A pill-popping dirty cop was sentenced yesterday to 15 years in prison for stealing guns from his East Village station house and selling them to his drug dealer.
Nicholas Mina, who had been a cop for four years, peddled four 9mm guns from his NYPD co-workers’ lockers so he could feed his prescription-drug habit, said his lawyer Robert Gallo.
“He takes responsibility and accountability for his actions,” Gallo said, which were brought about by “the scourge of prescription drugs.”
Justice Edward McLaughlin said the reasons for Mina’s crimes are “uncontested,” but what he did was “inexcusable.”
In addition to swiping three Glocks and a Smith & Wesson from the Ninth Precinct earlier this year, Mina admitted to selling his own private-use Glock — and investigators caught him on wiretaps talking about taking and selling more guns.
Those weapons could have been used against Mina’s fellow officers, the judge noted.
The judge accepted the plea agreement Mina worked out with prosecutors last month, and sentenced him to 15 1/2 years in prison.
Mina, who was fired after his guilty plea, declined to speak at the sentencing.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. called the case “a striking example of the destruction that surrounds prescription-drug abuse.”
“The defendant took an oath to protect New Yorkers from criminals. Instead, he worked alongside a gun trafficker in order to feed his drug addiction,” Vance said.
Gallo said his client had started abusing Percocet and Vicodin. He was prescribed the painkillers by a Police Department doctor after getting into an accident in his patrol car.
Investigators discovered his gun-peddling while they were probing Queens drugs-for-guns kingpin Ivan Chavez.
Mina, 31, was so desperate for painkillers that he sometimes called Chavez from the station house, court papers say.
The cops recovered all four of the stolen weapons plus Mina’s own gun from Chavez’s apartment. He had already heavily defaced the serial numbers.
Chavez pleaded guilty to conspiracy and firearms sales in September and was sentenced to 20 years behind bars last month.
The drug conspiracy has also embroiled a dot-com millionaire — Jennifer Sultan, 38, who allegedly sold Chavez some 60,000 pain pills also recovered in his apartment. She has been working on a plea deal with prosecutors.
Sultan sold her live streaming company, Live on Line, for $70 million in 2000.
She was living in a $6 million Flatiron District apartment when cops busted her for allegedly participating in the ring earlier this year. Prosecutor Chris Prevost said she had acted “as some sort of supplier for Mr. Chavez in various large-scale drug deals she arranged for him for their mutual benefit so that she could supply her own drug business with pills and drugs.”
Sultan has struggled with prescription-drug addiction herself, which caused her to run through much of her fortune, her lawyer, Frank Rothman, has said.