Any organization granted a tax exemption for “social welfare” activity under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code can collect unlimited and undisclosed contributions but if the group is spending most of its money on political activity, then it loses its status and has to report how much it got and from whom, according to tax experts.

Last Friday, the FBI revealed that the IRS was focusing on conservative groups for further review of their tax-exempt status. News reports first said the targeting was done by IRS agents in the Cincinnati office trying to cope with a flood of applications for 501(c)(4) exemptions. It turned out that on June 29, 2011, Lois Lerner, head of the IRS division overseeing tax-exempt groups, had learned of the targeting and insisted that the search be broadened to all political and lobbying groups, but, according to the New York Times, the IRS branch employees kept it narrow.

The revelation provoked Obama to say at a press conference last Friday, “If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous. It is contrary to our traditions.” He said that “people have to be held accountable, and it’s got to be fixed.”

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that the FBI is “coordinating with the Justice Department to see if any laws were broken in connection with those matters related to the IRS.”

On Monday, two Senate committees, both run by Democrats, announced they’d hold investigations while House committees run by Republicans have vowed to do the same.

“The IRS’s actions are disgraceful, and [it] attacks the very heart of our democracy,” Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) said in a statement. “It warrants a full congressional and criminal investigation.”

Rep. Steve Israel (D-Huntington) echoed his outrage. “I’m deeply disturbed by reports that the IRS targeted certain groups,” he said in a statement. “I’m eager to review the Inspector General’s report later this week. If some at the IRS took actions that were politically motivated, they must be held accountable, along with those at the highest levels of the agency. We must make sure that the IRS maintains its integrity as an impartial agency.”

In the 2012 election, Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) was in the crosshairs of millions of dollars spent in negative advertising by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt group. The advertising never mentioned Bishop’s Republican opponent, Randy Altschuler, but painted the five-term LI  congressman as a scoundrel embodying “everything that’s wrong with Washington.”

Rather than comment on what it felt like to be outspent by a 501(c)(4), Bishop expressed his concern about the IRS’ apparently politically motivated audits.

“I am deeply troubled by reports that some IRS employees applied undue scrutiny to certain groups seeking  tax-exempt status,” said Bishop in a statement. “The enforcement authority of the IRS was designed to operate independently of this kind of political pressure. I expect the report to be issued this week by Treasury Department’s Inspector General will be the basis for immediate action and strong, comprehensive measures to ensure fairness and impartiality at the IRS.”

John Gomez, who ran against Israel in 2010 on the Republican and Conservative lines, had the full support of Long Island’s Tea Party, he said. But he had an uphill battle trying to level the playing field financially.

“Steve Israel was sitting on $4 million—I had $50,000,” Gomez recalled. By the election, he said he’d raised about half a million dollars and had to respond to letters from the Federal Election Commission charging him with campaign fund-raising violations that he later overturned in court. He likens what he went through with the FEC to what Tea Party groups faced with the IRS audits.

“Strategically, it’s a way to slow these organizations down,” Gomez says. “You can’t spend time organizing and disseminating information because this is really what your purpose is: to make people aware that the government is out of control.”

Steve Flanagan, director of the Conservative Society for Action, one of the first Tea Party groups founded on LI more than four years ago, shared Gomez’s concern. “If any of these allegations are true, we’re talking about a serious abuse of power here,” he said.

Before the news broke about the IRS audits, the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, based in Washington, DC, sent out an urgent fund-raising request to its supporters past and present. One recipient was an 89-year-old woman who provided this reporter with her mailing. Among its calls to “provide critical financial and tactical support to principled conservative candidates at every level,” it said: “We can’t stand by and allow Obama, the Democrats and so-called ‘moderate’ Republicans to transform the United States into a weak, dependent, second-rate nation.”

From the wording above, it’s hard to say that this group is engaged in purely “social welfare.” But that’s what the tax-exempt battle apparently is about.

From a historical perspective, the White House has used the IRS to political ends for decades, starting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who employed it against Sen. Huey Long (D-La.) and Rep. Hamilton Fish, a New York congressman. During the Eisenhower administration, the IRS gave the FBI the tax returns of key members of the American Communist Party.

President Richard Nixon had the IRS audit muck-raking reporters who were critical of him, such as Newsday’s Bob Greene. And President Ronald Reagan used the IRS to challenge the tax-exempt status of the non-profit Mother Jones magazine, forcing one of the leading left-wing publications in the country to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend itself. It won.

Robert Cleva shows off his Crasche Middie women’s lacrosse helmet.

Many years ago, Robert Cleva, who runs a commercial real estate business in Woodbury, fell off his bike, landed on the grass and hit his head. An avid exercise enthusiast, he got back on his bike the next day and wore a baseball batting helmet. Dissatisfied with other bike helmets and unhappy with his fallback version, he came up with his own design, eventually patenting a product for bikers, skiers and skateboarders—even police officers.

“People who don’t want to look like they’re wearing a helmet but want to have protection are our clients,” says Cleva, whose online head gear company is called Crasche New York. Last year they began marketing the Crasche Hat, which looks like a woolen ski cap (it’s actually 100 percent Acrylic) but has hidden “impact-resistant protective inserts” made out of polycarbonate plastic and padded with neoprene rubber and air chambers to cushion the shock.

Cleva noticed that parents were buying the Crasche Hat for their daughters playing lacrosse—especially if the girls had suffered concussions—and that surprised him. He had it tested to determine its effectiveness against the impacts of lacrosse sticks and balls to the player’s head.

“It turned out to be a very good product for stick to head but it was marginal for ball to head,” Cleva says.

In February 2012 he’d submitted the hat model to US Lacrosse (USL), the sport’s national governing body, based in Baltimore, where the first women’s lacrosse team played in the United States in 1926. The league itself has been debating how to address the concussion issue—a debate that Cleva inadvertently got caught up in. At first, he got an encouraging reply from Melissa Coyne, the women’s game director at USL.

“Your product complies with current USL rules for women’s lacrosse,” Coyne emailed Cleva in March 2012. “Hope that helps!”

But with the test results in hand, Cleva decided to redesign his product so it could withstand a ball speeding to the head at 78 mph and reduce the impact below the concussive level.

“We re-engineered it, and informed US Lacrosse that we’d made some changes,” Cleva says. “We opened it up—took the top off—because the girls didn’t want the skull cap, they wanted their hair [coming] out the top.”

He named the new model the Crasche Middie, after a lacrosse position. It resembled a head band, available in red, white, black, navy blue or light blue.

“It’s designed to rest on the head,” Cleva explains. “It’s attached to the goggles. When you pull the goggles down, it goes back with it.”

He’s most proud of the material used in the new headgear’s inserts. “You could hit the thing with a sledge hammer and you can’t crack it,” he says.

At this year’s January national lacrosse convention in Philadelphia, Cleva set up a booth featuring the Crashe Middies underneath a big banner proclaiming, “The future of headgear in girls lacrosse.” The future was short-lived, however. USL officials shut him down and escorted him out of the building. Cleva thought USL’s previous approval of the Crasche Hat extended to the Crasche Middie. He was mistaken, they informed him. He would have to submit his new design for approval.

