15 Police Officers Arrested in N.Y. on Tax Evasion Charge

NEW YORK — Fifteen city police officers have been arrested for tax evasion, with some claiming that they didn’t have to pay taxes because, according to them, New York isn’t part of the United States, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Although that may sound like militia rhetoric, investigators say the officers were really driven by dollars, not ideology.

“It was greed, bottom line,” said Donald Wanick, a chief investigator for the Internal Revenue Service.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said later in the day that a continuing criminal probe by the city’s Department of Investigation showed the problem existed in other agencies and could involve at least 600 people, Reuters reported. Details on the other cases were not immediately available.

Since 1992, the officers who were arrested have avoided paying about $450,000 on $1.6 million in income. They face a variety of charges, including tax evasion, failure to file and conspiracy to defraud the government.

Some of the defendants sent letters to the IRS declaring themselves outside the sovereignty of the United States, U.S. Atty. Mary Jo White said at a news conference.

In 1992, two of the accused--Det. Barton Adams, 34, and Officer Frank Sambula, 34--began peddling tax-dodging “packages” to fellow officers, charging them $900 to $2,000 each for the advice, authorities said.

During off-duty meetings, they advised clients to eliminate their federal and state paycheck deductions by claiming 98 or 99 withholding allowances, authorities said. They also instructed them to skip filing returns and to sign a form letter to the IRS declaring themselves tax-exempt.

“I don’t think I would categorize it as a tax protest,” said one defense lawyer, Howard Weiswasser. “It’s more like idiocy, lunacy. As P. T. Barnum said: ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ ”

The scheme went unnoticed for nearly four years because the defunct Housing Police Department, for which 14 of the 15 defendants once worked, failed to alert the IRS that no deductions were being taken from the officers’ wages, which ranged from $30,000 to $50,000 a year.