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Four cops are getting the third degree from NYPD brass after a Manhattan socialite personally complained to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly that the NYPD hadn’t done enough to find her missing jewels, The Post has learned.
The remark to Kelly by Toni Goodale, a big-name Democratic Party and charity fund-raiser, ignited a firestorm in the Upper East Side’s 19th Precinct, where the targeted cops fear it could tarnish their reputations and stall their careers.
Long a society-page staple, Goodale, 70, is married to James Goodale, a former vice chairman of The New York Times and the lawyer who argued the Pentagon Papers case before the Supreme Court.
Toni Goodale has boasted on occasions about her closeness to Mayor Bloomberg and championed his flirtation with a presidential run, according to reports.
Now, many police insiders — and Goodale herself — are questioning whether police brass overreacted to her remark to Kelly by launching a wide- ranging internal probe into how detectives handled her case.
“I, of course, feel remorse that some detectives are now under review,” Goodale told The Post in an e-mail.
“My intent has never been to get anyone into trouble. Just to be clear, I never complained to Ray Kelly,” she wrote. “Commissioner Kelly and I saw each other over the holidays at a party, and I briefly mentioned that I had been robbed. I expressed frustration, but it was not, in any way, a complaint.”
Nevertheless, Kelly made her missing jewelry — said to be five or six pieces totaling about $200,000 — Priority No. 1 after the two spoke late last year.
The Goodales had reported the theft in January 2010.
Kelly handed the case to his top deputy, Chief of Detectives Phil Pulaski, who put the 19th Precinct’s cops in the hot seat, sources said.
There were no specific allegations that the detectives mishandled the case, a source said.
“It was, ‘We want to punish you because the jewelry wasn’t found,’ rather than, ‘We know you did this or that wrong and want to ask about that,’ ” said a Manhattan detective familiar with the grilling.
Top brass have been “torturing squad commander [Lt. James Malloy] and others who work with him,” the police source said. “They’ve been beating them up for months on this.”
In addition to Malloy, a sergeant directly under him and two detectives were interrogated.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said, “Commissioner Kelly responds to citizen complaints from the poorest precincts to the richest, and the 19th is not exempt from the bureau’s monthly review of 10 to 15 cases in all other squads, some randomly and some based on complaints.”
The cops, according to sources, told the brass that the Goodales had initially been slow in providing names of visitors to their East 80th Street apartment, where the jewels had allegedly been taken from a safe.
But Toni Goodale said she directed the cops to the building superintendent’s visitors log.
James Goodale said the jewels were reported missing from his wife’s safe the same day they were discovered gone. During the time in between, “We had no visitors to the apartment other than the maids and family,” James Goodale said.
“We hired a private investigations firm because we were disappointed in the Police Department’s actions,” said James Goodale, 77, a lawyer with Debevoise & Plimpton. “[The cops] have done nothing, it seems to me. If they haven’t solved the crime, they ought to solve the crime.”