“It happened to be seen by one of our rules committee members who brought up the fact that this product was different from the one that we had approved and this had not been approved,” Coyne tells the Press. “It’s significantly different!” She added that the Crasche Middie brochure “made some pretty incredible claims of its protective value, and that concerned some members of our organization, specifically our sports, science and safety committee…”

After Cleva submitted his new headgear for their examination, the USL’s rules subcommittee determined that the product was “deemed illegal for play.”  In their email to him, they said it violated “portions of Rule 2” regarding “Soft Head Gear…defined as any head covering without hard or unyielding parts that have the potential to injure another player. The product, Crasche Middie, contains hard inserts that are not unyielding which could possibly pose a danger to other players. Additionally, those inserts which [sic] are not adequately padded or appropriately secured and can be easily dislodged. They could potentially injure the player wearing the product or another player.”

Cleva was infuriated by USL’s response and wrote Coyne the following: “To claim that the inserts can come loose is patently false. To claim that they become a danger to other players is ridiculous.”

He sent them an impact test from ICS Laboratories in Ohio, which he’d paid for, claiming it showed that not only did his headgear pose no threat to another player it actually reduced the force of two players knocking heads if one wore the Crasche Middie and the other girl didn’t. USL’s Coyne was not persuaded.

“Parents are looking for protective headgear. We understand that,” says Coyne. “But we as a governing body also have a responsibility to make sure that consumers are protected.”

Coyne told Cleva that US Lacrosse is working closely with ASTM International, a nonprofit organization based in Pennsylvania formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials, to create a women’s lacrosse headgear standard. She suggested his company become a member. Cleva says joining would cost only $75, but he’s concerned that the terms of the membership could impinge on his patent rights. He is having his lawyer look into that issue before he signs up. Without a doubt, he insists, “My product will be the standard because it’s so effective.”

Of more immediate concern, he says, is that one of ASTM’s current members told him that setting standards could take two years at least. Any delay is hard for Cleva to take.

“How many girls who are denied the use of the Crasche Middie will subsequently suffer a preventable head injury?” Cleva wrote Coyne back in February after she suggested he wait until USL’s committee meeting in June.

The answer is that nobody knows.

A researcher at George Mason University, Shane Caswell, partnered with two members of USL’s sports science and safety committee to examine head injury incidents reported during 2008 and 2009 involving high school girls’ lacrosse players between the ages of 14 and 18 years old. Their study came out in February 2012. Gathering data from 529 varsity and junior varsity games, they found 21 concussions. Most of these injuries resulted from stick-to-head contact in front of the goal.

Coyne says that USL is constantly monitoring national research on the occurrence of concussions in the sport. “I don’t necessarily see that we’ve had this huge jump in the actual injury,” she says. “I think the actual diagnosis has been what’s changed.”

The girls’ game is intended to be safer than the boys’ game, says Stephanie Degennaro, who manages the Lacrosse Unlimited store in Miller Place. She played varsity lacrosse at Longwood High School in Brookhaven and at Stony Brook University. When she’s not selling merchandise for “the fastest sport on two feet,” she’s coaching and refereeing girls’ games.

“Basically women’s lacrosse is supposed to be a non-contact sport,” she says. “Everything is supposed to be finesse and controlled… Men’s lacrosse is a contact sport like football.”

Degennaro’s store does not carry headgear for girls, but she has noticed players wearing “these headband things” and “those soft foam ‘ugly’ helmets” on the field.

“Approving headgear is going to make the girls’ game more violent,” she says. “To be completely honest, I wouldn’t want to see the game go that way. Some of the girls out there wearing these helmets act as if they’re invincible. I would only want to give [headgear] to girls who’ve had prior concussions.”

One of those girls playing lacrosse with a concussion is Cindy Dreher’s 10-year-old daughter, Darby, who picked up the sport after watching her two older brothers play. The Babylon Village mother bought her a Crasche Middie because she had gotten a concussion from a serious horse-back riding accident last year.

“My daughter has dark hair so you don’t even notice she’s wearing it out there,” Dreher tells the Press. “It looks like a band for sweat. It doesn’t look like a helmet at all.”

Dreher had looked for a long time before she found Cleva’s product online.

“I had to do some research because what’s available for girls right now is this ridiculously stupid, soft helmet that doesn’t protect at all,” Dreher says. “They say it’s a ‘non-aggressive game’ but I don’t care because it’s got a stick and a ball, and those girls are very capable of hitting each other pretty hard with it…”

Lacrosse Unlimited’s Hauppauge store manager, Jason Sweet, a high school and college lax (lacrosse) player who still plays, thinks that giving girls’ more protection will change their game. “They might as well get gloves, too, and go out there and beat each other up like we do!” laughs Sweet, who’s had three concussions himself, but none since he started wearing a $234 helmet. By comparison, the Crasche Middie retails for under $30.

“I would say that most parents want headgear [for girls],” Sweet says, “Most players don’t.”

Cleva thinks one obstacle facing his product’s approval is growing tension within girls’ lacrosse about the future of the game.

“You have one camp that says, ‘Let’s put helmets on and protect the girls, and become like a boys’ sport. If it’s rough and tumble, who cares?’” Cleva explains. “The other side is saying: ‘That’s the worst thing. We don’t want the game to change. Leave it alone.’ US Lacrosse is in the ‘leave-it-alone’ camp. This is a big controversy, and I’ve kind of fallen into the middle of it.”

As of now only goalies in girls lacrosse are permitted to wear hard helmets. Goggles were mandated for all female players in 2004—New York State reportedly led this initiative—but now USL is considering whether the eyewear standards should be revised. “We’re taking a good look at that,” Coyne says.

Last week, Cleva got his hopes up when a USL official asked him to send his headgear to the rules committee at the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Then he learned that the USL’s own subcommittee, scheduled to convene this month, had tabled discussion of his headgear until June “when they can get the entire rules committee together,” Cleva says.

“Mr. Cleva has been told on several occasions that if he adjusts his product to fit the two elements that we wanted fixed – if he makes those adjustments—we are happy to look at his product again,” says Coyne. “But he has to address them just like anyone else. He’s not the first person to be rejected.”

Cleva has demonstrated the headgear’s ability to hang onto its inserts to Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) and to an aide in the office of Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford). He doesn’t believe USL is giving his product a fair shake.

“They’re saying it can come out and it can’t come out!” Cleva exclaims. Given the opportunity, this reporter shook the Middie as hard as possible for almost a minute and finally an insert dislodged when the head gear was hurled against the floor.

“When a 10-year-old comes to your office and her mother is terrified that the girl’s going to get hurt, it’s the human element that’s overpowering,” Cleva says. “We think we offer a very reasonable product that is going to offer impact protection and give some peace of mind to people and these people won’t let your daughter buy it.”

Talat Hamdani shifts between the kitchen and living room of her spacious Lake Grove home on a quiet Wednesday afternoon when the silence is suddenly shattered.

White bold letters highlighted by a blue streak splash across her television screen as two figures talk excitedly about developments in the dual bombing of the Boston Marathon just two days earlier. Footage of gray smoke billowing above a chaotic frenzy of police, first responders, injured runners and spectators as others run frantically for cover stream behind them in an endless loop.

Hamdani snatches the remote and raises the volume.

