Ciresi

PROVIDENCE — A jury began deliberations in the Superior Court trial of suspended North Providence police Sgt. Michael Ciresi yesterday after listening to lawyers argue whether Ciresi was a “good cop” who has been falsely accused or a “dirty cop” who enlisted his drug-dealing informants to commit crimes for his financial gain.

Much of the closing arguments yesterday centered on charges linked to Ciresi’s alleged role in the burglary of a drug dealer’s apartment at 459 East Ave., Pawtucket, two days before Christmas 2004.

Within two hours of the break-in, Mark Pine, the burglar captured at the scene, was telling Pawtucket police that he had been joined by Ciresi. He said the officer had given him gloves, a mask and a gun. The police retrieved Ciresi’s gun from behind a trash basket in the apartment.

Yesterday, one of Ciresi’s defense lawyers, John Lynch Jr., said Ciresi would not have been in the courtroom were it not for “the sloppiness” of Pawtucket police who were taken in by Pine’s false accusations.

Pine, he said, “was caught and knew he had no escape” other than to come up with a fantastic story that would implicate a police officer, something he was in a position to do because he had stolen Ciresi’s gun from Ciresi’s glove compartment and could claim that Ciresi had given it to him.

Lynch argued that detectives were so taken with Pine’s version that they failed to pursue other leads. While Ciresi’s cell phone records were checked, he said, the police didn’t check Pine’s calls, including those to his brother, Troy, and they failed to take fingerprints of Ciresi’s glove compartment.

But, Lynch said, the story that Pine gave the police and his testimony at the trial “does not make sense.” Anyone who believed Pine’s story, he said, would have to believe that Ciresi, then a 17-year member of the force and an expert in the use of weapons, would give a loaded gun — traceable to himself — to a convicted felon who had just gotten out of jail.

Lynch argued that a charge in which Ciresi allegedly conspired with Pine in 2002 to set off a small explosive outside the window of drug dealer on Charles Street in North Providence so the two could enter the apartment and steal money and drugs did not fit with the testimony of a patrolman, called to the scene by Ciresi, who said they went in and out of the apartment together.

A charge that informant Darryl Streeper sold Ciresi a $2,500 bracelet that had been stolen from a car by another convicted felon, Dennis Bautista, also was undermined, Lynch said, because Streeper couldn’t remember whether he sold the necklace to Ciresi. Lynch said the story was undermined by Bautista’s insistence that the encounter with Ciresi took place in Ciresi’s driveway, when the location Bautista described in his testimony matched the location of Streeper’s brother’s house, not Ciresi’s.

He said it also stretched the limits of believability that Ciresi would have tried to break into and steal money from a stolen ATM machine in view of a fellow officer and while other officers from North Providence, Providence and Warwick were outside. Rather than trying to pry open the machine as prosecutors alleged, Lynch said, Ciresi was merely trying to do his job, trying to remove the outer shell to see if Bautista had tried to open the safe.

Lynch acknowledged that Ciresi was known in the department for sometimes “bending the rules” but insisted that because a folder containing a traffic ticket issued to Ciresi’s informant, Streeper, ended up inside Ciresi’s locker did not mean Ciresi was trying to shield Streeper from prosecution. If Ciresi had wanted to shield the informant, Lynch said, he would have not have left the folder in his locker.

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Dawson acknowledged that much of the testimony has been incredible, but “it’s all true … You can’t make this stuff up.”

The case rests on the credibility of the witnesses, where the “bad guys” — convicted burglars and drug dealers — have been more “truthful” than those expected to uphold the law, he said.

“There was a lack of leadership at the top of the North Providence Police Department” that gave Ciresi “free rein” to do what he chose “with no checks or balances,” Dawson said.

It was evident from testimony that Ciresi had cultivated a relationship with his informants that gave him an unusual opportunity to use the informants for his own criminal ends and to reap benefits for himself, while masquerading as a “good cop,” Dawson said.

But even if jurors discounted the testimony from “the bad guys,” Dawson said, they would still be able to find Ciresi guilty on the Pawtucket burglary case based on statements he made during his initial phone conversation and his videotaped interview with Pawtucket police.

If Ciresi were honest, Dawson asked, why did he initially tell his then-superior, retired police Capt. Christopher Cardarelli, on Dec. 23, 2004 — about eight hours after the Pawtucket home invasion — that he had received a call from informant Pine the night before about possible drug activity at a house in Pawtucket and not tell Cardarelli that he had met with Pine? Why didn’t he tell Cardarelli that he and Pine had done a “drive by” of the house? Or did he make the call to Cardarelli, the godfather to one of his children, only to set up an alibi?

Other details about Ciresi’s conversation with Pawtucket police need examination, Dawson said. He said jurors should note the striking similarity between the profanities heard by the people in the Pawtucket apartment the night of the home invasion and the profanities Ciresi used when Pawtucket detectives advised him he had been implicated in a break-in.

And perhaps more telling, he said, was Ciresi’s confident insistence that the mask that Pine wore in the home invasion was nothing like the mask that he has at work. How would Ciresi know what kind of mask Pine was wearing unless Ciresi gave it to him, Dawson asked?

And what about the mask found on the back seat of Ciresi’s car? Hadn’t Ciresi told the police that when he met Pine he moved all of his SWAT gear to the trunk of his car, Dawson asked? “So why was there a mask still on the back seat? That would have been the one that Ciresi wore when they broke into the apartment.”

The jury is deliberating two counts of burglary, two counts of conspiracy to commit burglary, use of a firearm in the commission of a crime of violence, receiving a stolen generator, receiving a stolen bracelet (a felony), attempted larceny from a stolen ATM, harboring and obstruction of a police officer.

rdujardi@projo.com