Boston officer sentenced to 26 years in drug case
May 16, 2008 03:02 PM
By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff
Roberto "Kiko'' Pulido, the rogue Boston police officer who enlisted two
fellow patrolman in a brazen scheme to escort trucks bringing cocaine into
the city, was sentenced today to 26 years in federal prison by a judge who
said the defendant had disgraced his badge.
Boston Police Department photo
"The people who wear that badge have a sense of honor,'' US District Judge
William G. Young said, staring at Pulido, the ringleader of one of the most
notorious police corruption scandals in recent Boston history. "You are ...
dead to that sense of honor.''
The sentence was what a federal prosecutor had sought and six years longer
than that recommended by Pulido's public defender, who said her client's
abuse of steroids contributed to his crimes.
Pulido, who pleaded guilty in the middle of his trial in November to drug
trafficking charges, apologized to both the Boston Police Department and the
MBTA Transit Police, of which he had previously been a member.
"It was my lifelong goal to be a Boston police officer,'' said Pulido,
wearing a khaki-colored jumpsuit and white sneakers. "No one is more
disappointed than myself.''
Two rows of the courtroom were filled with supporters and relatives of
Pulido. Most of them wore white T-shirts emblazoned with a photograph of a
smiling Pulido beneath the words "Kiko We Love You.''
Michael K. Loucks, the first assistant US attorney in Massachusetts, who
watched another federal prosecutor argue for the harsh punishment, said
afterward that Pulido "deserves every second of that sentence.''
Pulido's guilty plea came on the fourth day of his trial in US District
Court in Boston, capping an extraordinary police corruption scandal whose
reverberations are still being felt.
In the previous two days, jurors heard a swaggering, expletive-spewing
Pulido in two dozen conversations secretly recorded by the FBI as part of a
carefully constructed sting that began in late 2003 and culminated with the
arrests of Pulido and fellow officers Carlos Pizarro and Nelson Carrasquillo
in July 2006. All three officers belonged to a police motorcycle unit.
Pulido and the two officers plotted an audacious scheme with men they
thought were drug dealers to protect trucks that brought 140 kilograms of
cocaine to Boston. The three officers did not know that the drug dealers
were undercover FBI agents and that the cocaine had previously been seized
by the government.
On April 23, 2006, Pulido and Carrasquillo monitored Police Department radio
channels while a transfer of 40 kilograms of cocaine took place at a garage
on Washington Street with the undercover FBI agents, according to
prosecutors.
Then on June 8, 2006, the three police officers guided a truck containing
about 100 kilograms of cocaine with an estimated wholesale value of more
than $2 million from Western Massachusetts to the city, prosecutors said.
The officers were paid a total of $51,000 by FBI agents posing as drug
dealers.
The three officers were arrested in Miami in July 2006 by federal agent.
Shortly before the arrests, the officers had arranged a deal to protect
another shipment of 1,000 kilograms of cocaine and five kilograms of heroin.
The secret tape-recordings also featured Pulido allegedly running numerous
other rackets involving identity fraud, fraudulently obtained store gift
cards, steroid sales, and prostitution. Pulido was never charged in those
schemes.
Jurors also saw a surveillance photograph of Pulido in a congratulatory
embrace of an undercover agent posing as a drug dealer called Big Manny in
an Atlantic City casino. Pulido hugged the phony drug dealer after receiving
a softball-sized wad of $15,000 that bulged in his pocket.
Although the government had only presented part of its case against Pulido,
the tapes and photographs had already made the defendant seem more like a
grade B movie crime boss than a crimefighter.
Pulido pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute
more than 5 kilograms of cocaine and 1 kilogram of heroin and two counts of
attempting to aid and abet the distribution of the cocaine. He pleaded no
contest to a fourth charge of carrying a gun in a drug-trafficking crime.
In a Globe interview from a New Hampshire jail shortly after his plea,
Pulido said he was pumped full of steroids when he suggested to undercover
agents in Atlantic City that he knew a good way to transport cocaine into
Boston.
He said a steroid addiction made him exaggerate many of the statements he
made on the surveillance tapes and called many of his comments pure fantasy.
In his mind at the time, he said, he was playing a role in a Hollywood
movie. He even recited lines from "Training Day,'' the film about a corrupt
officer.
"Anyone who knows me knows that I was acting,'' he said. "It was pure
puffery.''
Pulido's co-defendants, Carrasquillo and Pizarro, were recently sentenced to
18 years and 13 years, respectively, after pleading guilty last year.
Authorities in March also charged an acquaintance of Pulido with helping to
plant drugs and a gun on an innocent man and then breaking into his
apartment to steal a safe containing $18,000 as part of a conspiracy with
the rogue officer.
In addition, as many as a dozen Boston police officers have been summoned
before a federal grand jury investigating steroid use and after-hours
parties -- an offshoot of the probe that led to the convictions of the three
officers, three law enforcement officials familiar with the case told the
Globe in March.
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