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer hurriedly turns to one of CNN’s most senior correspondents, John King, who delivers the news: citing unnamed law enforcement sources, they declare there has been an arrest in the investigation, the first successful terror attack on a U.S. city since Sept. 11, 2001, killing three and injured more than 200. Police obtained video, says King, that shows a “dark-skinned male” placing a bomb near the second blast site along the Boston Marathon route.

“I pray it’s not a Muslim,” worries Hamdani, glancing back at her television.

Her fears, she says, were shared by others in Long Island’s Muslim community. Most likely they were shared throughout Muslim communities across the country. And they are justified. Since 9/11, countless law-abiding, peace-loving, family oriented Muslim Americans have been targeted, physically and verbally assaulted, spied on by law enforcement agencies sworn to protect all citizens, stereotyped as anti-Americans and even branded as terrorists. Islam itself, a centuries-old religion founded upon the universal principles of peace and love, say Muslim leaders, has become demonized due to its bastardization by those who commit the horrifying atrocities, such as the recent bombings in Boston, in its name.

Hamdani knows this all too well. A 61-year-old mother of two from Pakistan, she can relate to the extreme anguish and sorrow gripping the latest victims of Islamic extremists.

Just to her side rests a photograph of a smiling President Barack Obama, gray haired and in a form-fitting navy blue suit, his right hand on Hamdani’s shoulder. The photo was snapped in Manhattan on May 5, 2011, three days after Osama bin Laden was taken out by Navy SEALs. Hamdani’s head is tilted upward as she reciprocates Obama’s grin.

Salman Hamdani NYPD cadet photo. (Courtesy: Talat Hamdani)

In the morning hours of Sept. 11, 2001, her son Salman was taking the No. 7 train from Flushing, Queens, to Manhattan when “he probably saw the towers burning like everyone else,” recalls Hamdani, her face for the first time devoid of tears while telling this tale. Instead of heading to his job at Rockefeller University on the opposite end of the city, Salman, a New York City police cadet and an aspiring doctor “with a very compassionate soul,” says Hamdani, voluntarily rushed toward the burning World Trade Center, never to be seen again—along with 2,700 other victims.

What makes Salman’s death even more agonizing for Hamdani, however, is what transpired soon after authorities learned he was unaccounted for.

Instead of her son’s photo ending up on a Missing Persons flier, a black-and-white NYPD handout displaying Salman’s image began circulating around the city about a month after the tragedy, stating: “Hold and detain.” Another seeking his whereabouts declared: “NYPD Police Cadet Missing Since Attacks. Joint Terrorist Task Force Seeking Him. Has Chemistry Background!!”

Then came a New York Post headline: “Missing—Or Hiding? Mystery of NYPD Cadet From Pakistan.”

Her son—a Muslim who had sacrificed his life to save others he did not even know—was wanted in connection with the Twin Towers attacks.

Hamdani, a soft-spoken school teacher who moved to Long Island from Bayside, Queens, seeking a fresh start after the death of her husband and son, has not only been speaking out to correct the public record regarding Salman (the NYPD still will not include his name on its official 9/11 Memorial for those killed in the attacks), but has also been trying compassionately to educate the public about Islam, defending her faith in the face of misperceptions and the very extremists who have hijacked it.

Her pleas come at a time when more Muslims are living on Long Island than ever before.

A May 2012 religion census report released by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies reveals that the population of those who adhere to the Islamic faith on LI has grown exponentially between 2000 and 2010—up 40 percent in Nassau and 63 percent in Suffolk.

That’s not even the total Muslim population; many Muslims, for example, do not “adhere.” Meanwhile, many LI mosques have been expanding. And there’s a good chance many of them were monitored by the NYPD during covert surveillance of the LI Muslim population after 9/11.

Hate crimes against Muslims increased after those attacks and tensions were reignited when Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) held his Muslim “Radicalization” hearings as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Since then, there have been several failed terror attacks, some stopped by sheer luck, and others the result of extraordinary work by law enforcement, including the NYPD.

The fight to dispel misconceptions gets harder with every attack and foiled plot. Making matters worse, two Long Islanders became radicalized in America and latched onto foreign terrorist groups. One of those men was an al-Qaeda propagandist from Westbury, killed by a drone missile in 2011, who was the editor of Inspire, an English-language al-Qaeda magazine, which the two alleged Boston bombers, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnev and 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnev, both Muslims, reportedly read.

But are terrorist extremists, essentially maniacs and murderers, truly Muslim? And should the deranged actions of a handful of sinister criminals proclaiming their association with a particular religion be allowed to define the entire faith and its 1.6 billion followers?

Hamdani, along with religious leaders from various other denominations, resoundingly declare: “No!”

“If you place a couple of dirty drops inside the ocean, it’s still the ocean,” says Sister Sanaa Nadim, chaplain of Stony Brook University’s Muslim Student Association (MSA), a support group that focuses on educational and spiritual understanding among its members, on-campus and outside communities. “How can we say all the ocean is ugly? Meanwhile, fish comes out of it, life comes out of it, so many amazing things.

“That’s the ocean of the Muslim community.”

Sister Sanaa Nadim, chaplain of the Stony Brook University Muslim Student Association, has devoted the last 20 years of her life to the university’s youth. (Rashed Mian/Long Island Press)

NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK

The sun melts the gray-blue sky over Stony Brook University into black as a crowd of about 100 students and faculty form a semicircle around one of the campus’ many water fountains for a candlelight vigil organized by the school’s interfaith center and dedicated to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Nadim, a chaplain here for two decades, gave up a lucrative career on Wall Street to devote her life to Stony Brook’s Muslim youth. She leads the prayer. Her eyes peer toward the crescent of onlookers as the colors fade, reciting Psalm 23 from the Bible then reading a Muslim prayer before offering her own words of wisdom.

“Don’t allow the terror to prevail, don’t let it make us hateful inside, don’t let the anger eat away at us,” she pleads. “On the contrary, let us defeat terror by surviving and by reaching out to one another, by building bridges with each other by educating one another on who we really are.”

Nadim raised her family on LI. Her office abuts those of other religious leaders on the second floor of Stony Brook’s Student Union building, where the campus’ interfaith groups—Jews, Catholics, Muslims and Protestants—share a narrow hallway. This corridor, filled with inspiring messages of hope even during the darkest of times, exemplifies solidarity and how all religions can come together for a shared purpose.

Stony Brook’s Muslim Student Association is the largest campus group in the nation. Its members meet every Friday for Jummah prayer, which attracts upwards of 200 students. Those adhering to the faith pack a large room adjacent to the cafeteria. Bursts of laughter can be heard from students’ filing their bellies while its Muslim community prays solemnly toward Mecca—a city in Saudi Arabia home to Masjad al-Haram, which translates into “The Grand [or Sacred] Mosque” and the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad.

This mosque encloses another of Islam’s holiest sites, the Kaaaba—a cuboid-shaped temple which includes the “Black Stone,” a glassy, dark mineral revered as a relic by the devout and believed widely to be a meteorite.

Devout Muslims are required to face Mecca during daily prayers, to be performed five times a day. They are restricted from drinking alcohol, owning a dog, are permitted to eat only specially prepared food (called Halal), must fast during the holy month of Ramadan, and cleanse their feet and hands before praying.

As is any religion, Islam is a complex faith, with varying degrees of followers.

