NYPD Bad Cop’s Illegal Search Mars Career, Good Cop Image : New York: Lt. Patricia Feerick is a born leader, a lawyer, a role model. She is also, a jury decided, a bully, a liar and a lawbreaker.

Call it a case of good lieutenant, bad lieutenant.

The good lieutenant is a born leader. Lawyer. Role model.

The bad lieutenant is an overzealous bully. Lawbreaker. Liar.

The images, good and bad, both belong to Patricia Feerick.

Late last year, a Manhattan jury found the decorated officer and three of her subordinates guilty of terrorizing several East Harlem apartment dwellers during an illegal search for a stolen police radio.

Barring a successful appeal, Feerick, 35, who recently married and is expecting her first child, will begin serving a two-year prison sentence later this year.

Feerick’s victims portrayed her as “the most abusive, nasty and threatening” of the four defendants, the judge noted at sentencing. She is unrepentant.

“Do I regret anything? I regret caring enough to do my job,” she said in an interview. “Imagine. Two years for doing my job.”

Feerick’s fall from grace is more than a personal ordeal. Within the NYPD, her case is viewed as a lesson in the pitfalls of aggressive policing, the frustrations of the war on drugs, the erosion of police credibility.

Police brass conceded Feerick may have overstepped her authority, but questioned the severity of her punishment.

“It left a bad impression,” said Michael Julian, who was the department’s chief of personnel at the time. “You destroy the career of a woman who devoted her life to public service, and the drug dealers walk away free.”

On Sept. 26, 1990, Feerick’s main concern was a $1,500 police radio.

Police had received a tip that the radio was in a 32nd-floor apartment in a massive private complex overrun by Purple City, a gang known for selling vials of crack with purple caps.

Officers later overheard unauthorized transmissions, including a threat against the commander of a narcotics unit in the 25th Precinct--Feerick. Gang members “knew me and hated me,” the lieutenant said.

Feerick, with a tall, sturdy frame and stern on-duty demeanor, was known for her dogged pursuit of both criminals and career.

She grew up on Long Island, became a nurse, then jumped to the NYPD in 1982. She made sergeant in 1986, lieutenant in 1989 and was due for a promotion to captain. Along the way, she won eight medals for meritorious police work.

She also was a part-time student at St. John’s University law school. She briefly taught search and seizure law at the police academy.

But she returned to the streets, where she relished battling Purple City.

“It was so inspiring to see a female supervisor, especially a white woman, who actually wanted to work in East Harlem,” said former officer Mayra Schultz, one of the officers convicted with Feerick. “It made me want to work for her.”

Feerick was outraged by the thought of the radio in the hands of the gang. She asked her superiors to let her search the 32nd-floor apartment. They told her they wanted to get a warrant first.

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The good lieutenant wasn’t content to wait.

According to the defense’s version of events, Feerick decided to launch a random--and perfectly legal--door-to-door canvass of a different building in the same complex. Officers Schultz, Orlando Rosario and John DeVito joined her.

By chance, a woman named “Nikki” answered the door at one apartment on the 32nd floor. She invited Feerick and three other officers into what amounted to a dirty, three-bedroom ashtray. Trash, including empty crack vials, was everywhere. Another woman was sleeping under a pile of clothes.

Neither woman knew about the radio. But they indicated that an apartment-mate named “Ben” might. The officers waited a half hour for Ben to return. He didn’t. They left.

Outside the building, they ran into Benjamin Stokes, a convicted drug dealer. He dropped a brown paper bag and fled. Inside the bag were more than 500 vials of crack and $100 cash, evidence the officers later booked.

At 10:30 that night, an anonymous caller told police they would find the radio in a bag next to a security booth at the apartment complex.

“See? You put a little pressure on the block and you get results,” Feerick’s supervisor told the troops the next day.

A footnote: Rosario arrested Stokes four months later after what the defense says was a chance encounter.

*

The bad lieutenant also wasn’t content to wait for a warrant.

According to the prosecution’s version, Feerick decided to search the 32nd floor apartment of Denise Jackson, where she knew an alleged Purple City dealer, Stokes, sublet a room.

Guns drawn, the four officers rushed into the apartment, threw Jackson against the wall, rousted her friend and unleashed a barrage of obscenities.

The lieutenant ripped apart a stuffed animal belonging to one of Jackson’s children. The officers flipped over furniture, dumped food out of the refrigerator, ripped down curtains and wrote, “We want the radio!” in big letters on the living room wall.

Jackson’s friend finally directed Feerick to a sixth-floor apartment where she found Stokes. He, too, denied any knowledge of the radio. Feerick responded by beating the bottom of his feet with her nightstick.

The officers tore apart the second apartment, finding cash and crack. They cut a deal with Stokes: Arrange the return of the radio and avoid arrest. They left with the drugs and money.

A shaken Jackson, meanwhile, went to a neighbor’s home and called 911.

An internal affairs detective arrived at the trashed apartment and began investigating. By then, Feerick and the officers had begun a cover-up that included filing documents that falsely stated Stokes dropped the drugs and ran.

Stokes found out who had the radio and upheld his end of the deal.

A footnote: Rosario arrested Stokes four months later, prosecutors say, as revenge for Jackson’s reporting the illegal search.

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Feerick, Schultz, Rosario and DeVito were indicted in March, 1994. The lieutenant was charged with criminal trespass, unlawful imprisonment and official misconduct.

A grand jury indictment of Stokes was dismissed after he agreed to testify against the officers.

The defense, apparently convinced that a jury wouldn’t believe Stokes and the others, never called the officers or any witnesses to the stand.

Acting Supreme Court Judge Bonnie Wittner admonished Feerick for failing to use “your position of authority and natural leadership ability to set an example for those you commanded. . . . You misused your position and took three other police officers down with you.”

Some, including the American Civil Liberties Union, praised Feerick’s two-year sentence for sending a message that police misconduct would not be tolerated. But many officers viewed it as an assault on their honor.

Feerick, who recently passed the bar exam, remains confident that an appeals court will side with her.

If cleared, she wants to become a defense lawyer--and a good mother.

“I was so devoted to the Police Department,” she said. “All this has opened my eyes to the more important things in life.”