Never mind man’s best friend; this guy wanted his chocolate lab to be the next Superdog.
The feds busted a Westchester man who impersonated an anti-terrorism agent so he could get a Department of Defense badge certifying the hound as an expert bomb-sniffer, authorities said.
Preston Goldsmith, 39, hoped he could hoodwink a vendor into selling him a badge bearing the words, “Federal Law DoD Enforcement K-9” by claiming that he was a field agent for the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force.
After the harebrained scheme unraveled, Goldsmith admitted he “wanted the badge so that he could tell potential customers that his canine was certified by law enforcement as a particular kind of explosive-detection canine” and charge higher prices for his services, a criminal complaint charged.
Goldsmith paid about $4,000 a year ago to buy the retriever, which had been trained in bomb detection, according to a source in the security industry.
Goldsmith and his pooch — who was not named — were later hired on a freelance basis to perform sweeps at Manhattan’s Javits Center and the US Open in Queens, earning about $80 an hour.
But the suspect hoped for a bigger payday and in July reached out to the vendor, claiming he worked for the feds.
He even went so far as to submit a forged signature of George Venizelos, the assistant director in charge of the New York FBI office, to support his claim, the complaint said.
“He’s a man who should have been content with a very well-trained, well-behaved and very effective tool, but that wasn’t enough for him, so he wanted a badge,” the security source said.
The vendor thought the overture was fishy and reported his suspicions to the feds.
Goldsmith was charged Thursday with “false personation of an officer or an employee of the United States.”
He was arraigned before Manhattan Magistrate Frank Maas and released on a $250,000 bond.
Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli and Rich Calder