“When you talk about the Muslim youth, every one of them has a different journey,” Nadim says inside her office, replete with photos, certificates of appreciation from local lawmakers, a Koran and a book declaring: “You’re In Seawolves Country.”

“And the beauty of this country, no matter what happens and no matter how negative the press can be, there’s good stories, there are beautiful stories of successes of Muslim young men and young women,” she continues. “And the beauty of this whole thing is that people don’t give up on themselves simply because they are disheartened about current events.”

Muslim American Long Islanders are physicians and pharmacists, students and community leaders and teachers and Imams—the worship leaders of a mosque.

Dr. Faroque Khan is the former chief of medicine for Nassau County University Medical Center. Now a board member for the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury, he has become the unofficial spokeman for the Muslim American community in Nassau during times of crisis. It’s not like he had a choice in the matter.

“We’ve been kind of the de-facto spokespersons for the community whether we want it or don’t want it,” Khan says from a couch inside his Muttontown home, where the concept of the Islamic Center was born. “People come asking questions, so we have to find the answers.”

“Someone hits us with a sledgehammer 8,000 miles away,” he explains, “and we have to give an answer here, so that’s been the challenge.”

Why are Muslims terrorists? Why do you guys destroy everything? What’s a woman’s role in the Islamic faith? Do you believe in Jesus? How do you reconcile the difference between church and state? These are common questions to Khan at public events, he says, with terrorism always on the top of the list.

“I can understand where people are coming from,” Khan says calmly. “Sadly, the first major exposure for American to a Muslim was 9/11, and that was a terrible introduction.”

“These are people who are claiming to act in the name of Islam, and they’re committing certain actions that most Muslims irrevocably hate and detest and completely condemn,” says Zain Ali, an Italian-Pakistani senior at SBU studying Spanish and bio chemistry, who also serves as president of the school’s MSA. “What the community needs to do, rather than be reactive, is be proactive.”

Khan, Nadim and others stress that Islam is a religion founded on the fundamental principles at the core of all major religions: mutual respect.

“It’s a continuation of the Jewish, Christian faith,” explains Khan. “We believe in all those previous faiths that have come through prophets.

“We follow all Commandments except one: Keep the Sabbath,” he continues. We don’t have a day off; it’s a work day for us. The rest we all believe… The bottom line is the Golden Rule is the same for everybody: Do unto your neighbor what you would do unto yourself. It’s the same in every faith.

“Jesus Christ is considered one of the five great prophets in the Koran,” he adds.

Muslim leaders ask non-Muslims to look deeper instead of believing everything they see and hear in the media. A February 2013 report by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that Muslim American terrorism is actually on the decline.

Thirty-three of the 180,000 murders in America since Sept. 11 were attributed to Islamic terrorism, the report states, while “more than 200 Americans have been killed in political violence by white supremacists and other groups on the far right,” according to a recent study by the Combatting Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy, which the Triangle Center analysis cites.

“Obviously 9/11 has made people hypersensitive to certain types of threats, and God-forbid that something should happen on a comparable scale from the white supremacists groups, then I imagine our sensitivity to those kinds of threats would increase as well,” says its author Charles Kurzman, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

But the number of deaths by Islamic terrorists could be “in the thousands,” argues Congressman King, if it wasn’t for law enforcement’s ability to thwart recent plots.

“What makes the Islamists’ threat different right now is it’s the only one right now which has an overseas component,” says King.

Investigators began questioning a “Saudi man” injured in the bombing who was identified by the New York Post as a “potential suspect” just moments after the two pressure cookers exploded near the Boston Marathon’s finish line. The paper noted that a bystander had tackled him to the ground because he was running away from the bombing and looked “suspicious.”

Just as CNN’s report blaring from Hamdani’s TV about the “dark-skinned male” turned out to be erroneous, the “Saudi man” was eventually cleared and never officially identified as a suspect.

It’s this rush to blame Muslims—dubbed “Islamophobia” by the media—that has so many law-abiding Muslims, such as Hamdani and Khan, so frustrated. They want the perpetrators called what they are—homicidal maniacs, the same description that could be used to describe mass murderers from any religious denomination.

“Now here’s the problem,” says Khan. “The same day that this is happening [in Boston], ricin-laden letters are arriving in Washington [D.C] and the person has been identified and he has been arrested.” [Charges have since been dropped against Mississippian Kevin Curtis, an Elvis impersonator and conspiracy theorist.] “And the first response coming out is he’s mentally disturbed, so why don’t you use the same principle when you talk about somebody who is crazy enough to put bombs and kill people like this? The guy is not normal; obviously, he’s either brainwashed or he’s deranged.

“Nine-eleven was a double-whammy for the Muslims,” he continues. “Number one, we lost a lot of people we knew from the community…then we became the suspects.”

“None of these [9/11] hijackers were American Muslims,” says Hamdani. “Why are we held responsible? Similarly with this [Boston] attack—whoever it is—let’s say for argument sake it happens to be a Jewish person, are we going to condemn all the Jews in this country? We will not and we have never done that. If it happens to be a Christian person, we will not condemn him for his faith. We did not condemn Timothy McVeigh [who killed 168 and injured more than 800 when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995] for his faith.

“God-forbid it happens again to be a person of Muslim faith, it will have a negative impact,” she laments about the Boston bombings. “It will definitely have a negative impact.”

“It’s such nonsense!” blasts Nayyar Imam, chairman of the Muslim Advisory Board of Suffolk County, the Anti-Bias Task Force of Brookhaven Town and the Muslim chaplain for Suffolk County police. “I’m worried about our children. It [will be] worse before it gets better.”

The backlash against some Muslims in the wake of the Boston attacks was immediate.

A Bangladeshi man described by his attackers as a “fucking Arab” was jumped in the Bronx. A Long Island man was beaten in a mall parking lot but was saved by police officers. There have also been several incidents of people driving by hijab-wearing Muslim women and shouting obscenities, according to one Muslim community leader.

“Young people in our society need to remain calm and not respond with anger, and understand that tensions are running high,” advises a 29-year-old Long Island man who asked for anonymity because he’s been a victim of similar attacks before. “It’s our job as good Muslims to inform the public that everything will be okay: we are on their side, we are American.”

In the wake of the recent Boston tragedy, some have been clamoring for surveillance of American mosques as a way for law enforcement to deter future attacks. Yet the secret surveillance of Muslims has already been taking place throughout the city and Long Island for quite some time—including Stony Brook’s student-run Muslim association website.

Talat Hamdani, whose son, Salman, any NYPD cadet, lost his life in the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center Attacks, has been a fierce defender of Islam and an outspoken advocate for peace. (Christopher Twarowski/Long Island Press)

EAGLE EYE

The notes scribbled on the NYPD’s Demographic Report for Nassau (2007) and Suffolk (2006) counties—a covert initiative to gather information on the local Muslim community—are vague and loaded with unenlightening observations. There are no smoking guns. The documents could very well be taken from the script of Police Academy or the law enforcement parody show, Reno 911!

Combined, they amount to 166 pages describing surveillance of Muslim restaurants, religious institutions, smoke shops and “locations of concern” in Nassau—the towns of Hempstead, North Hempstead and Oyster Bay—and three religious institutions classified as “locations requiring further examination.” The report is the spy world’s equivalent of the Yellow Pages for Muslim businesses and houses of worship, filled with descriptions of Korans, donation boxes, fliers listing phone numbers, wardrobe, stores’ capacities and presumptions about just how devout those observed were.

