Narcotics unit to be born again

Friday, September 26, 2008 6:46 AM EDT

By William Kaempffer, Register Staff

NEW HAVEN — The Police Department has tapped a 16-year veteran to lead its reconstituted narcotics squad, a significant step as the agency moves forward from a 2007 corruption scandal that sent three former drug investigators to prison.

The officer in charge will be Lt. John Velleca, who now heads the department’s special investigations unit. He will have about 16 yet-to-be-selected sergeants and detectives under his command.

“This is going to be a division that’s highly scrutinized. It’s going to be under the microscope all the time. We’ve got to work to build trust in the community and we have to do that by achieving results,” Velleca said Thursday.

The department has been without its own narcotics unit since March 2007, when the FBI arrested two of its investigators, including the unit’s top lieutenant, on corruption charges. The city disbanded the unit soon after.

“We’re going to try to restore a culture of integrity to the narcotics unit,” Velleca said.

The new squad isn’t expected to be up and running until late this year or early next year, after police academy graduation frees up staff resources.

But in October, Velleca and prospective members of the division will receive training at a Drug Enforcement Administration school in Massachusetts, said Assistant Chief Peter Reichard.

Meanwhile, Velleca will have to construct policies and procedures from the ground up. The old unit, a post-mortem study by a policing consultant concluded, had few set rules, which led to a fast-and-loose culture under Lt. William “Billy” White, a decorated cop of four decades who now is serving a 38-month prison sentence.

The FBI set up stings and caught White and one of his detectives stealing money planted by agents, including one incident in which White and a state police sergeant, who was secretly cooperating with the FBI, took $27,500 that White believed to be drug money from the trunk of a parked car. All said, three people from the unit served prison time as inmates and families came forward with stories and lawsuits with claims of being framed.

A state police drug task force has been handling drug investigations in the city.

“Statewide narcotics has been doing narcotics investigations in the city and has been doing a tremendous job for the amount of personnel that they have and the size of the problem that we know is in the city,” Reichard said.

New Haven’s restructured division will pattern its policies, such as the handling of evidence and registering and payment of informants, on procedures by the DEA.

Early this year, a detective in was arrested for allegedly stealing money form the confidential informant’s fund.

Velleca joined the department in 1992. He worked in the detective bureau as a detective and later a sergeant from 1999 to 2003. He was promoted to lieutenant in 2008.

URL: http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2008/09/26/news/a3-nenewdrug.prt