Someone with the right connections could mouth off to a Bronx cop in a traffic stop — and still make their ticket disappear.
Lawyers brought out such a story today in Bronx Supreme Court, with testimony from Officer Harrington Marshall and transcripts of secretly recorded conversations made by probers in the ticket fixing scandal.
In late March or early April 2010, the nephew of a Bronx-based police sergeant zoomed by a Highway Patrol car.
The patrol officer pulled over the sergeant’s nephew, named in a call recorded on April 11, 2010 as John Van Gaglia.
Van Gaglia "gave him a hard time," an officer identified in the transcript as Pat related to Joe Anthony, a Bronx PBA trustee caught up in the ticket fix probe.
"Number one, he almost — he tried to hit his car, almost hit his car," said Pat. "But he jetted, on the road. He tried to squeeze by."
Then, said Pat, Van Gaglia "gave him a lot of f—-ing mouth."
The Highway Patrol officer turned in the ticket — and resisted efforts to make it go away.
In the transcript, Anthony seems to back up the Highway Patrol cop’s push to bring the ticket to court. "I don’t’ expect anybody to take s—- from anybody," he told Pat.
But Marshall said on the witness stand today that he was able to persuade the unidentified Highway Patrol cop to drop the case.
Asked in court if he felt it was wrong to fix tickets in such a manner, Marshall said:
"It’s a professional courtesy — just like you as a lawyer are extended professional courtesies from other lawyers, and people in every occupation are extended professional courtesies."
Marshall said he is cooperating with the Bronx DA’s office in return for immunity from prosecution in the scandal, which is now before a grand jury.
He testified in the drunken driving case of Stephen LoPresti, a former Bronx assistant DA. Defense lawyers hope that Marshall’s alleged involvement in fixing tickets will diminish his credibility as a witness against LoPresti.
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