I knew I’d seen this act before. A routine car collision gets covered up. Why? Because a politician was in the car.
When I first wrote about it 10 years ago it was Jeanine Pirro in the back seat with her then-husband Al Pirro. Their vehicle, owned by Al, sideswiped a motorcycle and the rider was injured.
After seeing who was in the car, the original accident report (more properly called a collision report) was deep-sixed and the Pirro vehicle magically disappeared from the second accident report. The cops called the Harley rider a fraud and listed it as a one-vehicle accident.
Except that someone already had a copy of that first report, and the cops were caught covering up the crash.
Fast forward to this week, and it is Mayor de Blasio in the car with his wife that is involved in a collision, and the story hits the Daily News — four years after it happened.
Apparently, a car veered into his lane and hit the mayoral SUV. I say apparently because that was the lede in the story:
On a Saturday morning in August 2015, Mayor de Blasio was in the back seat of a black NYPD Chevy Tahoe bound for an event in Harlem when a driver changing lanes slammed into his ride.No one was hurt. No big deal, right?
Except that the police decided to cover it up. Instinct perhaps?
Back to the story:
No one was hurt, but the commanding officer of the mayor’s executive protection unit, Howard Redmond, was furious. Text messages obtained by the Daily News show he immediately ordered the incident be covered up to protect de Blasio’s image.
“As per CO [the commanding officer] no one is to know about this,” Sgt. Jerry Ioveno texted members of the unit, referring to Redmond. “Not even the other teams.”
“No one is to know,” he repeated.
Why this would reflect badly on the Mayor is beyond me, even if the Mayor’s driver was at fault. He, after all, was a passenger.
But the NYPD was worried about optics. If there are bad optics, then yeah, maybe it does reflect badly. On the NYPD. And its driver. If the NYPD driver was actually the one at fault.
But the story just gets weirder:
Redmond allegedly ordered that the cop behind the wheel, Detective Edgar Robles, be officially listed as the driver of a backup SUV, text messages show. That way, the unit could more plausibly claim the mayor wasn’t in the vehicle involved in the collision, a source close to the executive protection unit said.
Then, buried down further in the article, it hits: It was the NYPD at fault. Not the other driver:
NYPD spokesman Phil Walzak told The News that the NYPD investigated the accident involving de Blasio’s SUV “and determined the NYPD was at fault. Far from a coverup, this in fact shows the exact opposite – the NYPD took this incident seriously.”
The text messages are almost comical in their ham-handed way of covering up the crash — successfully for years. Some of the texts:
“Is Eagle p—-d?” Ioveno asked in a text message, using de Blasio’s code name.
“Not really,” a detective wrote.“Redmond hell-bent that this doesn’t get out to anyone, we need to kill the story,” executive protection unit cop Jorge Bravo wrote.
“He went off on OPTICS of this detail – the little things (double-parking and crosswalk s–t),” Bravo added…
“No one is to know; also, Eagle was not in the limo … are we clear guys please?” Ioveno said, using the code word limo for the NYPD Chevy Tahoe.
And then came a second crash, this one involving city First Lady Chirlane McCray, multiple vehicles and disappearing witnesses. And in this crash, someone was hurt.
The NYPD went all in, it seems, on trying to cover this one up also. As per one of the attorneys involved:
“The way the police report is written, you can kind of tell they’re covering something up,” Grossman said. “If you see the diagram — it doesn’t make sense. … They seemed to whisk everybody away without anybody saying anything.”
And so it goes. Negligence happens and those who are supposed to document what happens decide to come up with “alternative facts” and hide the witnesses so that innocent victims are frustrated in their ability to find out what actually happened.
The more the world changes, the more it stays the same. Except that sometimes emails and texts help with the Big Reveal.
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