NYPD’S OVERTIME COVERUP
Lied about working on rape cases Despite it all, he retired with full pension
The NYPD’s secretive disciplinary system for its officers has always been the subject of great criticism. In this series, the Daily News profiles the system through four cases that mostly played out behind closed doors, with the department hiding behind a controversial legal interpretation it believes precludes public disclosure.
Here, we profile the case of a sex crimes commander who used real crimes to justify fake overtime.
A DISGRACED NYPD lieutenant who made headlines in 2015 for an infamous weekend trip to Seattle to visit a rape victim was guilty of so much more — but the full extent of his misconduct was hushed up by top brass, the Daily News has learned.
Lt. Adam Lamboy was allowed to retire with a lavish, 50% tax-free pension in 2015 after The News broke the story of his highly inappropriate interaction with the young woman he went to the West Coast to interview.
Missing from the official narrative was something else deeply disturbing: Lamboy was found to have lied about working on rape investigations when in fact he was not.
According to information obtained by The News through records and sources, Lamboy, 47, stole nearly 200 hours of straight time and overtime worth nearly $15,000, forged overtime slips and lied on official documents in the first six months of 2013.
His larceny was documented in an internal NYPD investigation that was kept under wraps The — probe until now. found that Lamboy, then commander of the Manhattan special victims unit, made false statements about his whereabouts during work hours.
He often claimed he was working a rape investigation, or at Police Headquarters or at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, according to department records and sources who spoke with The News.
In reality, Lamboy wasn’t working — and had faked his boss’ signature on his overtime slips, the internal probe found. Investigators were also convinced there was more fraud to unearth — but top NYPD brass meddled in the investigation, The News learned.
His overtime theft got buried in the department’s secretive disciplinary system— and when investigators tried to persuade prosecutors to open a criminal case, they were rebuffed, sources said.
Lamboy’s schemes can be traced to 2013, when he was 43, head of the Manhattan special victims unit and investigating some of the most high-profile sex assaults in the city.
That year, he raked in $297,035 in salary and overtime, records show. It was also that year, on Jan. 13, that a college student told the NYPD she was sexually assaulted by a man inside his Union Square apartment. Lamboy’s unit handled her investigation.
In July, Lamboy flew to Seattle, where the rape victim was living, to interview her. He traveled with his colleague, Officer Lucasz Skorzewski.
During their visit, the two cops took the victim out drinking at local bars, and Skorzewski allegedly made a pass at her — but the incident went unreported for a year.
That same month, as Lamboy left for Seattle, his boss — Capt. Caroline Roe — voiced her suspicions about the lieutenant’s extensive overtime. Roe did not return calls for comment for this story.
On July 14, 2013, Roe filed complaint #2013-30162 with the Internal Affairs Bureau and asked the detective bureau investigations unit to look into whether Lamboy was improperly using an NYPD car, forging his overtime slips and falsely reporting he was present for duty, records show. Investigators pored over six months of records, including Lamboy’s department and personal E-ZPass records, his vehicle log, the unit’s command log and his NYPD cell phone records. From the documents, a pattern emerged: l Jan. 24, 2013: Lamboy said he was at 1 Police Plaza at 7 a.m. for a CompStat meeting. Yet at 7:19 a.m., he used his E-ZPass at the Battery Tunnel. He used it again at the tunnel at 7:55 a.m. At 8:18 a.m., he made a call in Brooklyn and again at 8:43 a.m. Later, he said he was at the DA’s office — and didn’t return to his desk at Police Headquarters until 5:20 p.m.
at 4:01 p.m. he was headed to Brooklyn and made 19 calls from that borough between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., records show.
March 11, 2013: Lamboy said he was at a meeting at Kings County Hospital at 8 a.m. But he made six calls in Suffolk and Nassau counties between 9:27 a.m. and 10:58 a.m. He used his E-ZPass at 11:25 a.m. to enter Manhattan. At 11:30 a.m., he arrived at his command. By the end of the day, he claimed more than four hours of overtime.
