Prosecutors drop most charges against officer

Sunrise officer accused of leaking info to press

A former Sunrise police sergeant accused of leaking secrets to the media is free after pleading no contest to a single charge of making a false official statement, a deal that involves no jail time and will not show up as a conviction on his criminal record.

Prosecutors confirmed Wednesday that the case against Roger Krege, 45, was resolved partly because a key witness against him was his ex-wife, whose hostile divorce might have been exploited by the defense, and partly to protect the type of information Krege was accused of leaking in the first place.

As part of the deal, Krege was sentenced to six months’ probation and resigned from the Sunrise Police Department in December.

Krege’s attorney, Robert Buschel, said the deal was in his client’s best interest because it closes out the case, leaves him with no criminal record, and allows him to keep his pension and his certification as a law enforcement officer.

“We would have loved to try this case in front of a jury,” Buschel said. “We believe we would have won. But there hasn’t been a jury trial since the pandemic started. We do know that his probation will be over before jury trials resume.”

Krege was formally charged in September with 11 criminal counts stemming from a 2013 Sun Sentinel investigation titled “Cops, Cash and Cocaine.” That series exposed Sunrise police for luring big-money drug buyers into the city from across the United States, negotiating the sale of kilos of cocaine in family restaurants, then busting the buyers and seizing their cash and cars.

According to Sunrise police, Krege abused his access to police records to reveal the name of at least one confidential informant, a disclosure police said threatened the informant’s life and the integrity of their drug investigations.

While the articles did not disclose the names of any confidential informants, they prompted the department to relocate its Vice, Intelligence and Narcotics unit.

A police investigation determined that Krege’s then-wife, Elizabeth “Peggy” Krege, was the person who disclosed the information to a reporter. The investigation could not determine how the police sergeant got his hands on the informant list, and Peggy Krege’s testimony would be needed to establish that she found it in his safe, prosecutors said in a March 3 memo outlining the plea deal.

“Their divorce was quite acrimonious, and the potential for problems related to her testimony was part of why the state was amenable to the plea offer,” wrote Assistant State Attorney Christopher Killoran, head of the prosecution’s Public Corruption Unit.

Prosecutors also realized that the defense would likely be entitled to the list of confidential informants relied on by Sunrise police investigating drug and other cases, another risk they were not willing to take.

Krege