“We recognized one of the Bengali males in the group as a regular in the vicinity of Jackson Heights,” one undercover officer writes in his report about a Suffolk Dunkin’ Donuts—twice noting that customers were visiting the location after prayer. “Nothing of [significance] was overheard.”

Some are downright comical.

One discovery contained in the NYPD’s covert stakeouts of a kebab joint in Huntington provides the revelation that “this location also has belly dancing on the weekends.”

The program was a closely-guarded secret until the reports were leaked to The Associated Press, which earned a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on them.

The NYPD also monitored Muslim student association groups at local universities, including the Stony Brook University MSA’s website, according to the AP, and had informants reporting from inside mosques.

“What did you get out of it?” asks Khan rhetorically. “How much money did you spend and what was the outcome? I have not seen or heard of anyone who has been arrested, prosecuted and convicted based on that spying. So for me, it was a wasted effort. What was the downside? You lost the trust of the very community willing to help.”

Both NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have defended the controversial initiative, noting the necessity of preventing future attacks.

“The NYPD is trying to stop terrorism in the entire region,” the mayor said last year. “When there’s no lead, it’s just you’re trying to get familiar with what’s going on and where people might go and where people might be.”

For the NYPD, the spying may be an example of the ends justifying the means. There have been no attacks on the city since Sept. 11, and local and federal authorities have foiled several plots since then, including a plot to bomb the New York City subway system and, most recently, a plan to blow up the Federal Reserve building in New York City.

And while the NYPD may have consequently lost the trust of some LI Muslims, those same Muslims have no qualms with local law enforcement.

“They are very different: they are very open,” says Imam, comparing Suffolk police to the NYPD. Suffolk County Police Commissioner Edward Webber and Chief of Department James Burke hold several meetings a year with Muslim leaders, he says.

“We have a very good relationship,” agrees Dr. Hafiz Rehman, commissioner for the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission and an advisor to Webber and Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone.

“It’s because of our interaction with them that they respond so quickly to our needs,” he adds.

“Was there much of a need to become directly involved [before 9/11]?” says Det. Lt. Bob Donohue, commanding officer of Suffolk police’s Community Response Bureau. “Not so much perhaps 10 years or so ago or 20 years ago…there have been some challenges we’ve faced, particularly the challenge that occurred last week in Boston…the tragedy of 9/11, but I think we have an excellent relationship and it’s because of the interaction we have with people.”
Those relationships, law enforcement officials say, are invaluable.

“[The] reality is you can’t look to have or start a relationship after something bad happens and to expect honesty and trust between people that have not had a relationship prior to that,” adds Deputy Chief Kevin Fallon, SCPD’s lead spokesman. “The fact that we maintain a very good relationship helps us in both good and bad times.”

Despite the positive gains made by Muslims in the community, suspicion remains, and they have radical Islamists abroad—and at home—to thank for that.

THE WAR WITHIN

“I am proud to be a traitor to America,” is the title of an article reportedly written by Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda mouthpiece who spent his teenager years in Westbury before moving to North Carolina.

“He’s a person who was basically raised on Long Island, became radicalized, and became a terrorist while he was on Long Island,” King said at the time.

Khan’s family grew concerned, trying several times to intervene and seeking help from religious leaders in their community, according to The New York Times. It didn’t work. Khan ended up leaving America for Yemen in 2009, and was killed two years later in a drone strike targeting al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric known for spreading anti-Western sentiment.

Bryant Neal Vinas was another Long Islander-turned-terrorist sympathizer. The Patchogue native was reportedly raised Roman Catholic, then converted to Islam before he was captured in Pakistan, and admitted to giving al-Qaeda information for a plot to bomb the Long Island Rail Road.

Imam, the SCPD Muslim chaplain and former director of the Selden Masjid, remembers seeing Vinas, or Ibrahim, as he knew him, at the mosque.

“Very quiet, very ordinary guy,” he says. “Never thought that this guy would wind up in [Pakistan] fighting against us. But that was a shocker, that was really a shocker.”

Islamic Jihad was brought back into the fold on Long Island on Sunday, April 14—one day before the Boston bombing—when blogger Pamela Geller appeared at the Chabad at Great Neck after the Great Neck Synagogue had caved to public pressure and cancelled their event.

Hundreds turned out. Some held signs declaring “No Sharia Law”—the code of law derived from the Koran—while also defending Geller’s right to free speech. About a dozen men stood sentry holding American flags along path to the entrance of the Chabad, which overlooks Manhasset Bay.

“Under the Sharia, there are blasphemy laws: you cannot criticize Islam, you cannot offend Islam,” Geller told the packed room while dozens of others watched from a screen outside. “In Muslim countries, if you blaspheme, you’re put to death. That’s the penalty for blasphemy.”

Geller’s Stop Islamization of America group was labeled a hate group by the civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center. She blasted her critics, proclaiming: “I do not promote hate speech, I expose hate speech.”

Others, such as Khan and Nadim, would disagree. But right now they’re looking toward the future—one without constant suspicion toward Muslim Americans.

COME TOGETHER

At Stony Brook, Nadim exudes pride for the country, citing Woodstock, America’s forefathers and Martin Luther King, Jr. as examples. She holds onto hope.

“I wish it didn’t happen, I wish it was a different place, a different time when people didn’t have to deal with this. I wish this young 8-year-old boy didn’t die in the way he died,” she says, teary-eyed. “I wish there is no violence. I wish there are no wars…but that’s the fact of our existence in this world. Evil is existing, together with good, and human beings have the choice to act according to evil or to act according to righteousness and good.”

The hope for a brighter future “is America,” she says. “The hope is the Constitution. The hope that every person has an inalienable right to live in peace and harmony as long as they’re law-abiding citizens. That’s the hope. And that’s what makes this country a better place than any other place.”

Hamdani also holds out hope for the future, hope that worshipers from all religions can finally see their shared common ground, hope that she, too, through her story, can transform her hardship into a tangible solution that can be shared and embraced by not only this generation, but for those yet to come.

“I’m so much at peace now,” she says, while confessing she has “one more fight to fight”—getting Salman recognized as a police cadet on the NYPD 9/11 Memorial, something the department has yet to do.

Throughout the past 13 years, Hamdani has tackled every challenge thrown her way—whether fighting for her son’s name or dispelling misconceptions about Islam. And through it all, she never lost her faith in America.

Standing proudly in front of her home, an American flag waving behind her, Hamdani is reminded about the love her son had for his country, a love so intense he laid down his life to save the lives of complete strangers.

“Nobody in this world would not want to become an American!” she exclaims. “In spite of what’s happening in the political world, I’m proud to be an American, too.”

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested Friday night and is suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon. (Photo: FBI)

Federal authorities have charged the Boston Marathon bombing suspect with using a weapon of mass destruction, which is punishable by death, but didn’t deem him an enemy combatant as some had urged.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is expected to be arraigned Monday in his room at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where authorities have said he is listed in serious condition.

“Today’s charges bring a successful end to a tragic week for the city of Boston and for our country,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “We’ve once again shown that those who target innocent Americans and attempt to terrorize our cities will not escape from justice.”

