3 COPS INDICTED IN ILLEGAL DRUG SEARCHES

Three Chicago police officers were indicted Tuesday on charges they entered
the homes of three suspected drug dealers without search warrants in 1996
and later lied under oath about where the arrests took place to conceal the
illegal searches.

One of the officers, Xavier Castro, 52, was charged in February, but the
other two, Matthew Craig, 39, and Robert Gloeckler, 38, were named for the
first time in the indictment Tuesday.

The initial charges alleged Castro falsified reports in one arrest; the new
indictment alleges the Foster District officers were involved in three
different incidents.

Sgt. Robert Cargie, a Chicago police spokesman, said the department will
move to suspend all three officers without pay in light of the new indictment.

The officers have been on desk duty, stripped of their badges and police
powers, since the allegations were first investigated by the department's
internal affairs division several years ago.

In the first alleged incident in January 1996, the officers were accused of
fabricating the location they arrested two men for selling cocaine in order
to conceal that they had ventured outside the district without notifying a
supervisor and had improperly entered one of the men's apartments without a
warrant.

But the scheme backfired because one of the two victims was wearing an
electronic monitoring device. When he was led by the officers from his
Northwest Side apartment, the monitor triggered an alarm at precisely the
time the officers later claimed to have arrested him at a street corner 5
miles away.

The officers seized cash and cocaine in the illegal search at the man's
home, but the money turned up missing, the charges allege.

Eight days later, the officers entered another individual's apartment
without a search warrant but didn't find any contraband. Later that day,
the officers arrested the individual and a second person at another
location and falsely claimed to have found a revolver on one of them,
authorities charge.

In the final incident, in November 1996, the officers are alleged to have
seized cocaine from another apartment after searching the premises without
a warrant, the charges allege.

To conceal the improper search, they falsified reports to make it look as
though the arrest had taken place after the individual exited a car
carrying a bag, authorities said.

Criminal charges against those arrested in the three incidents were
dropped, Assistant U.S. Atty. David Hoffman said.