ONE POLICE PLAZA

Confidential Drug-Trafficking Probe Continues

Federal officials are investigating whether one or more police officers
were involved with a recently demoted deputy inspector accused of narcotics
violations while in a Bronx homicide-narcotics task force six years ago,
sources told Newsday yesterday.

The deputy inspector, Dennis Sindone, was demoted to captain Friday, less
than a month after Commissioner Bernard Kerik had promoted him. After the
promotion, he had been placed on modified assignment, his badge taken from him.

Police sources say his promotion, which came after he had been a captain
for about a year, had been recommended to Kerik by a sergeant in Kerik's
security detail who had served with Sindone in the same Bronx task force.

Kerik's spokesman Tom Antenen declined to comment.

Police sources said the task force was put together in the 1990s as police
officials determined that most homicides were drug related. The unit, which
worked closely with the detective bureau, was disbanded about a year and a
half ago, the sources said.

In what appears to be the first whiff of major police corruption under
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the department has portrayed Sindone's actions as
isolated and occurring while he was off duty, but sources said the feds are
investigating the possibility that more cops may have been involved.
Neither the department nor the feds have described the specific allegations
against Sindone.

But three sources told Newsday last week that Sindone is accused of
protecting a drug shipment, a charge his attorney Philip Karasyk said,
"Sindone categorically denies." Most disturbing to top department officials
is, first, that Sindone, an 18-year veteran, is the highest ranking
department official ever implicated in alleged drug trafficking and,
second, that he was enormously well-regarded at One Police Plaza.

As a chief for whom he worked put it last week, "If Dennis did this, he
must have been desperate." Police sources say the allegations against
Sindone were first brought to the feds by a confidential informant seeking
a better deal for himself after his arrest on undisclosed charges. Yet
despite the source of the allegations, no one in the department has rushed
to defend Sindone.

A top police official said last week, "The question is not whether or not
Sindone will lose his job but whether or not he will go to jail."
Apparently, the feds have more than the word of a confidential informant.

Alan's List. Here are some of the folks Comptroller Alan Hevesi says advise
him on police issues in his mayoral campaign: Former police commissioner
Bill Bratton, who has endorsed Hevesi's rival, Mark Green; Philadelphia
police commissioner John Timoney, who Hevesi says he last spoke to seven
months ago; and current commissioner Kerik, who recently criticized Hevesi
for accusing the Police Department of racial profiling.

Now here are the people Hevesi says he would consider for police
commissioner if elected mayor: Timoney; former commissioner Ray Kelly;
current first deputy Joe Dunne, who Hevesi acknowledges he barely knows;
Kerik [which would make him the first police commissioner retained by an
incoming mayor]; and Bratton [which would make him the first police
commissioner in city history to have backed a rival candidate].

* * * Strange Bedfellows Department. Here is the press release from
Patrolmen's Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch, dated April 30,
after a meeting with Democratic state Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton last week.

"I met with Senator Clinton for more than an hour this morning and we had a
cordial and productive discussion of many issues of mutual concern," Lynch
wrote. "I briefed the Senator about the crisis in New York's inability to
recruit and retain police officers and she pledged to address that problem
in whatever way she could.

"I told her of my contention that a dramatic improvement in police salaries
here would be the key element in solving the problem and she agreed that
our officers deserve adequate compensation for the hard work they do.

"We exchanged ideas on a wide range of subjects affecting law enforcement
in general and New York City's cops in particular-including the issue of
racial profiling and the problem of summons and arrest quotas-and we agreed
to engage in a continuing dialogue." No response from Hillary.

* * * Slumming? None other than the PBA's top legal gun, Steve Worth,
appeared in the police trial room last week to defend an officer accused of
concealing assets in a bankruptcy hearing.

Resplendent in a pin-striped suit, cell phone in hand as he stopped on the
second floor where the city's police reporters are based, Worth is the same
fellow who defended Ed McMellon in the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo and
Charles Schwarz in the sodomy of Abner Louima.

So what's he doing in such a lowly venue as the police trial room? "First,"
Worth said, "we're short a couple of guys so I have to help out.

Second, it's a complicated white-collar case and I wouldn't want a less
experienced lawyer to handle it."