The 19-year-old Cambridge man was captured Friday night following a five-day manhunt that ended when the teen was found hiding in a boat in Watertown, Mass.

His 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, was killed in a shootout with police after the duo allegedly gunned down an MIT police officer and carjacked a driver Thursday night.

The bombings last Monday at the Boylston Street finish line left three dead and more than 200 wounded. Investigators have said the suspects made the bombs out of pressure cookers filled with nails, ball bearings and other projectiles.

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) joined fellow Republicans in calling on President Barack Obama to have the surviving Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant, meaning he would be tried in military tribunal instead of civilian court.

“The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans,” King said in a joint statement. “The suspect, based upon his actions, clearly is a good candidate for enemy combatant status.”

Tsarnaev, a native of the Chechnya region in southern Russia, was granted U.S. citizenship in September. Massachusetts has outlawed the death penalty, but it is still allowed under federal law. He could also be sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Carmen Ortiz, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said she could not disclose what the teen may have said to investigators except to say that they always “seek to elicit all the actionable intelligence and information we can from terrorist suspects.”

Rich Sturges, a 41-year-old Boston school teacher originally from Malverne, was about five blocks from the scene during his second running of the nation’s oldest marathon when the bombs went off second apart.

“It was very stunning,” he told the Press. “It’s not going to be back to normal for a while.”

First responders on the scene at The Boston Marathon finish line following a pair of explosions Monday, April 15, 2013 (Courtesy of CBS).

Long Island is on high alert after twin bombings Monday at the Boston Marathon left at least three dead—reportedly including an 8-year-old boy—and more than 100 wounded.

New York State, city, Nassau and Suffolk county authorities said they are taking extra precautions while federal investigators work with Boston police on the investigation, which is still in its early stages. A number of Long Islanders were among the runners and spectators swept up in the ensuing chaos.

“We will be holding a security meeting this Wednesday with subsequent security briefings in the weeks leading up to our Long Island Marathon,” Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano said of the May 3-5 races—just two weeks away. He said Nassau police “is in constant contact with the FBI and the [NYPD].”

Suffolk County Police Deputy Chief Kevin Fallon, that department’s chief spokesman, said officers are focusing on Long Island Rail Road stations, malls and sports arenas with backup from bomb-sniffing dogs.

“Patrols will include having officers exiting their vehicles and walking through the transportation facilities,” he said. “Police have no reason to believe that a similar incident will occur in Suffolk…but the department is taking precautionary measures.”

The two closely timed bombs went off about 50 yards from each other at the Boylston Street finish line shortly before 3 p.m. Police said they later found at least one undetonated explosive devise nearby and that a report of a third explosion at nearby JFK Library preliminarily appears to be an unrelated fire. The FBI has taken over the probe.

Rick DesLauriers, FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Boston field office, said authorities are treating the case as a “potential terrorist investigation.” Boston police said that despite widespread news reports to the contrary, there is no suspect in custody.

Sal Nastasi, a 33-year-old Massapequa Park man who finished the 26.2-mile race in two hours and 35 minutes, was cheering on a friend at the 24-mile mark when he got word he narrowly avoided the carnage himself.

“The course cleared out and people were trying to figure out just what was going on,” Nastasi told CBS Sports Radio. “People were pretty frantic.”

Anthony Abbruscato, a 22-year-old North Babylon man who was also cheering on friends who were running the race when the bombs went off, said he was stunned by the attacks.

“There was a moment where time seemed to stand still as all of us tried to digest what was happening,” he said. “After the gravity of the situation set in, everyone began to panic and flee from the area. Phone lines were either down or busy, and everyone just felt helpless as they tried to contact friends and loved ones at the event.”

The case is a reminder that the public and law enforcement needs to remain vigilant, according to Vincent Henry, director of the Homeland Security Management Institute at Long Island University.

“From what we’ve seen it appears to have been an anti-personnel device,” he said. “Something that was designed to harm people and not buildings.”

Jeffrey Grossmann, a St. John’s University criminal justice professor in the Homeland and Corporate Security Program, said that the fact that countless cameras were aimed at the finish line could help solve the case.

“Anyone with recordings and videotapes of surveillance videos of anything that happened should contact authorities,” he said. “It may play a key role in finding out what happened.”

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterintelligence & Terrorism, said the attackers will be brought to justice.

“Americans will not be deterred by terrorism,” he said. “We will hunt down and bring to justice the cowards responsible for today’s attack.”

Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis echoed the sentiment.

“This cowardly act will not be taken in stride,” he told reporters in a Tuesday night news conference. “We will turn every rock over to find the person responsible.”

President Barack Obama addressed the nation in a brief televised statement.

“We still do not know who did this or why,” he said. “And people shouldn’t jump to conclusions before we have all the facts.  But make no mistake—we will get to the bottom of this. And we will find out who did this; we’ll find out why they did this. Any responsible individuals, any responsible groups will feel the full weight of justice.”

CROOKED IN HQ: Former Second Deputy Nassau Police Commissioner William Flanagan, convicted of conspiring to cover up a burglary, faced a press swarm after his arrest in March 2012.
(Photo by Rashed Mian/Long Island Press)

After about five frustrated days of jury deliberations, Judge Mark Cohen was preparing to declare a mistrial in the cover-up case against an ex-Nassau County police brass member when a court officer handed him a note: The jurors had reached a verdict.

With the clock running out, two jurors and Cohen—a Suffolk judge brought in after two Nassau judges had recused themselves last year—were about to go on vacation, threatening to nullify the month-long trial. Shortly before 8 p.m. a hush fell over the small crowd at Nassau court in Mineola on Feb. 15 as the jury foreman read the verdict. William Flanagan, the retired second deputy Nassau police commissioner, readily looked on.

He was found guilty of conspiracy, a misdemeanor, and not guilty of receiving reward for official misconduct, a felony, after being convicted of two misdemeanor official misconduct counts on Valentine’s Day.

“This isn’t over,” Flanagan calmly told reporters outside the courtroom.

It was his first public statement since he’d given a round of interviews following his March 2012 arrest—prosecutors had unsuccessfully tried to use those quotes as evidence since he never took the stand.

“We’re very disappointed that the jury mistakenly convicted him of the misdemeanor,” said Bruce Barket, Flanagan’s Garden City-based attorney, who vowed to appeal. “They exonerated him of the most serious charge. The appellate court will take care of the rest.”

District Attorney Kathleen Rice, the top-elected Democrat seeking re-election in Republican-controlled Nassau, now faces strained relations with the police agency her prosecutors work closest with after she took down its disgraced ex-third top cop, sources in both departments say. As two of Flanagan’s alleged co-conspirators await trial—the highest-ranking of the brass to do so after an especially scandalous year for Nassau cops—Rice echoed a Press expose that had sparked Flanagan’s arrest and conviction.

“This case has always been about making sure that there isn’t one set of rules for the wealthy and connected, and another set for everyone else,” Rice said in a statement. “The jury validated our belief in that important principle.”

The scandal erupted five months after Bronx prosecutors accused 15 NYPD officers of fixing tickets in what some described as New York City’s biggest police favoritism case in a half-century. Those cops pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.

