Nappe

EAST HAVEN - Six weeks after the reconstituted Board of Police Commissioners voted to withdraw its appeal of a Superior Court decision ordering the town to rehire former police officer Bob Nappe, nothing has happened.
Political divisions remain at the center of the logjam.
The board's vice chairman, new Democratic appointee Fred Brow, says Republican Chairman Pasquale "Pat" Romano and the board's attorney Larry Sgrignari are trying to delay the action.
Romano is a holdover from Republican former Mayor Joe Maturo Jr.'s administration who doesn't want to rehire Nappe, and Sgrignari was Maturo's town counsel. They both have expressed concerns about the legality of the June 2 meeting at which the board reversed itself and agreed to take the steps necessary to rehire Nappe.
Nappe is a 19-year police veteran. He retired in 2004 after the police board refused to grant him a one-year leave of absence to take a job training Iraqi police recruits for a private company under contract to the U.S. State Department. Since returning, he has been fighting to get his job back.
Nappe, who this spring agreed to relinquish claims to back pay for the 3½ years that followed his returning from Iraq, is frustrated and says he is running out of ways to make ends meet.
He has been picking up shifts as a paramedic with a private ambulance service and selling his possessions while waiting for the other shoe to drop, he said.
"I think it's ridiculous," said Nappe. "I should have gotten my job back when I stepped off the plane when I got back from Iraq - 3½ years ago."
While he gave up claims to back pay, he wondered aloud about whether he should be paid now that the board has ordered him reinstated and asked how he could ever be "made whole."
"The board told Sgrignari to drop the appeal and put me back to work, and he didn't do it," Nappe said. "So if he's not doing what his client tells him to do, isn't he violating his oath? ... He has an order to do something and he doesn't do it? Fire the guy."
In the meantime, Nappe said, "a man is still out of work, scraping to keep his house in order. I mean, I'm selling things left and right just to keep myself above water ... and all this political bureaucracy that's going on, it's total crap, and it shouldn't be going on."
Brow appears to agree.
He recently had a letter delivered to Sgrignari, ordering him to do as he was instructed or withdraw from representing the police board, Town Hall sources said.
"To me, it's just a stall tactic," Brow said of the fact that the appeal has yet to be withdrawn. He was appointed by Democratic Mayor April Capone Almon in the spring, following the death of Vice Chairman Terry Pine.
Brow said Sgrignari sought to have a meeting with just him and Romano, but Brow said he refused.
"We're not meeting as individuals. We're meeting as a board," he said. "It was a board decision."
Romano said he's not trying to stall anything. But he said he won't withdraw the appeal until he can get some sort of ruling that the matter was properly noticed in the June 2 meeting and a previous one that are the basis of a complaint he has filed with the state Freedom of Information Commission.
"It's not a stall tactic," he said, adding that he would be willing to withdraw the appeal "if Fred can get me a legal opinion from the town telling me that that meeting was legal."
Romano said he told Sgrignari to wait until the FOI Commission acts "because I'm challenging that meeting and no one has given me a decision that that meeting was legal or not."
Sgrignari, who was kept on by the Capone Almon administration in part because he had a prior agreement to cap fees in the Nappe case to the $10,000 paid while Maturo was still mayor, said he may end up withdrawing because he's in a position of conflict.
"I've sent three certified letters to the chairman and the vice chairman because there are legal issues that need to addressed," Sgrignari said. "I haven't had a clear response. I've advised my chairman of the need to address certain issues."

Mark Zaretsky can be reached at mzaretsky@nhregister.com or 789-5722.

©New Haven Register 2008