US News

TROOPER SUICIDE

ALBANY – A former top State Police official slated to be questioned in the political Dirty Tricks probe committed suicide yesterday at his upstate home, officials said last night.

Retired State Police Inspector Gary Berwick, the last head of former Gov. George Pataki’s security detail and a one-time key adviser to now-fired acting State Police Superintendent Preston Felton, was found hanging from a rope in his garage in New Windsor, Orange County, by his 12-year-old daughter.

A source close to Berwick told The Post last night that the longtime trooper had expressed “concern in recent weeks about Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s investigation” of alleged political espionage by renegade State Police members.

The source said Berwick’s wife was the last one to see him alive, at about 3:30 p.m.

His daughter, one of the couple’s three children, discovered the body in the garage at about 5 p.m. after disregarding a note left on the door telling her not to enter, the source said.

Berwick hanged himself with a rope that apparently broke, with his body falling to the floor, according to the source.

Berwick, who left as head of the governor’s security detail to become an adviser to Felton shortly after Eliot Spitzer took office in early 2007, was the former driver for Pataki’s wife, Elizabeth.

He is survived by his wife and three daughters.

“He was a wonderful man,” Pataki told The Associated Press, calling Berwick “a person of tremendous integrity, tremendous professionalism.”

Berwick was a protégé of controversial former State Police Col. Daniel Wiese – a central figure in Cuomo’s ongoing probe of allegations that a rogue group of State Police officials engaged in political espionage over several years.

Wiese, who headed Pataki’s security detail before Berwick, was suspended without pay last week as the state Power Authority’s inspector general after Cuomo’s investigators found Wiese’s official state computer and BlackBerry had been purged of e-mails and other records.

Officials said they had no evidence Berwick’s suicide was connected to the probe.

One source said Berwick was “certain” to be interviewed by Cuomo’s investigators because of his “in-depth knowledge” of State Police activities.

Gov. Paterson, who fired Felton within days of taking office in mid-March, asked Cuomo in late March to conduct a criminal probe of the State Police because Paterson said more than 10 state legislators told him they suspected they had been the targets of varying forms of improper police conduct.

Paterson also said he took the action – and went public with his marital infidelities and youthful drug use – because he feared the rogue trooper unit were circulating malicious rumors about him.

Pataki countered the claims, insisting, “They did not have a rogue unit.”

Last summer, Cuomo issued a blockbuster report on the Dirty Tricks Scandal that found then-Gov. Spitzer and his top aides used the State Police to gather purportedly damaging information on the alleged misuse of state aircraft by Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Rensselaer.)

The report concluded that Bruno had done nothing illegal.

fredric.dicker@nypost.com