INFORM & ARREST Paid mole got close to alleged cop-van vandal
The NYPD used a paid informant to befriend an antipolice demonstrator who was eventually busted for trying to cut the brakes on a police vehicle, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
Jeremy Trapp, 24, who the NYPD arrested July 17 in the case and was released without bail on state charges, was attending a protest outside Brooklyn Criminal Court on July 13 when he met the NYPD confidential source. He told the source that he believed the police were racist, that he wanted to harm officers and that he had previously set fire to an NYPD car, according to the feds.
The two exchanged phone numbers.
They met up the night of July 15 and the confidential source recorded portions of the conversation.
“Trapp told the CS that he wanted to ‘burn the [Verrazzano-Narrows] bridge down’ so that ‘white supremacists’ could not use it to get to Brooklyn from Staten Island,” an FBI agent wrote in the criminal complaint against Trapp.
They took photos of the bridge as reconnaissance, federal prosecutors said.
Prosecutors claim Trapp told the confidential source that burning cop cars was not enough and that they should burn down NYPD stationhouses instead.
Two days later, the source and Trapp again met up, planning to find unattended NYPD cars to cut the brake lines, the feds said. The NYPD set up a surveillance team to follow the duo.
Trapp attempted to cut the brakes on a cop car in Sunset Park while the source acted as a lookout, according to the complaint. The source and surveilling NYPD officers took video of Trapp under the NYPD vehicle.
Trapp actually partially severed the “wheel speed sensor” of the cop car, which could “adversely impact a driver’s ability to stop and maintain control of the NYPD van in an emergency,” according to an NYPD mechanic. The wheel speed sensor resembles the brake line.
The confidential source is a registered informant paid by the NYPD.
It was not immediately clear if the source was directed to earn Trapp’s trust or if he learned what Trapp wanted to do and reached out to the cops, according to a police source.
The NYPD declined to comment about the confidential source.
“The information provided by the CS has proven reliable in the past and has been corroborated by independent investigative techniques,” the feds wrote in the complaint.
Trapp is charged in Brooklyn Federal Court with tampering with the NYPD vehicle. He was arrested by FBI agents on Wednesday.
“Trapp resisted arrest and wrestled with FBI agents until multiple agents were able to physically restrain him with handcuffs,” the feds wrote in a detention memo Wednesday.
He faces up to 20 years in prison on the charge and was ordered jailed pretrial by a judge, after his defense lawyer tried to compare his case to that of two lawyers accused of tossing a Molotov cocktail into an empty NYPD vehicle during a George Floyd protest in May.
Magistrate Judge Steven Gold disagreed about the similarity of the cases.
“The analogy comparing to the other case with the Molotov cocktail does not hold,” he said. “It was an abandoned car that was the subject of the incendiary device. The risk to human life was minimal … It’s hard to imagine a more potentially dangerous act than cutting the brake lines of any automobile, much less a police car that might find itself involved in high speed activity.”