May 2, 2013: Lamboy said he clocked in for his job at 9:55 a.m., but he made three calls over the next hour in Suffolk, Nassau and Queens. That evening, he again said he was at the DA’s office, but a halfhour later he was in Brooklyn. He claimed four hours of overtime for working on case #340, a sex abuse case on the Upper West Side — but investigators found no evidence he’d done anything related to the job.
June 15, 2013: Lamboy billed 11 hours of overtime for case #466, a rape and assault in Harlem, records show. But investigators determined he was nowhere near the rape case for seven of those hours.
Cell phone and other records showed he made 16 calls in the Suffolk County towns of Nesconset and Hauppauge when he was supposed to be working the Harlem rape, records show.
He later made another 22 calls in Queens and Brooklyn, nowhere near the rape or his office.
June 17, 2013: Lamboy claimed he was present for duty at 10:25 a.m., but he made 11 calls between 10:17 a.m. and 12:14 p.m. in Suffolk County.
June 25, 2013: Lamboy said he was at the DA’s office at 8 a.m. But he made four calls in Brooklyn from 8:37 a.m. to 8:52 a.m. He claimed he worked five hours of overtime on case #455, a rape on the Upper East Side. Investigators found no evidence to show he was working for nearly four of those hours.
In all, from January to July, 2013, investigators found he was paid conservatively $14,614.80 for 195 hours of straight time and overtime on 49 days he did not work, and they believed the misconduct was far more extensive, sources and records show.
His overtime slips appeared to be signed by Roe and authorized by Deputy Chief Michael Osgood, special victims commander. But investigators found they were signed by Lamboy himself.
The investigation was making waves, and the senior special victims bosses were unhappy with the scrutiny of one of their leading commanders, sources said.
By August 2013, investigators had compiled a summary of the misconduct found when they reviewed six months of Lamboy’s records.
Investigators planned to dig deeper into Lamboy’s work history — but senior leadership in the Detective Bureau blocked it, sources said.
Around the same time, the Lamboy case was presented in an Internal Affairs Steering Committee meeting to brief high-ranking IAB officials on various internal investigations. If the IAB judged the case criminal, the bureau could have taken it over.
But the IAB declined to take Lamboy’s case, so investigators brought it to the official corruption unit at the Manhattan DA’s office, where they were told to leave their file and go.
Two days later, a clerk phoned to say that Lamboy’s case was dead on arrival.
The investigators then met on March 21, 2014, with Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce — who was promoted to that position after Mayor de Blasio took office — and pleaded with him to call Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr. and urged him to give the case a thorough examination, sources said. Boyce declined.
In an April 2014 interview with investigators, Lamboy said he had “no explanation” for his whereabouts on certain days, but copped to forging his overtime slips, sources said.
Boyce closed the Lamboy stealing-time investigation the next day.
At almost the same time, the IAB finally learned of the serious misconduct by Lamboy and his partner during the Seattle trip — and the allegations from the rape victim sparked a whole different investigation.
The Seattle tryst was on the front page of The News on Jan. 15, 2015. In its public statements, though, NYPD officials downplayed any talk of a probe into Lamboy’s theft of time — and tried to focus solely on his Seattle troubles.
The NYPD Department Advocate’s Office charged Lamboy and his partner with misconduct related to their behavior in Seattle — and Lamboy at the same time was quietly charged with stealing time from the department.
Lamboy served a 15-day suspension, lost 45 vacation days and paid a $5,000 fine for his actions in Seattle and his overtime theft.
The NYPD refused to make Boyce or any other officials available to comment on Lamboy’s case.
“All these cases have been subject to disciplinary proceedings which have been concluded,” an NYPD spokesman told The News last week.
Lou Turco, head of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association, said Lamboy’s penalty was severe.
“He paid dearly for his misconduct,” he said.
Lamboy retired on May 31, 2015, and was allowed to keep his pension, which pays him $87,310 a year for the rest of his life, with 50% of it tax-free.
For his part, Lamboy told The News, “No comment, it’s an internal matter with the Police Department. It’s closed.”
Four months after he retired, the Seattle rape victim sued the city and the two cops.
The case settled for $10,000 in March 2017. The city paid $5,000 and Lamboy and Skorzewski paid $2,500 each.