City's No. 3 cop leaving for job in NYC

10/09/2007

City’s No. 3 cop leaving for job in NYC

William Kaempffer , Register Staff

NEW HAVEN — The third highest ranking officer in the Police Department will retire to become the chief investigator with New York City’s Business Integrity Commission. Capt. Stephen Verrelli, 52, confirmed Monday he accepted the position in New York and will end is 26-year career in about three weeks.

His annual pension will be about $86,000. His new position will pay $110,000.

"This city and this Police Department has been very good to me and my family for 26 years and I mean that in sincerity," he said. At the same time, this opportunity and the financial stability it will afford his family was impossible to pass up.

Verrelli spent the last 4½ years running the department’s largest division, uniformed services, overseeing about 325 officers and day-to-day patrol operations. Before that, he ran the information services division, which includes the communications, MIS and records departments.

New York’s Business Integrity Commission, formerly known as the Organized Crime Control Commission, was created in 2001 to consolidate the regulatory jurisdiction over the private carting industry, businesses operating in the city’s public wholesale markets and the shipboard gambling industry.

The commission’s Web site says there are about 1,100 active carting companies operating in New York and about 150 wholesale businesses operating in three of the city’s wholesale public markets.

BIC Commissioner Michael Mansfield, a former longtime prosecutor in Queens County, took over in August and is undertaking a commissionwide overhaul. He said he looked for a person "whose integrity was beyond reproach" and "a strong law enforcement professional" to fill the newly created position. Verrelli fit the bill.

"I think the city of New Haven is going to be sorry to lose him. New Haven’s loss is New York City’s gain," Mansfield said.

Verrelli joined the department in 1982 and served as district manager in the East Shore and Fair Haven as a lieutenant in the mid- to late-1990s. As a captain, he took over information services in 1999 and his current post in March 2003, when Chief Francisco Ortiz Jr. vacated the spot to become assistant chief.

He’s leaving at a time when the department is in flux, beset by a federal corruption probe and depleted ranks across the board, and is preparing for final recommendations from a national consultant hired to study the department in the wake of the probe. Despite the challenges, he said, he was confident the department would thrive again.

Last year, Verrelli was one of the front-runners for an assistant police chief position but was passed over.

He said he harbors no ill will, but, "I now see myself risen to about as high in this organization as I’m going to achieve."

He expressed gratitude to former police chiefs Nicholas Pastore and Melvin H. Wearing, and Mayor John DeStefano Jr. for giving him the opportunity to succeed here.

The departure will leave seven of eight captain spots vacant, and currently the department has just 40 percent of its mid-management ranks — lieutenant and captain — filled. Promotions for both are planned this fall.

Also, there are seven vacancies in the sergeant rank, but there is an active promotional list. City officials have not said why the promotions weren’t made, but the presumption in the department was that one of the next candidates in line, Detective Jose Silva, was rumored to be in the crosshairs of the FBI. He pleaded guilty last week to a misdemeanor civil rights violation and Ortiz is seeking his termination through the Board of Police Commissioners.