As far as Long Island law enforcement cover-up scandals go, Flanagan’s conviction may be the most serious case since a New York State commission investigated widespread allegations of Suffolk County police corruption in the 1980s—assuming that discrepancies revealed at the now-shuttered Nassau police crime lab were just mistakes and not acts intended to sway cases.

UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR:
Gary Parker, a CPA from Merrick who asked his police friends’ for help quashing the arrest of his son, Zachary, was a star witness at Flanagan’s trial (Photo by Rashed Mian/Long Island Press)

Nassau jurors unanimously agreed that Flanagan had joined a conspiracy to return electronics stolen from John F. Kennedy High School in Bellmore in May 2009 by then-17-year-old student Zachary Parker as a favor to Parker’s father, Gary, a donor to a nonprofit Nassau police foundation, who wanted to avoid Zach’s arrest. But, by acquitting Flanagan of taking three $100 Morton’s steakhouse gift cards from the Parkers as a reward for misconduct, jurors had doubted that there was a quid pro quo, apparently buying the defense argument that the two were friends who’d exchanged gifts before.

“We realized that it was a conspiracy from day one,” one juror told the Press the night of the verdict. “They did what they did. They can’t undo that.”

Now that the first of the conspiracy cases have wrapped, one nagging question persists: Why should a jaded public care?

CALLING SERPICO

For a case that required jurors to listen to 18 witnesses, hear dozens of emails read aloud and watch what observers estimated was a record number of sidebars over 12 days of testimony, there was at least some star appeal to spice things up.

Those who sat with Flanagan supporters were high-ranking current and former officials, including his old boss, retired Nassau Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey, and Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), who told the Press: “Bill’s a good friend.” Gary Parker testified that Bill O’Reilly of Fox News Channel billed the Nassau County Police Foundation—a group fundraising for a new police academy the two donated to—for $600 worth of his Pinheads and Patriots books. Parker also testified he’d asked for Flanagan’s help while the ex-cop was securing the 2009 U.S. Golf Open at Bethpage State Park.

But, beyond the splashy celebrity lure, such cases can have a real chilling effect.

“There’s an old saying: Everybody does it,” says Peter Cardalena, a St. John’s University criminal justice professor, Floral Park-based attorney and retired NYPD officer. “We just let it roll off our backs. The public should be concerned.”

He recalls students telling him when they think they’ve been improperly stopped by police but rarely report the allegations to internal affairs investigators because they feel “nothing can be done.” Cardalena counters that police retraining is routinely ordered after misconduct claims are made—a sign such allegations are taken seriously.

Police Commissioner Thomas Dale—whose first task was closing half of eight precincts—was hired halfway through a 20-month period in which four cops died in the line of duty and oversaw a year in which a half dozen police employees were arrested. Last May he had the Nassau County Legislature grant him the power to fire officers as he sees fit without arbitration, although the Nassau County Police Benevolent Association is fighting that move in court.

Still, by all accounts, 2012 was the department’s worst year in recent memory. Aside from Flanagan’s two alleged co-conspirators—former Deputy Chief of Patrol John Hunter and retired Det. Sgt. Alan Sharpe—ex-Nassau Police Officer Michael Tedesco pleaded not guilty in December to 109 charges alleging he spent shifts at his mistress’ house, police aide Frances Colvin pleaded not guilty to harassing a romantic rival, and another cop was sentenced in June to community service after admitting to shoplifting $40 of baby food. Inspector Thomas DePaola was also demoted for downgrading crime statistics in July.

Justin Hopson, a former New Jersey State Trooper who blew the whistle on corrupt cops and is the author of Breaking the Blue Wall: One Man’s War Against Police Corruption, says Dale will have to do more than fire bad apples to restore public trust in the department.

“Every act of police corruption needs to be unearthed, investigated properly and prosecuted,” he tells the Press, adding that Dale needs to “create a cultural sea change, one where the police police one another.”

Inspector Kenneth Lack, the department’s chief spokesman, declined to comment for this story. Rice’s office referred questions back to her statement.

From left: Retired Det. Sgt. Alan Sharpe, ex-Second Deputy Commissioner William Flanagan and former Deputy Chief of Patrol John Hunter. Sharpe and Hunter had their cases severed from Flanagan’s and are awaiting trial.

OFFICE POLITICS

The difference in opinion between police and prosecutors over whether Flanagan should have ever been charged could be measured in the distance separating his supporters and the district attorney staffers seated on opposite sides of the courtroom during the trial.

How much that rift carries over into everyday inter-agency cooperation—or lack thereof—is open to debate, although observers agree that the internal politics is more an issue than the case’s potential impact when Rice’s re-election campaign ramps up later this year.

“My gut says the verdict has its own implications but it’s going to be like a tree falling in the forest—it’s not going to have any political implications,” says Jerry Kremer, a former state Assemblyman turned LI Democratic strategist.

Although representatives for the police and the prosecution declined to discuss the rift on the record, those close to the situation agree that there are fences in need of mending.

“I think there’s relationships that should be developed and made stronger…for the continued success of policing and prosecuting in Nassau County,” says James Carver, president of the Nassau PBA, which has supported Rice’s past campaigns.

Nassau County Attorney John Ciampoli is confident that both sides will eventually bury the handcuffs.

“This is not the first person in a police force who’s been charged with a crime,” says Ciampoli. “This comes up in the course of business. It’s come up before; it’ll come up again. The professionals on both ends are working through it.”

In her statement the night of the verdict, Rice acknowledged that the case is a black eye for the beleaguered police department.

“This is a huge win for the public, but it’s also a sad day for an awful lot of incredibly hard-working Nassau cops who do their brave jobs honestly every day,” Rice’s statement reads. “This case is a reminder that to safeguard the public’s trust and the integrity of our honest officers, we must be vigilant in our fight against corruption and misconduct.”

Still, don’t expect the issue to spark any action in the halls of county government.

A spokesman for Presiding Officer Norma Gonsalves (R-East Meadow) says there are no proposals or public hearings in the county legislature stemming from the case. A spokeswoman for County Executive Ed Mangano did not respond to a request for comment.

The March 31, 2011 Press cover story “Membership Has Its Privileges” sparked an investigation by the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office that resulted in the felony conviction of Zachary Parker and the indictments of three ex-top cops.

JAIL CELL DOORS

Flanagan, who resigned following a year in which he was ranked LI’s highest-paid cop, is scheduled to be sentenced May 1. Misdemeanor convictions are punishable by up to a year in jail, although it’s doubtful he’ll serve much time—if any.

His co-defendants, Hunter and Sharpe, had their cases severed from Flanagan’s and they are due back in court March 15. Their attorneys declined to comment.

Zachary Parker, the burglar who was never arrested by police, pleaded guilty to charges in a grand jury indictment after prosecutors investigated the cover-up allegations in the Press. He’s serving up to three years in prison.

How many others like him whose cover-ups were never exposed we may never know.

President Barack Obama gave his first State of the Union address of his second term Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013.

President Barack Obama laid out more than a dozen new initiatives Tuesday in the first State of the Union address of his second term, packing an array of issues into the hour-long speech, including four—climate change, immigration, veterans and gun control—of particular importantance to Long Islanders, a few of whom were in the audience.

