An NYPD sergeant has been fired and becomes the first cop to lose his job in the sweeping Bronx ticket fixing scandal, his lawyer told The Post.
Sgt. Jacob Solorzano was also stripped of his pension after he was implicated in the alleged crimes of fellow officer Jose Ramos, whose drug-dealing ties sparked the massive probe that led to the arrest and indictment of 16 NYPD cops and five civilians.
“He is a sacrificial lamb,’’ lawyer Roger Blank said of Solorzano Tuesday, claiming the city – determined to take away Solorzano’s pension – relied on testimony of a dodgy confidential informant to do it.
Solorzano, 43 and a 20-year NYPD veteran, was canned after he was too sick to show up at an NYPD departmental trial in September.
“He intended to testify,’’ Blank said, but couldn’t because of health issues.
Law enforcement sources told The Post that Solorzano was in a department facility for alcohol abuse at the time.
Blank said Solorzano wanted to delay the trial, but the city wouldn’t budge. The cop was found guilty of official misconduct.
“He was denied his rights to due process,” Blank said, adding that his client now intends to sue the city.
Solorzano was indicted in 2011 on misdemeanor criminal charges stemming from the ticket fixing probe.
Prosecutors claimed that Solorzano pretended to make an arrest during a fake sting operation that had been set up to snare Ramos.
In that operation, Ramos had allegedly planned to steal $30,000 in drug money from an uptown hotel. Solorzano was in the car with Ramos when he was lured to the hotel to grab the money by a confidential informant, since identified as Harry Mingo.
Authorities said Solorzano pretended to make an arrest in a car stop so Ramos could steal the money. What Ramos didn’t know was that the person he allegedly tried to rob was an undercover detective.
Blank said Solorzano – who was not implicated in the actual theft — was wrongly targeted based on misleading testimony from Mingo, who had a history of arrests before the ticket-fixing probe and was part of a crew busted for stealing a $1.5 million shipment of iPads from John F. Kennedy Airport in November 2012.
Republished with permission of The New York Post
