A disgraced NYPD officer admitted yesterday that he falsified charges to arrest an innocent black man after the two exchanged angry words during a street encounter while he was on plainclothes patrol in Staten Island.
Michael Daragjati, a white eight-year veteran, pleaded guilty in Brooklyn federal court to misusing his authority as a police officer to intentionally violate the man’s civil rights.
As part of a plea agreement with Brooklyn federal prosecutors, the 32-year-old officer will resign from the NYPD after his sentencing and never seek another job in law enforcement, his attorney told Judge William Kuntz II.
The officer — who has been suspended without pay since his arrest — faces a maximum sentence of 21 years’ jail, but under the plea deal he will likely receive a term of 46-57 months.
Following the April 2011 street encounter, FBI agents listening into a phone conversation recorded Daragjati talking about the encounter and using the N-word to refer to the man he had arrested on trumped-up resisting arrest charges.
The officer — who has been held in a detention center since his arrest in October — admitted to violating the man’s civil rights and conceded that he acted outside the law to make the arrest.
”I charged an individual…knowing that no probable cause existed to support the charge,” Daragjati said in court.
Daragjati also pleaded guilty an unrelated extortion charge that was connected to his snowplow business.
He admitted that while off-duty – along with a group of men – he had confronted a person whom they suspected of stealing Daragjati’s plow, and then assaulted and injured him.
mmaddux@nypost.com