New Nassau police head targets drug heists

Nassau County's new police commissioner, Thomas Dale, is determined to fight the plague of prescription-drug robberies on Long Island. Just two weekends ago, he saw its tragic consequences close to home.

Hours before the New Year's Eve holdup and shootout at a Seaford drugstore that left an off-duty federal agent and an ex-con thief dead, Dale was there as a customer, picking up medicine for himself and his wife.

"That's my pharmacy -- Charlie's Family Pharmacy," Dale said in an interview.

Two days after the shootings, the 62-year-old Town of Oyster Bay resident, a veteran of more than four decades in the NYPD, officially assumed the commissioner's job.

Besides combating the prescription painkiller problem, Dale said that he is determined to bring down overall crime in the county even more, meet community groups, and make sure that "there are no more problems" with crime evidence handling.

"We do have some issues that we have to address," Dale said.

Statewide, robberies of pharmacies for controlled substances rose to 30 in 2010 from four in 2006, according U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration figures. Local statistics aren't readily available. Newsday reported in 2011 on nine pharmacy robberies and one attempted pharmacy robbery in Nassau and Suffolk.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that a person dies every 19 minutes in the United States from prescription narcotic pain pills, making abuse of such medication the country's fastest rising drug problem.

Some Long Island pharmacists have said they are scrambling to protect themselves with panic buttons, bulletproof glass, surveillance cameras and gun permits.

"It's absolutely a bad situation that we have out here on Long Island now," Dale said in an interview.

Among Nassau's plans to respond, Dale and aides to County Executive Edward Mangano said, are intelligence-driven policing to deploy resources to combat robberies like the one at Charlie's, a countywide summit with pharmacists, and tamper-proof bins being deployed to all eight precincts to collect unused prescription drugs.

Vulnerable pharmacies

Police and social service investigators have compiled a list of the county's vulnerable pharmacies -- based on statistics of diverted drugs, prescription patterns on abused pills and other factors -- and are scrutinizing the locations for any patterns, said Mangano spokeswoman Katie Grilli-Robles.

The programs under development by the police department and Mangano's office are an expansion on work the department has done for the past few years.

The issue of pharmacy robberies came into sharp relief for Dale back in June, after David Laffer shot and killed four people inside a Medford pharmacy before fleeing with thousands of pain pills.

"The one in Suffolk County drove it home for me, and this one [the Seaford robbery] just made the situation twice as bad," Dale said.

Soon after the shooting, Dale's BlackBerry buzzed with word of the bloodshed at the pharmacy where he has been a customer for about 20 years.

"I said to my wife, 'I've got to run down,' " Dale recalled. "I'm going down as the [incoming] police commissioner but I'm going down as these people's friends." When he got to the scene, yellow police tape cordoned off the area and the body of the slain robber lay nearby.

Dale said he comforted store employees and the pharmacist. He made sure they had water and were warm. He made sure the victims understood how the investigation would unfold.

"I wanted to go down there and make sure they were OK," he said.

The Seaford shooting also marked the second fatal friendly-fire case in Nassau County in less than a year.

The first was in March, when an armed plainclothes Nassau officer, Geoffrey Breitkopf, was mistakenly shot dead by a uniformed MTA officer who mistook him for a threat at a crime scene in Massapequa Park.

In the Seaford case, off-duty federal agent John Capano was wrestling with the robber he had just shot and wounded when a retired Nassau police lieutenant, Christopher Geraghty, and an off-duty NYPD officer, Joseph Arbia, came upon them, sources have said. In the confusion, Geraghty shot and killed Capano. Arbia shot and killed the robber, James McGoey, the sources said.

Once Nassau District Attorney Kathleen Rice concludes her inquiries, Dale said, the police academy would review investigators' findings for any lessons on cop-on-cop confrontations. Those would be incorporated into the department's police training and passed on to other police departments.

"It was just a situation that developed. Everyone was trying to do, in my opinion, the right thing. The situation just became tragic," Dale said. He added: "We're going to see if we can learn anything from it."

Lab woes, budget pressure

Dale has a lot on his plate.

In the month before taking office, Dale sketched out to himself about 15 areas he wanted to learn more about, from active cases to the state of the crime lab.

He was hired for the $175,000-a-year post by Mangano to be a set of "fresh eyes" on a department in a county that is struggling to close a $310 million budget gap. Precincts could be shut, and layoffs are possible, Mangano has warned. A state watchdog has slammed the slipshod way the department handled evidence at its now-shuttered crime lab. The department's Internal Affairs Unit is investigating whether cops rebelled against cuts by writing fewer traffic tickets.

In one of his first acts as commissioner, Dale toured all eight Nassau precincts. A decision on whether to close two precincts, he said, is "still up in the air."

When he was interviewed last week, there was still a fresh smell of paint in Dale's second-floor office, which overlooks a courtyard at the department's headquarters in Mineola.

The walls were still bare. Scattered family photos, many of his grandchildren, lay scattered, ready for framing. Boxes of honors from four decades in the NYPD were nearby, ready to be displayed.

Among his most prized memorabilia is a picture he found in the basement of his Park Slope, Brooklyn, childhood home: his great uncle, an NYPD cop named John O. Dale, and the Honor Legion award he won in 1923.

"He was the guy I looked up to" when he was growing up, Dale said.

Dale has two grown children and blushes when he talks about his four grandchildren and how he takes his three granddaughters to the nail salon.

A Long Island resident for 41 years, Dale did not expect a difficult transition from city to suburban policing.

"A precinct looks like a precinct. You got the desk. You got someone on the phone. You got the person inside typing. That's what a precinct is. You got the detectives upstairs," Dale said.

Bio for Thomas V. Dale

AGE: 62

CHILDHOOD: Lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Astoria, Queens

LIVES IN Oyster Bay Town

EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree in economics from Iona College; master's degree in criminal justice from John Jay College, Police Management Institute at Columbia University

JOINED NYPD in 1970. Most recently three-star chief in charge of personnel; previous ranks included officer, detective and assistant chief. Commanded precincts covering the Williamsburg, Bushwick and Coney Island sections of Brooklyn. Held senior borough-wide police supervisor jobs in Queens and the Bronx.

MARRIED for more than four decades to wife Maureen; two children and four grandchildren