PACKIN’ SHEETS
When it absolutely, positively has to get there . . . trust your bodyguards!
Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz used members of her taxpayer-funded security detail to help her move to her new million-dollar digs — potentially running afoul of ethics rules, The Post has learned.
The borough’s top prosecutor was spotted wearing her gold DA’s badge on her hip last week as she carried four boxes of belongings to a black Ford Expedition parked outside the Forest Hills house where she’s been temporarily living since selling her former childhood home for $1.05 million in February.
She then climbed into the official vehicle and was driven about 1.2 miles by a pair of plainclothes NYPD cops to her new three-bedroom, 2-¹/2 bathroom Colonial-style home, which city records show she bought late last month for $1.1 million.
The trip was one of four that The Post saw Katz, 56, and her detail make between the two homes on Tuesday morning.
On Friday morning, The Post saw members of Katz’s security detail carry various items to the SUV from one of the homes while picking up the DA and her two kids.
One cop made three backand-forth trips, and the other officer made two. They carried stuff in their hands and in large black plastic bags.
Sources familiar with Katz’s routine told The Post that members of her security detail also had been hauling flat-screen TVs, groceries and dry-cleaning around for her, as well as loading her sons’ bicycles and sports gear into an official SUV, driving the family away and returning several hours later.
“She uses the detectives as her personal car service,” one source said.
‘City resources’
The moves appear to run afoul of provisions in city law that bar elected officials and other public servants from using their positions “to obtain any financial gain, privilege, or other private or personal advantage” and “from using City resources for any personal, non-City purpose.”
Those prohibitions were cited in a 2016 agreement between the city Conflicts of Interest Board and the late Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson, who agreed to pay a $15,000 fine to settle allegations that he illegally had his security detail buy him meals reimbursed via the DA’s Office.
Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group, which advocates for government accountability, said Katz “deserves protection” because “we live in a crazy world.”
“But any elected official who needs to have their laundry picked up or their belongings moved should hire a private company to do it,” he said. “There are a lot of elected officials who have gotten into trouble for using pub
Doing the Hevesi lifting
Katz, a Democrat whose annual salary is $212,800, is a protégé of disgraced former state Comptroller Alan Hevesi, having babysat his kids and volunteered on his successful 1993 campaign for city comptroller.
Hevesi supported Katz’s winning third-party campaign to replace him in the state Assembly against the local Democratic district leader a year later.
In his 2006 re-election campaign for state comptroller, Hevesi was accused by his Republican challenger of using a member of his security detail as his wife’s chauffeur for three years. Hevesi acknowledged the abuse and paid $83,000 in restitution, but was later ordered to cough up another $90,000, then forced to resign and serve 20 months in prison for a $1 million pay-toplay corruption scam with a state pension-fund investor.
A rep for the DA’s Office said Katz’s NYPD detail was assigned “for protection, as has historically been the case.”