The Arrest Was a Bust. The Officers Got Overtime Anyway.

NEW YORK — The narcotics officers from the 83rd Precinct didn’t get much when they set up outside the J & C Mini Market on Irving Place in Brooklyn on an autumn afternoon four years ago.

Moving in on what seemed to be a crack deal, they seized two packets, which turned out to contain little more than a residue of the drug. Two men — said to be the buyer and the seller — were arrested, but the charges against one of the men were eventually dismissed.

What the officers did get that day was more than 20 hours in overtime for hauling in and processing the men. Collectively, court papers say, they earned as much as $1,400 in extra pay.

On Tuesday, four of the officers involved in the arrests will appear in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn for the start of an unusual civil-rights trial, facing accusations that they detained one of the men, Hector Cordero, simply to increase their income.

If any of the officers are found liable, another trial will be scheduled, one that could mark the biggest challenge to New York policing practices since stop-and-frisk. The second trial would examine the broader question of whether the city’s police officers habitually use false arrests to bolster their pay.

Accusations about the practice — known as “collars for dollars” — have dogged the department for decades. The Mollen Commission’s 1994 report about police corruption, which used the term, detailed the various and devious overtime schemes that have been used.

In one, the police would involve additional officers in making an arrest, maximizing the number of people eligible for overtime. In a typical arrangement, those extra officers might claim to have discovered evidence that the defendant had tried to hide, or in some other way they would enter the case as peripheral witnesses. They would need to be on hand to handle paperwork or be available to testify — so they too would get overtime pay.

In another practice, known as “trading collars,” officers sometimes directed arrests to the member of their team who stood to get the most overtime. Felony arrests are often presented to a grand jury about five days after the incident; but if an officer who took part was scheduled to work on the anticipated grand jury date, he or she might defer to a colleague who was not.

The second officer would “take the arrest,” and receive the extra pay for going to court on a day off — even if that meant testifying about events they never witnessed, the report maintained.

One of the city’s most infamous overtime frauds occurred in the late 1980s among officers from the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, Brooklyn, known as the Morgue Boys. At their federal corruption trial in Brooklyn, Daniel Eurell, an officer who pleaded guilty, testified that he and his colleagues often made arrests when their shifts were almost over to ensure receiving overtime. The group would then file false reports, or “cover stories,” to justify the arrests, Eurell said.

The notion that police officers have financial incentives in making arrests also emerged at the trial last month of a Queens detective convicted of perjury. The detective, Kevin Desormeau, had arrested a man on drug charges after claiming, falsely it turned out, to have witnessed the suspect dealing drugs. In arguing the case, prosecutors noted that Desormeau had filed for four hours and 24 minutes of overtime for “an arrest that was illegal.”

If Cordero’s allegations that he was falsely arrested to boost overtime pay are upheld, it would seem to suggest that years of attention and reform have only had a marginal effect on curbing the connection between false arrests and overtime, said Harry G. Levine, a professor of sociology at Queens College who has written extensively about drugs and policing. It would also trigger the second broader trial, which lawyers and policing experts in New York said would be a rarity.

“The pattern of making arrests to get overtime pay is historic and long-standing,” Levine said.

Gabriel Harvis, Cordero’s lawyer, has suggested that a second trial, should one indeed occur, would set the stage for the biggest challenge to unconstitutional policing practices in New York since a 2013 federal trial about the department’s overreliance on stop-and-frisk tactics. “Phase II is the rare opportunity for a Federal District Court to review controversial citywide practices of the N.Y.P.D.,” Harvis wrote in an email.

The stop-and-frisk trial, which found the practice was unconstitutional, resulted in a huge decline in the tactic’s use and the creation of a court-appointed monitor to track it. While it remains unclear what effect a finding of liability against the city in a second Cordero trial might have, the judge in the case, Jack B. Weinstein, could take similar action.

The lawsuit has accused the officers of concocting the basis of Cordero’s arrest “in order to obtain overtime for completing the attendant paperwork,” court filings state. The officers, who are being defended by lawyers for the city, have denied the charges. The city’s Law Department said that the arrest was “supported by probable cause.” The case began at 1 p.m. on Oct. 24, 2014, when Officer Hugo Hugasian was sitting in an unmarked police car watching the mini-market as part of a plainclothes street narcotics team. Court papers state that Hugasian saw a man — later identified as Matthew Ninos — walk up to the store with a cellphone at his ear.

Then someone left the store, approached Ninos and handed him “two little zips or bags” in exchange for money, Hugasian said. After a description of the buyer was sent out on a radio, Ninos was arrested on a charge of having 0.138 grams of cocaine. He later pleaded guilty to drug possession.

The seller went back into the mini-market, court papers said. Though two other officers, Peter Rubin and John Essig, went inside to find him, they were unable to identify him. So Hugasian, who said that he had witnessed the deal, went into the store. Court papers state he bought a bottle of water and identified the seller as Cordero, a cashier at J & C Mini Market who is 59 years old.

Cordero was arrested within minutes, according to the papers, but when he was searched, the police did not find any drugs or drug paraphernalia. He did, however, have $580 in his pocket, which he said was “for emergencies.” Both Cordero and the owner of the store, Fausto Tineo, told the police that he had never left the market and had been serving customers when the drug deal supposedly occurred. Cordero was held for several hours, but five months later — on March 4, 2015 — the Brooklyn district attorney’s office dismissed the charges against him.

The encounter led Harvis to conclude that the arrest was a sham and had been orchestrated to generate overtime. In court filings, he noted that the street narcotics unit filed for at least 22 hours of extra pay that day — most of it by Hugasian and Essig.

Both men, according to the lawsuit, had been scheduled to work on the day of the arrests from 7 a.m. to 3:35 p.m. Police records show that Cordero and Ninos left the precinct at 5:30 p.m. and were taken to the courthouse. While Hugasian never met with an assistant district attorney, court papers said that he was interviewed by phone about Cordero’s arrest. Shortly after 8 p.m., the papers said, Cordero was released from the courthouse. (Ninos had also been released.) But Hugasian filed documents claiming that he worked until 12:25 a.m. the next day, and Essig said that he remained on duty until 11:30 p.m.

In October, Weinstein issued an order saying that if any officer was found liable, a second trial would explore Harvis’s theory that “the Police Department has long been aware of a widespread practice of false arrests at the end of tours of duty.” The second trial would be likely to rely on Police Department records about overtime abuse, which the city has filed under seal as part of Cordero’s case but could become public.

“A reasonable jury may find that this practice is not isolated to a few ‘bad’ police officers,” Weinstein wrote, “but is endemic, that N.Y.P.D. officials are aware this pattern exists and that they have failed to intervene and properly supervise.”