Four years after COVID ended, there is still an unsolved case that it left behind called the “Booze Patrol. During months of lockdown, a group of New York City sheriffs, working for the Department of Finance, were gathering in a Long Island City warehouse to “booze it up,” in a secret shed inside a storage area in Long Island that has been dubbed their “man-cave.” They also hung out inside the windowless storage container smoking hookah, cigars and cigarettes. The liquor they were drinking and cigarettes they were smoking had all been confiscated from bars and clubs that had broken the Covid lockdown restrictions that were then in effect.
Last May, the dozen people involved in the case were suspended for 30 days without pay, but they will not be prosecuted.
Ryan Lavis, the chief spokesperson for the city’s Department of Finance (DOF), was keeping mum, repeatedly refusing to provide details about their identity or the charges against the sheriffs. DOF Commissioner Preston Niblack has also refused to divulge any information about the scandal, and declined repeated requests for an interview.
In the face of the collective stonewalling, The City requested the internal report from the Department of Investigation through the Freedom of Information Law. Even after DOI forwarded its findings to the Queens District Attorney which has jurisdiction over the area, Melinda Katz and her team “declined to prosecute.”
The City discovered the names, charges, and exact dynamics of the theft, through surveillance videos that show who brought the bottles of booze to their cars, who distributed the boxes in the warehouse in order to inadvertently cover the CCTV, the analysis of phone and financial records,–in short, anything that was released since the investigation started in January 2021, when an anonymous complaint was filed.
Apparently, the DOF resorted to internal disciplinary charges against the dozen sheriff office staffers involved in the booze pilfering. Seven employees resigned before the charges went to trial at the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH), which oversees disciplinary cases for most municipal workers. Three went to a disciplinary hearing. Only one of these people was recommended by the judge to be fired. But city agencies very often just ignore these recommendations.
