Corruption case leaves plenty to be angry about
In early 2020, a man named Oswaldo Pedraza-vasquez was arrested on charges that he was moving large amounts of drugs through town.
“Detectives from the Columbus Police Department received information that a Mexican Drug Trafficking Organization (’DTO’) was trafficking kilogram quantities of heroin and cocaine in the city of Columbus,” Franklin County prosecutors would later write in their bid to deny Pedraza-vasquez bail. “The information led Columbus Police to a main target, the Defendant, who is possibly the leader of the DTO in Columbus.”
The Columbus police officer who filed the charges on Pedraza-vasquez was, according to Municipal Court records, John J. Kotchkoski.
This week, Kotchkoski, 33, and another narcotics officer, Marco Merino, 44, were arrested by the FBI following a drug investigation.
Merino and Kotchkoski are charged with dealing 7.5 kilograms of fentanyl, and Merino with taking bribes to help protect deliveries of cocaine, according to criminal complaints filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus.
Both men were taken into custody and been suspended with pay from the police division.
Following their arrests, Mayor Andrew J. Ginther said he was “flat-out angry,” and there is plenty to be angry about when it comes to public corruption cases like these.
Start with the violation of trust, the hypocrisy, the damage inflicted upon the police division and upon the community by officers who helped to flood the streets with lethal narcotics from here to West Virginia. Officers who noted their product “had put a woman in the hospital,” as Merino did in one conversation with an associate, according to the FBI. Officers who viewed their DEA training as useful tutorials on money-laundering, as the agency alleges Merino did, based on yet another documented conversation.
These weren’t nickel-and-dime dope deals the pair were tasked to investigate. Both officers were members of the division’s cartel unit, a team meant to make cases against the big
ger dope dealers in town.
A month after charges were filed on Pedraza-vasquez, for instance, the cartel unit publicized another bust of nine suspects and the related seizure of 83 guns, nearly $15,000 cash, 905 pounds of marijuana, 698 grams of cocaine, and 26 grams of crystal meth.
Now prosecutors will be tasked with reviewing any such cases touched by Merino and Kotchkoski, to determine how badly they may have tainted the proceedings.
Pedraza-vasquez, 31, likely will be part of that review.
Police put him under surveillance early in 2020, and he was arrested during a Feb. 6 search of his home and a detached garage.
Police said he agreed to talk and told detectives that he had cocaine stored in the detached garage. He provided the detectives with the garage door opener, and the detectives found nearly a kilo of the drug just where Pedraza-vasquez said it would be, according to court documents.
Prosecutors spelled out his background when seeking to keep him behind bars pending trial.
“Defendant is not a legal citizen of the United States,” they wrote. “Defendant has been deported numerous times and has made re-entry to the U.S. repeated despite it being illegal for him to do so. Defendant has a multi-state criminal record and has a pending future indictment for a F2 Felonious Assault that occurred in Franklin County in 2015. It is alleged that while driving on I-70 EB near 670 EB, Defendant fired several shots at another vehicle, striking two occupants, one in the face and one in the arm.”
Eventually, Pedraza-vasquez cut a deal. He pleaded guilty to trafficking in cocaine, and in return prosecutors agreed not to indict the assault case. He was sentenced last November to 5 to 71⁄2 years in prison, a sentence he is serving at Lake Erie Correctional Institution.
Among the more unsettling allegations lodged against Kotchkoski last week was a last-minute phone conversation that the FBI said he had with Merino. Merino, the feds said, already had been arrested and made the recorded call at the agency’s direction.
“Merino told the FBI that Kotchkoski had told Merino if he ever spoke about any of the illegal acts between Merino and Kotchkoski that Kotchkoski would have Merino’s wife and children killed by sicarios,” the court records said.
Sicarios are hired killers employed by the drug cartels.
Back when Pedraza-vasquez was awaiting disposition in his case, prosecutors had this to say about him:
“The evidence is strong that Defendant is dealing in large amounts of dangerous narcotics,” they wrote. “Because of the Defendant’s lack of regard for the safety of the community, he poses a substantial risk of serious physical harm to any person or the community.”
On that day of his arrest in 2020, Pedraza-vasquez must have felt as if there were a vast gulf between him and his captors.
Now he knows differently, that he and some of them, at least, may have had a great deal more in common than he realized. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker