NOPD officer acquitted of taking payoffs from tow company

By Ramon Antonio Vargas, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on June 19, 2013 at 7:07 PM, updated June 19, 2013 at 7:55 PM

Orleans Parish Criminal District Courthouse (NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

A New Orleans jury late Wednesday acquitted a New Orleans Police Department officer of charges that he accepted between $600 and $800 in exchange for sending municipal business toward a tow truck company. Jurors found the veteran policeman of about 38 years, who was once a part of NOPD’s Towing and Recovery Unit, not guilty of one count of malfeasance in office in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Karen Herman’s courtroom.

NOPD officer John Ray’s lawyer, Eric Hessler of the Police Association of New Orleans, argued that the money his client received was a gift, meriting administrative discipline for a lapse in ethics but not a felony conviction. Assistant District Attorneys Andrew Doss and Reed Poole, though, tried to convince a jury that Ray broke a law that requires officers to uphold the state Code of Governmental Ethics, which prohibits them from taking anything of economic value from members of the public, or gratuities from anyone they regulate.

NOPD’s Towing and Recovery Unit keeps a rotating roster of qualified towing companies. From about 2010 to 2011, Robert “Bob” Kingsmill of Kingsmill’s Auto Service slipped Ray, 62, a $100 bill between six and eight times on the street “when no one was looking,” and in return, Ray permitted only Kingsmill’s drivers to haul heavy equipment from a city tow zone and rejected all other companies who sought the same work, prosecutors tried to prove during a one-day trial.

Kingsmill paid Ray with money from his company, and Kingsmill’s wife, Sharon, the business’s office manager, wrote the payments off as petty cash in the company books, prosecutors said.