since his retirement.

Ryan Walsh, a spokesman for Barbieri, this week affirmed that Brown had "administrative oversight" of IIU, and reported to Cheetham before their retirements.

Cheetham could not be reached for comment.

Anthony, on the other hand, was available for comment and issued a lengthy statement in response to a reporter's questions.

"When the (Palmer) IIU investigation was completed by the investigator and reviewed by his supervisors it followed the normal course of action for review. It went to the Community Police Hearing Board for their recommendation, then it went to Capt. Daniel because (those detectives) worked for him in the Narcotics Unit and then it went to me as Capt. Daniel reported to me," the statement read, in part.

"I reviewed the written investigative report. Sgt. Andrew never referred to or noted any 'cell block video', any 'cell block interrogations' or the fact that Gregg Bigda threatened juveniles in the cell block at the Palmer Police Dept. in his report," it continued.

Anthony said he recommended a review of the kicking investigation by state police or the Department of Justice, which is supported by a June 29, 2016, report.

Daniel, Anthony and Barbieri all recommended a full vetting by the Community Police Hearing Board, a civilian oversight board run by mayoral appointees. They made their recommendations independently, Anthony said.

"A criminal investigation should be conducted by (state police) or DOJ as this is a very serious allegation that, if true, has major ramifications for this department and community," Anthony wrote in his notes from 2016.

Documents obtained by The Republican indicate Andrew's review was completed on June 16, 2016, three months after the complaint was filed by the Wilbraham Police Department. The case underwent an initial review by the civilian board four days after that. The panel recommended a full hearing.

"Were there any deficiencies found in the IIU investigation?" the case review form asked.

"None," a member wrote.

Vigneault's resignation is still being reviewed in city labor hearings.

Back on Oct. 29, 2016, Barbieri appeared to gingerly address the swelling storm over department brass missing the Bigda videos.

"I know this is the first time that we've had a slip up like this and I know that the major focus was on the assault (alleged kick) but we have to ensure that we do the best we can so that there is no reoccurrence (sic) ... Also thank you for being so responsive on a Saturday morning! Our jobs are definitely a blessing and a curse!" the commissioner wrote to Cheetham before 8 a.m. that morning.

And the night before:

"We need to look at IIU tracking software that we talked about before - it is imperative that we get a better handle on tracking (and) reviewing the cases. We have to step up our game and show that we are plugging any holes on that side," Barbieri wrote.

The city recently hired an outside consultant for $130,000 to review the police department's IIU policies and practices. The software has not yet been installed.

Andrew said he believes the commissioner attempts to sidestep uncomfortable disciplinary decisions whenever he can. The retiree has refused to testify before the civilian board on the Nathan Bill's case after he became soured by the department's handling of it and the Bigda controversy.

"I don't think anyone wants to be held responsible for anything. I don't think the commissioner wants to hurt anybody, and in a way I get that. But at the same time, I think that really tarnishes the city and tarnishes the department. And I think that's shameful," Andrew said.