A dirty cop was sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing guns from his East Village police station house for his drug dealer.
Nicholas Mina, who’d been a cop for four years, peddled four 9 mm guns from his coworkers’ 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 reason for Mina’s crimes are “uncontested,” but what he did was “inexcusable.”
In addition to swiping three Glocks and a Smith & Wesson at 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.
He stuck to the terms of the plea agreement Mina worked out with prosecutors last month, and sentenced him to 15 and a half years in prison followed by five years on parole.
Mina declined to speak at the sentencing.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance 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 Percoset and Vicadin after he was rpescribed the painkillers by an NYPD doctor after getting into an accident in his patrol car.
Investigators discovered his gun peddling while they were investigating a Queens based drugs-for-guns kingpin named Ivan Chavez.
Mina, a cop for 4 1/2 years, was so desperate for painkillers that he sometimes called Chavez from the precinct, court papers say.
The cops recovered all four of the stolen weapon 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 is expected to be sentenced to 20 years behind bars.
The Chavez 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’s been working on a plea deal with prosecutors.