Loeb had found things in the bag that might have belonged to a police officer: handcuffs, mace, and a gun.
But he also found things that pointed to something much darker, according to a friend of Loeb's who spoke to him after the incident—like *advertiser censored* that appeared to him to feature prepubescent boys.
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Burke even threatened to murder Loeb with a "hot shot," or a fatal overdose of heroin that might later be arranged to appear self-inflicted.
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Immobilized but conscious of the fact that Burke was the owner of the bag with the alleged *advertiser censored* stash, Loeb called the chief a name. Newspapers typically soften the word to "pervert," and the feds say Loeb was mistaken, but in Loeb's telling of the story, as documented in a video interview recorded for Newsday, he called Burke a "pedophile."
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But according to former police officers, local politicians, lawyers, and Suffolk County residents with whom I spoke about the case, Burke's conviction likely represents only the first domino to fall in what could become one of the more surreal federal probes of local law enforcement in American history.
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It involves allegations of illegal wiretapping, cover-ups, sex addiction, drunk-driving cops, and blackmail. It involves a super PAC funded by the Suffolk Police Benevolent Association that critics say uses mandatory donations to cement a wall between cops and the people they are paid to protect. And it involves Tom Spota, the longtime Republican-turned-Democrat District Attorney of Suffolk County, who fathered Burke's rise to power through a close friendship that began after they met during the high-profile trial of a bizarre murder case.
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"Suffolk is so dirty," concurs Peter Fiorillo, a retired New York City cop who has lived on Long Island since the 1960s. "Every place has corruption, but on a scale from one to ten, it's an 11."
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But based on conversations with others about the incident, Trotta suspects Burke may have been shaking down drug dealers for crack and using the contraband with his girlfriend while they had sex.
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For some, the verdict in the Pius case did not bring any closure. One of those people is attorney Frank Bress, now a law professor at New York Law School in Manhattan, who defended Bresnic in a 1986 appeal.
"Burke was a low-level burglar and drug dealer as a kid," Bress says over a salad not far from his home in Westchester. "It made his testimony unreliable."
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The lawyer ran a yearlong clinical program on Bresnic's appeal with eight of his students while he was teaching at New York's Pace University, immersing himself in what he perceived to be inconsistencies of evidence. Today, he believes the same thing he believed then: that all four boys were innocent.
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Even in those days, Suffolk cops had a reputation. According to Kornbluth's research, the department had a 97 percent confession rate for murder suspects, a number three or four times higher than most American homicide squads' best years
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He also says Burke was a short guy with a Napoleonic complex and "a sex addict."
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"Burke used to take me and some of the other guys to Gossip, a strip club in Melville," R says. "Downstairs, in the private room, Burke and other cops used to **** some of the dancers for money.
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R cites a locally infamous bust at World Gym in Ronkonkoma in 2002, where officers were convicted for selling cocaine and steroids, as representative of the scene among Long Island cops at the time.
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Gia says she worked on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights with two regular dancers named Tara and Hawaii, and that the trade of sex for money was commonplace in the basement of the club. She adds that empty "liquor cabinets" were used for sex work, and the ownership at that time, which she describes as "shadowy" and Russian, encouraged prostitution—and that one dancer at the club had a " Felix the Cat magic bag" filled with vibrators, nipple clamps, and other gear for female submissive S&M sessions.
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Gia says cops were regular customers, but "different from the firefighters," who were usually looking for a gentler time. The police she knew, as a rule, were misogynists who liked it harder.
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I ask Gia if she might introduce me to Tara or Hawaii to see if they ever encountered Burke.
"I can't," she says, her lips curling downward into a pout. "They're dead of a drug overdose."
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Even after Burke was forced into retirement by the scandal surrounding Loeb, for example, he was still owed an eye-popping payout of $434,370 under the auspices of unused sick and vacation time. (Burke averaged an annual salary well over $200,000 in his final years on the force.)
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At around the same time, Burke was reported to be obstructing federal authorities from collaborating on the effort to catch the Long Island Serial Killer.
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Both Trotta and Doyle are quick to note that Spota has run twice unopposed for office. In 2013, the most recent election, he was cross-endorsed by both the Democratic and Republican parties as well as the Independent and Conservative parties. Ray Perini, a Republican attorney who attempted to challenge Spota, was quickly stifled by members of his own party.