Nearly 1,000 cases affected

A sweeping, 14-month investigation into evidence tampering at the Boston Police Department's central drug depository has found that drugs confiscated in nearly 1,000 cases over 16 years were stolen or improperly discarded, Commissioner Edward F. Davis said yesterday.

The FBI, prosecutors from Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley's office, and Boston police have launched a criminal investigation to determine who took the drugs.

The drugs included cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and Oxycontin, Davis said. The Oxycontin was often replaced with a substance similar to Tylenol or aspirin, he said.

An officer or officers were almost certainly involved, Davis said, because only police are allowed into the Hyde Park depository.

Davis said he plans to inform defense lawyers involved with the drug cases to let them know about the audit's results.

None of the drug cases in which evidence was missing are still open. Jake Wark, spokesman for Conley, said the district attorney's office is investigating whether any of the closed drug cases were compromised because of the missing evidence.

"It's simply too early to tell," he said. "We will be looking closely at whether and how any defendant's closed cases may have been affected."

The revelations have sparked Davis to conduct an audit of all department units, including hiring and personnel.

"We're really going to shake the place out and make sure that every department is up to national standards," Davis said.

The audit examined 110,000 individual quantities or batches of drugs from more than 74,000 cases between 1990 and 2006. Police officials had initially planned to audit only a small portion of the evidence in storage, an investigation launched in 2006 as a precautionary measure because evidence was being moved to another part of the warehouse.

But department officials decided to conduct the more extensive investigation when they learned that drugs that had just been inventoried were missing. As a result of that discovery, the 12 officers who worked at the depository were transferred to other areas in December 2006. None has been charged.

"It's an unprecedented step to do a complete inventory of drug evidence," Davis said. "I don't know anybody else in the Commonwealth who has done that."

Police officials found that bags of drugs were often cut open and the contents sometimes replaced with other substances.

In other cases, the drugs were simply stolen from the bags.

Police found problems with 965 cases, which were defined as one or more envelopes containing drugs. In 265 cases, 368 drugs were missing from the envelopes or showed some type of tampering.

In 700 other cases, the envelopes were missing entirely from warehouse shelves, and police are still investigating whether they were stolen or just thrown out. In those missing envelopes were hundreds of bags of drugs, including: 467 bags of cocaine; 125 of heroin; 197 of marijuana, and 20 pills, tablets, or capsules.

Officials do not know how many people were involved. "This could have all been perpetrated by one person," Davis said.

Finding the culprit will be difficult, officials acknowledged. Davis said investigators do not know when most of the drugs were taken.

Many of the affected cases involved investigations conducted between 1991 and 1997.

Superintendent Daniel Linskey said whoever stole the drugs might have tapped older cases in a belief that officials were less likely to discover they were missing.

"If the drugs have been sitting there for a while and I'm going to do this, what's the likelihood of me getting caught?" he said.

But Davis said many drugs lose their potency after a year, making it more likely they were taken during those earlier dates.

Police are also looking into whether some of the evidence may have been lost during moves between department units during the 1990s.

Drugs were moved from district stations to a central drug unit in Jamaica Plain. In 1996, the evidence was permanently moved to Hyde Park, into a 13,500-square-foot building that also stores evidence from gun and homicide cases.

Commanders overseeing the warehouse were concerned about security from the time the facility opened. There was only one camera recording who went in and out of the facility, and officers were allowed to go alone inside the warehouse. Since the audit, the department has installed 20 cameras at the facility and officers must enter the warehouse in pairs.

At least three commanders of the warehouse had asked for audits of the depository. Department policy recommends that an audit of 1 percent of the drug evidence be conducted annually, but the only other audit conducted was in 2004, by Lieutenant Detective John Fedorchuk, who worked in evidence management at the facility for eight months in 2000.

When the most recent audit was ordered, Fedorchuk was again assigned to conduct it, a decision that raised concerns over a conflict of interest from union officials, who decried the transfer of Captain Frank Armstrong. Armstrong had been assigned to oversee the warehouse in 2006 and recommended the audit that uncovered so many problems.

But Davis defended the decision, stating Fedorchuk has extensive experience in auditing and review.

Fedorchuk made several recommendations, including installing more cameras, but they were not implemented at the time. Driscoll said officials do not know why the recommendations were not adopted or why yearly audits were not conducted.

Davis said the audit is an opportunity to request changes in state law that will allow police to destroy drug evidence immediately after it is confiscated.

Currently, Boston police are not allowed to destroy evidence until a convicted felon's appeals process has been exhausted, which can take decades.

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