A drug-addicted city cop was ripping open evidence bags to grab cocaine and raiding medicine “drop-off boxes” to get painkillers, according to an arrest warrant from state police.
The officer, Matthew Macero, cast a web of deceit, once claiming he failed a drug test because powdered cocaine accidentally ended up on his face as he inspected a baggie found on the street.
The arrest warrant was made available to the public Thursday.
It provides the first public details — albeit only law enforcement’s version of events — about the investigation into Macero. It explains why state police camped outside the Ansonia Police Department in September 2013, scouring the building’s evidence room.
Macero, a decorated Ansonia police officer for 12 years before he retired during the investigation, faces three felony charges: illegal alteration of records, possession of narcotics and second-degree larceny.
Reaction
Asked if Macero was a drug addict, Ansonia Police Chief Kevin Hale said people can reach their own conclusions.
“I’m going to let people infer what they want. The affidavit speaks for itself,” he said. “This rocks you to the core. This is not what we want to be about.”
Macero is free on a $5,000 bond in the case pending a court appearance Oct. 27.
Macero’s lawyer, Daniel Esposito, e‑mailed the Valley Indy a statement Thursday saying Macero would be cleared of the charges.
Macero entered a not guilty plea during his first court appearance.
Esposito said Macero is “a hero” who is being scapegoated.
“He was an asset to the Ansonia Police Department and to the task forces to which he was assigned,” the lawyer wrote. “The Ansonia Police Department may very well have an issue with its handling of evidence, but those failures have nothing to do with Matt.
“It’s reprehensible that (Ansonia Police) Chief Kevin Hale has chosen to shift the blame for his own inadequacies to one of his finest officers,” Esposito’s statement continues. “We look forward to Matt’s vindication.”
Article continues after the lawyer’s statement below.
Esposito Statement by ValleyIndyDotOrg
Macero supporters posting on the Valley Indy Facebook wall point out Ansonia police previously accused one of their own of wrongdoing — former Officer Mustafa Salahuddin — and were routed when the matter went to trial.
Click here for Hale’s initial statement on Macero’s arrest, published by the Valley Indy Sept. 15.
What Happened?
Macero was, by all public accounts, a good police officer.
In 2012, he foiled an attempted burglary of a Maple Street market, leading to the arrest of four teenagers.
He was one of several Ansonia officers thanked by the federal Department of Justice in March 2010 for playing a role in a Beaver Street weapons sting in 2009.
In May 2013, Macero was given a departmental citation for more than seven years of work as an undercover officer serving in the Valley Street Crimes Unit and the Ansonia Police Department’s Anti-Crime Unit.
But the arrest warrant paints a different picture, portraying him as a cop who eventually took advantage of his position to steal drugs seized by police to feed his own habit.
The warrant, citing a worker’s compensation issue, notes that Macero also apparently sought help for substance abuse problems through rehab.
Initial Suspicions
State police began their investigation Sept. 26, 2013 at the request of Chief Hale.
On Sept. 13, 2013 the warrant says, two other Ansonia cops had seen Macero accessing a drop box for prescription meds found in the police department’s front lobby.
The box is a place where the public can safely dispose unwanted medicine.
He wasn’t authorized to open the drop box, according to the warrant.
Hale was told Sept. 16 that Macero had taken two drug tests for a worker’s compensation claim and had allegedly tested positive for cocaine and methadone.
The chief then ordered Lt. Wayne Williams and Detective Sgt. Patrick Lynch to investigate why Macero had been accessing the prescription drop-off box.
The pair was also told to do an inventory of the evidence room to see if any evidence had been tampered with.
Their review uncovered 16 cases of “apparent evidence tampering,” the warrant says.
When briefed on the results, the chief ordered Williams and Lynch to halt their probe and called in the state police to take over the investigation, per the department’s protocol.
Surveillance Footage
State cops from the Western District Major Crime Squad responded, parking a van behind the police station on Elm Street for several days as they inventoried evidence and did extensive interviews with police officers.
In the warrant, written by state police Detective John Kimball, authorities flat-out accuse Macero of cutting open evidence bags.
“The accused cut the original APD evidence bag to access the contents,” the warrant says. “The accused then resealed the APD evidence bag, usually through the use of transparent adhesive tape. A secondary method was accomplished by the accused simply tearing the bag open, with no attempt to reseal the bag.”
State cops also reviewed a month’s worth of surveillance footage of the police department’s evidence room.
Macero allegedly shows up on the footage three times.
On the first occasion, Macero is seen on the video “elbows deep” rummaging through drug evidence, and in several instances, “suddenly stopping his movements, then raising his left hand to his mouth.”
Other video footage depicts Macero retrieving drug evidence from a cabinet and/or the department’s drug “burn barrel” and leaving the evidence room on multiple occasions.
The “burn barrel” is what police use to periodically destroy narcotics no longer needed to be stored as evidence.
