The Bronx deputy inspector in charge of the NYPD’s in ternal-affairs ticket-fixing probe has been ensnared in the scandal himself — after allegedly having a highway cop fix a speeding ticket for an apparent relative.
Internal Affairs Bureau Deputy Inspector John McDermott — who once bragged to pals that the ticket-fixing investigation would be his crowning achievement — allegedly had a speeding ticket that was issued to a Bridget McDermott in 2009 disappear, a law-enforcement source told The Post yesterday.
The NYPD has angrily denied the accusation.
The bombshell allegation surfaced two weeks ago, when a Bronx highway cop was questioned in front of a grand jury and later by IAB investigators, the source said. Inspector McDermott was not among the IAB probers who interviewed the cop, the source said.
“I was approached by a cop from the 44th Precinct and asked to take care of a speeding ticket for Inspector McDermott,” the highway cop told investigators, the source said.
The highway cop admitted to making the ticket go away, the source said. He identified Kevin Driscoll, a veteran Bronx cop, as the officer who requested the ticket fix, the source said.
The relationship between McDermott, a Westchester resident, and Bridget McDermott is not clear. Inspector McDermott is the field officer in charge of the day-to-day operations of the IAB probe into the scandal.
He declined comment yesterday.
NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told The Post that the allegation “is a complete fabrication.
“The officer’s purported claim that he was asked to fix a ticket for a family member of Inspector McDermott is false,” Browne said. “No such request was made by an officer or anyone else for or on the inspector’s behalf or [for] any family [member]. Someone is either grossly ill-informed or you’re being set up.”
Driscoll could not be reached.
A spokesman for Bronx DA Robert Johnson declined comment.
A police source yesterday said he was not surprised that an IAB cop might be involved in the scandal.
“This just shows that this is the culture of the job. If you asked everybody in IAB under oath, more would say that they either had a ticket fixed or knew of a ticket being fixed for a relative than don’t,” the source said.
McDermott had been mulling retirement before the ticket-fixing scandal broke — and had put off leaving the force as he told pals that the probe would “be my Michael Dowd case,” the source said.
Dowd became the poster boy for police corruption in the 1990s after admitting that he and other dirty NYPD cops ripped off Brooklyn drug dealers and later sold the drugs themselves.
McDermott is the second deputy inspector caught up in the ticket-fixing scandal, which could lead to criminal charges for dozens of NYPD cops and departmental sanctions for as many as 400 other officers, sources said.