NO REVELATIONS FROM ROGUE COP

Staley Avoids The Hard Questions

It was moving day in the downtown apartment building where disgraced
Toronto cop Richard Staley will be spending the next 18 months under house
arrest.

No need to ring the security buzzer, though, not that Staley's name was
listed on the panel because it wasn't. It was just that the movers had
conveniently left the front door open as they hauled their boxes from a
17th-floor apartment to the truck parked in the crescent below.

Problem No. 1 was therefore solved. The requirement of having to first use
the intercom had been taken out of play. All there was to do now was go
directly to his apartment, knock on his door, and ask for his side of the
story --like how does a 27-year veteran cop with 30 commendations in his
file become a crackhead?

Last week, Superior Court Justice Harry LaForme surprised everyone -- the
50-year-old Staley included -- by sentencing him to house arrest after he
pleaded guilty to a litany of crimes, everything from supplying
confidential police information to a drug dealer, running a licence plate
number through the police computer for a woman connected to an outlaw
motorcycle gang, to "losing" three handguns registered in his name and then
not reporting them missing as required by the law.

All because of his addiction to crack cocaine, first "sampling" it as an
undercover cop and then letting the hard-boil narcotic consume his life.

It was after that first whiff that Staley, in the words taken from his
pre-sentence report, "moved from the role of a cop to that of a culprit."

Staley himself told the judge he thought he deserved at least six months in
jail, and he even brought along a plastic bag containing a toothbrush,
clean underwear and a deck of smokes, all in anticipation of his first
night in the detention centre.

Lenience opposed

The Crown was seeking a year for Staley's serious breach of the public's
trust. Two internal affairs officers who brought him down -- Det.-Sgts.
Mike Earl and Bryce Evans -- were hoping for enough to send the message
that bad cops will not get an easy ride from the courts.

But Judge LaForme ignored them all.

Instead of going to jail, Staley walked out of court and headed home -- his
pension figuratively in his back pocket, having officially signed his
retirement papers on the eve of his guilty pleas.

Despite spending almost 20% of his career as a cop on paid suspension, and
with enough criminal and Police Services Act convictions to fill more than
a half-dozen bankers' boxes, Staley will nonetheless collect a pension of
approximately $30,000 a year.

All he had to do was retire without a criminal record hanging around his neck.

And this is what he did.

Can't go far

There are at least three dead bolts on Richard Staley's apartment door. The
friend who answered the knock said he had just gone down to the lobby and
would be back in a minute.

As stipulated in the terms of his house arrest, Staley can't go far, not
even to the corner store to buy groceries. So the wait for his return was on.

"I've got absolutely nothing to say," he said when first confronted. Then
he took my business card, and promised to think it over.

That evening, he agreed to meet -- at 11 o'clock the next morning.

Richard Staley came across pretty good in earlier press reports. He said
all the right things and pushed all the right buttons.

"I'm not trying to justify what I did," he said in one article. "I just
hope at the end of the day my colleagues on the job and the public will not
see me in too harsh a light"

He is, in fact, almost instantly likable. He is also, according to his
pre-sentence report, "egocentric, moody, socially immature" and prone to
"passive aggressiveness."

And "manipulative," according to the two internal affairs cops who busted him.

"He knows how to cry the right river," said one.

In the end, however, there would be no asking Richard Staley about how and
why he became a crackhead, and no answer to the question of what would
possess a once-honourable cop to allow three of his handguns to be out on
the streets, no doubt in the wrong hands.

"He traded them for crack," said Det.-Sgt. Earl. "What else are we supposed
to believe?"

The meeting with Staley had been set for 11 a.m. at a place to be determined.

At 6 o'clock in the morning, however, the telephone rang.

Richard Staley had changed his mind.

He said he had "had enough."