“In summary, during the time depicted on the surveillance footage, only four officers spent any appreciable time inside the evidence room,” the warrant says.
“Of these four officers, Macero was the only officer not designated as a department evidence officer,” the document states. “And Macero was the only shown on video repeatedly accessing the narcotics cabinet and removing items consistent with the appearance of evidence, then leaving the evidence room with these items. Macero is also the only individual shown accessing and removing items from the burn barrel.”
DNA Evidence
The case against Macero also contains DNA evidence, according to the arrest warrant.
A half-eaten, green oxycodone pill was found during the state police review of evidence in Ansonia.
The pill had been part of a drug seizure by Ansonia police in September 2011 — but the pill was confiscated fully intact, the department’s records showed.
The pill was sent to the state police crime lab in Meriden to be analyzed. Macero’s DNA profile was found on the pill, according to the warrant.
Short Counts
The state police audit of the evidence room also turned up several “short counts” in the evidence room — instances in which investigators discovered discrepancies between how much drugs a given bag’s label said were inside, and how much was actually in the bag.
The bags were coming up light.
In other instances, state police said narcotics were replaced with substances that weren’t narcotics. Other evidence bags had simply been emptied of their contents, even though their labels indicated they should contain a quantity of narcotics.
’Exposure Report,’ Failed Drug Tests
Ansonia police Lt. Williams told investigators that Macero had filed an “exposure report” on June 3, 2013 with police saying he had gotten cocaine on his face while inspecting evidence he had found on the street.
The warrant noted that the day Macero filed his “exposure report” he had been “made aware” he would be taking a drug test June 3.
In the “exposure report,” Macero said that while on duty, he had been sent to an area “with high documented drug activity.” He found what he suspected was a gram of cocaine on the ground in a clear plastic baggie.
He wrote that he picked up the back to inspect it.
“As this writer (Macero) picked up the bag, the contents of this bag shot out of the bag into this writer’s face,” the warrant quotes Macero as saying. “The white powder-like substance went into this writer’s eyes, mouth, and nose, causing this writer to be startled and fall backwards.”
’Classic Addictive Behavior’
The warrant concludes Macero didn’t steal drugs to make money through illegal sales — but rather for his own use.
In doing so, he “exploited the trust of his fellow officers — thereby placing them in danger of discipline,” as well as “manufactured and falsified documents, employed multiple deceptions … and took overt steps in order to avoid detection, all for personal gain.”
“Once caught, Macero refused to cooperate with investigators from his own department, and state police,” the warrant says. “All of the behaviors are consistent with classic addictive and drug-seeking behavior.”
Investigations Tainted?
The state police probe of narcotics kept in the evidence room of the Ansonia Police Department found 45 criminal cases which show signs of tampering.
The situation has the “potential of far-reaching effects on multiple cases,” according to the warrant.
The warrant does not itemize each suspected case of tampering. State police allege Macero carefully chose which evidence bags to target.
“Detectives uncovered evidence through court paperwork that the perpetrator attempted (to) choose evidence with which to tamper which they believed would have a low probability of detection — such as narcotics which were the subject of destruction orders,” the warrant says.
John R. Williams, a New Haven-based defense lawyer, said Thursday that if any of those cases are still pending in court, it will be trouble for state prosecutors.
“I think that I have a couple of active cases that he was involved with,” Williams said, without getting into the specifics of those cases. “This has a significant impact.”
Prosecutors can’t introduce evidence that’s gone missing, and if a prosecutor put Macero on the witness stand in such a case, his testimony could be “easily impeached,” Williams said.
In those cases, he said defense lawyers could pressure prosecutors into dropping the charges.
But with respect to evidence connected to cases already finished in court, Williams said “it’s a little difficult to do very much.”
The lawyer also said it was curious that Macero wasn’t charged with tampering with evidence, a Class D Felony.
“They certainly could,” Williams said after reading the warrant. “They just chose not to either because they think it’s easier to prove this or they’re hoping it will reduce the collateral impact.”
Hale, the Ansonia police chief, said Thursday that Ansonia police performed their own review of the 45 alleged instances of tampering and determined that the majority of those cases were “non-prosecutable” — cases in which drugs might have been found somewhere and then turned into police, or where undercover officers performed a “controlled buy” but then couldn’t ID the alleged seller.
But nine of the alleged tampering involved cases that went to court, he said.
“We identified nine cases that were in the court system, and we sat down and reviewed those with the (prosecutors),” Hale said. “What they did after that is up to them.”
The Valley Indy asked Mark Dupuis, a spokesman for the chief state’s attorney’s office, how prosecutors handled the nine cases.
But he wouldn’t answer since his office is now prosecuting Macero.
“We do not comment on pending cases,” Dupuis said.
Next Step
Macero is scheduled to appear Oct. 27 at Superior Court in New London.
Though the alleged crimes occurred in Ansonia, allegations of wrongdoing against cops are routinely transferred to other courthouses to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.
