One police officer, Joseph Gambardella, was fired after being charged with breaking into Lenny and Joe’s Fishtale and stealing lobster and shrimp from the restaurant. He is also charged with stealing gasoline from town pumps and a burglary at Beebe Marine.

Timothy Heiden, a sergeant and police union president, has been suspended. With a phone call, he interrupted state police questioning of Gambardella and told him to stop talking to the investigators about the restaurant burglary.

A third Madison cop, Bernard Durgin Jr., faces charges of using a police computer to check the background of former girlfriends and women he met while working as a security guard at Yale-New Hospital. He also faces workers compensation fraud charges for collecting disability benefits while working as a security guard when he was off work, supposedly injured as a Madison police officer.

Durgin was suspended originally from the force after he flashed his badge in August in New Haven to help a fellow member of a motorcycle club who allegedly threatened to kill the officer who stopped him on a traffic check.

While all these charges unfolded in 2007, the new year has brought additional charges of impropriety. Prostitutes allegedly paid regular visits to four officers during the midnight shift. The prostitutes were brought to Madison by a friend of Durgin who is a felon.

Durgin is the only one of the four officers identified publicly as having seen the prostitutes, Heiden, the midnight shift supervisor, faces new departmental charges as a result of the visits. While details of what occurred during the visits at a commuter parking lot, R.H. Brown Middle School and at the North Madison Shopping Center have not been disclosed, more arrests are possible.

The series of misdeeds in a department this small is almost beyond comprehension. Certainly, Heiden failed as supervisor even if, as he claims, he was unaware of the prostitutes’ visits. He was also Gambardella’s supervisor. Heiden’s earlier phone call to Gambardella amounts to obstruction of police work, regardless of his union role.

The patterns of misconduct run deep enough that the overall integrity of the department and its supervision is open to question. Gambardella is charged with stealing gasoline only in 2006, but he pumped similar amounts in 2004 and 2005. Since he was hired in 2000, Durgin has been off the job for alleged injury 478 days. The bad actors seemed to have had free reign.

Madison faces the possibility of nearly a third of its officers being charged with crimes or suspended for misconduct. Residents have to wonder if there are enough honest cops to protect them.