Police Payoff Probe

April 21, 2005 -- Two NYPD veterans are being investigated by Internal Affairs for allegedly accepting payoffs from the motion-picture industry to arrest vendors of pirated DVDs, law-enforcement sources told The Post.

One officer, a sergeant on the force since 1992, has been transferred from the Staten Island Task Force to the 122nd Precinct pending the internal investigation.

The other, a cop for five years, still works on the task force.

As members of the unit, the officers, ages 36 and 32, would arrest the sellers of illegal DVDs and confiscate their stock.

Often they would act on tips from investigators with the Motion Picture Association of America, many of whom are former cops, sources said.

There is nothing improper about that practice. But on at least four occasions in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island, the task force officers arrested the vendors, confiscated the illegal movies and then allegedly received gratuities of several hundred dollars from the MPAA itself or its investigators, the source said.

The MPAA strongly denied that the payoffs came from the trade organization.

"We don't give cash to police officers," said Bill Shannon, an MPAA anti-piracy official.

"We work with law-enforcement organizations by providing information and logistical support, and the police make the arrests."

No department charges have been filed against the NYPD officers, and neither is on modified duty.

The Staten Island Task Force last made headlines in 2003, when one of its members, Officer Bryan Conroy, allegedly shot and killed Ousmane Zongo, an unarmed African immigrant, inside a Manhattan storage warehouse.

Conroy and other officers were at the warehouse to bust DVD pirates.

Zongo, who spoke little English, was an innocent bystander. Conroy's trial earlier this year ended in a hung jury. He will be retried this summer.

The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that it loses $3.5 billion in potential worldwide revenue because of movie piracy.

Hollywood has stepped up its effort to bust video and DVD pirates.

An MPAA tip, for example, led to the recent prosecution of Randy Guthrie, the black sheep of a blueblood New York family, who was recently sentenced to 21/2 years in a Chinese jail for selling nearly $1 million in pirated movies over the Internet.