“The family plan” is what Greg Kaczmarek’s lawyer called it today outside the Schenectady County Courthouse. Greg, former Schenectady police chief, agrees to do two years in state prison so that his wife, Lisa, can get off with just six months in the county jail, it being understood that the county jail is an easier place than a state prison and of course six months is easier than two years.
“It was a stand-up thing for him to do,” the lawyer, Thomas O’Hern said. “He took his deal to prevent her from going to state prison.”
I don’t know if anything can be said to be “stand up” about coke-snorting and coke-dealing after a career in law enforcement, but maybe there is an element of nobility in a man’s taking a hit for his wife, if that is indeed how this worked out. I hope so. I would like to see something besides utter shame and disgrace in a former police chief pleading guilty to criminal possession of cocaine with intent to sell.
Call it the family plan or whatever you want to call it, that’s the upshot: Greg will do two years, Lisa will do six months, even though Greg’s lawyer insisted that the case against Greg was “very defensible” and the evidence against him “not nearly as compelling as against his wife,” an evaluation that I would agree with.
Lisa’s lawyer, Keven Luibrand, was of course reluctant to endorse that analysis but did say on the courthouse steps, “Six months, given the wiretaps, is a good deal,” referring to tape recordings of Lisa arguing with the head of the drug ring about her supplies running short, tape recordings in which Greg is heard kibbitzing in the background.
It did seem to me that Lisa was more of a player and Greg more of a helping hand in the minor cocaine dealing they were engaged in, but there is often a feeling among prosecutors that law enforcement officers should be held to a higher standard since they have the least excuse of anyone for breaking the law.
I suspected also that Greg might be regarded as a bigger fish and hence be given harsher treatment, though a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, John Milgrim, disputed that, saying, “Any decision is based on an evaluation of the evidence and the role of a particular defendant.”
Maybe, but Greg and Lisa Kaczmarek were indicted together, appeared in court together, pleaded guilty together (one right after the other, strictly speaking), and clearly the negotiations for their guilty pleas and sentences were conducted together even though they had separate lawyers. They will also be sentenced together, come Feb. 2 (not in January as I had been informed earlier).
Judge Karen Drago said she would accept the plea bargain worked out with the attorney general’s office contingent upon the standard probation report that is prepared before sentencing.
In response to a reporter’s question, O’Hern also expressed concern for Greg Kaczmarek’s safety in prison, where the reporter suggested he might come up against people he had helped put away, but in my experience ex-cops are kept in a protective unit along with other inmates who might be in danger if they were part of the general prison population, those being notorious child molesters, the effeminate, sometimes gang members, and anyone else who might be a target.
My friend Jack Carroll was in such a unit for a while up in Dannemora and told me the inmates there tend to be peaceable among themselves because they know there is nowhere else to go but isolation. It’s no different from any other unit, or cellblock, except that the inhabitants live, eat and exercise separately. Surely Kaczmarek will not be the only ex-cop in prison.
It was a grim enough scene up on the fourth floor of the courthouse this morning, and adding to the grimness was the presence of the parents of William Marhafer II, the Schenectady police officer who committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in the locker room of the police station seven years ago when he was caught in the middle of a federal investigation into misconduct by his colleagues and was about testify against those colleagues.
To this day they hold Kaczmarek partly responsible for that disaster and resent what they insist is Kaczmarek’s lie in claiming that he administered CPR to their son as he lay dying, or dead, on the locker room floor.
“I want to see him go down,” the father told me as he studied the back of Kacmarek’s crewcut head in the courtroom. “And I’ll be here for the sentencing.”
I’ll be there too, God willing, but I can’t say I’ll take any pleasure in it.