Obama started off flat while discussing his budget and tax reform proposals, but he worked his way up to an emotional plea for Congress to enact new restrictions on firearms sales to reduce the number of gun deaths nationwide. He sounded encouraged by current immigration reform talks among lawmakers, but the president oscilated between urging the Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to negotiate a compromise on the upcoming deficit reduction plan known as sequestration, and threatening to use executive orders if Congress doesn’t act on global warming.

“We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen, were all just a freak coincidence,” Obama said, referring in part to the Oct. 29 hurricane-nor’easter hybrid that ravaged LI and the Northeast. ”Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science—and act before it’s too late.”

The president remained vague on most of his proposals, choosing to paint a broad picture of the goals he’s setting for the year to come, but did get into some specifics while discussing immigration and, to a lesser degree, gun control.

“Senators of both parties are working together on tough new laws to prevent anyone from buying guns for resale to criminals,” the president said, before rallying for a vote on the bill. ”Police chiefs are asking our help to get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets, because these police chiefs, they’re tired of seeing their guys and gals being outgunned.”

Among those top cops was John Aresta, the Malverne village police chief, whose uncle was among six murdered in the 1993 Long Island Rail Road massacre. He was invited to attend by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-Mineola), whose husband was killed and son injured in the same shooting spree that launched her to the national stage to advocate for gun control.

“I personally don’t see a reason why anybody would need a 30-round clip or a 10-round clip for an assault rifle,” Aresta had told Fox Business News  last month shortly after New York State passed sweeping new gun control laws in the wake of the Newtown elementary school massacre in December.

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), the lone Republican among LI’s five-member Congressional delegation, wrote on Twitter that he was disapointed in Obama’s lack of focus on unemployment and deficit reduction, but co-authored an op-ed in Politico expressing support for ensuring background checks for all  gun purchases, with the exception of gifts between family members or temporary transfers for hunters. He noted national estimates that only four in 10 gun buyers are subject to such checks.

New York City got two mentions. Obama first touted the heroic nurses who evacuated newborn babies from the NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan during Sandy, signaling Menchu Sanchez by name. She was seated next to First Lady Michelle Obama. He later extolled the benefits of P-Tech in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York Public Schools, the City University of New York and IBM, where students graduate with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in computers or engineering—a model he wants emulated nationwide.

The emphasis on improving education to better the economy dovetailed with his reasons for supporting immigration, a hotly debated issue on LI, where undocumented Hispanic immigrant day laborers have repeatedly been victims of Suffolk County hate crimes in recent years.

“Our economy is stronger when we harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants,” Obama said, emphasizing that reform must include stronger border security, cutting waiting periods, attracting highly skilled engineers and ”establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship—a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and … learning English.”

But some immigration issues are easier to solve than others. Rep. Steve Israel (D-Dix Hills) invited as his guests Dania and Nick Marvos, a Little Neck couple who were in the process of adopting a 1-year-old boy named Ari from Russia until two months ago when Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law banning American adoptions of Russian children. The move was widely seen as retaliation for a recently passed U.S. law punishing Russian human rights violators.

“Waiting for news to see if we will be allowed to bring our baby home has been one of the most trying times in our lives,” Dania Mavros said in a statement released by Israel’s office. ”Devastating does not capture the emotional roller coaster that we are enduring every day.”

Congressman Israel said he is negotiating to help the couple complete the adoption process despite the new Russian law in an attempt to save their son-to-be from growing up in an orphanage. Thousands of other cases are also in jeopardy.

Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) invited Dina McKenna of Lindenhurst, whose husband, Sgt. William McKenna, died in 2010 of cancer caused by his exposure to toxic fumes from burn pits the military used for disposing of hazardous waste in Iraq. Bishop had laws passed to curtail the use of burn pits and require the Department of Veterans Affairs to improve its treatment of soldiers exposed to them.

“All veterans whose health may have been affected by toxic burn pits must be accounted for and given the health care and support they have earned,” Bishop said in a statement.

Obama’s nod to veterans came as he promised to better defend against cyber attacks, end the more than decade-long war in Afghanistan “by the end of next year,” prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons and isolate North Korea for its provocations in testing nuclear weapons potentially capable of being fitted on inter-continental ballistic missles. He reiterated plans to strengthen U.S. missle defense to block such an attack.

The commander-in-chief also made clear that while the military will not be sending large numbers of troops abroad for Iraq-style occupations, he vaguely referred to special operations forces that will continue to hunt al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and wherever else they may be hiding. He made veiled reference to the continued deployment of predator drones despite recently renewed controversy over their use to kill American citizens working with terrorists, such as Westbury-native Samir Khan, the al-Qaeda propagandist killed in U.S. airstrikes alongside militant cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.

“Where necessary, through a range of capabilities, we will continue to take direct action against those terrorists who pose the gravest threat to Americans,” he said.

Former Nassau County Police Second Deputy Commissioner William Flanagan faces conspiracy and official misconduct charges. He surrendered to the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office March 1, 2012.

An ex-Nassau County police detective testified that the ex-commander who’s a defendant in an alleged cover-up case thanked him after the investigator returned stolen property without arresting the suspect who’s a police donor’s son.

Retired Seventh Squad Det. Bruce Coffey and two current Nassau police officials—his ex-partner, Det. Barry Franklin, and his old boss, Deputy Inspector Lorna Atmore—took the stand last week in the trial of William Flanagan, the former second deputy police commissioner.

“We’re getting calls from pretty high up about this case,” Coffey said one of his bosses, retired Det. Sgt. Alan Sharpe—Flanagan’s co-defendant, who’s case has been severed—told him. But, Coffey testified, the brass wanted the charges dropped: “They weren’t looking for an arrest.”

Flanagan has pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and misconduct charges along with Sharpe and former Deputy Chief of Patrol John Hunter, who’s also slated to be tried separately. Coffey, who’s cooperating as a witness to avoid prosecution, testified Hunter leaned on Sharpe to have Coffey get the charges dropped.

The allegedly quashed case was that of Zachary Parker, a former student at Bellmore’s John F. Kennedy High School, who admitted last year to burglarizing his alma mater in 2009 and is serving prison time for the $11,000 in thefts. His father, Gary, was a friend of Hunter and Flanagan as well as a director of a Nassau police nonprofit. The Press exposed the alleged cover-up in March 2011.

“You didn’t order an arrest…because the school was ambivalent, is that correct?” Bruce Barket, Flanagan’s attorney, asked Atmore, Coffey’s then-supervisor. She agreed, adding that it was “not unusual” for schools to take an initial wait-and-see approach on arresting students.

Atmore testified that the day the report came in she learned Parker was a well-connected suspect who she believed would “very likely” be arrested and reported the case to the Internal Affairs Unit (IAU) because he worked in the department’s Emergency Ambulance Bureau.

“I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to get involved,” she testified of her desire to avoid a case involving a suspect who’s dad is friends with some of her bosses. “I’m thinking this is a good thing, my detectives aren’t going to be responsible for dealing with this mess.”

Her relief was short-lived. Atmore said the same day she called IAU, Hunter called her back and “said that the Seventh Squad was keeping the case.” She said “It was odd and it was weird and I was trying to figure out what his relation was,” because as a patrol commander, Hunter wasn’t generally involved in detectives’ investigations.

Atmore obeyed the order, but transferred the case to Coffey after pulling it from his partner, Franklin, who originally was assigned the case. She was promoted out of the squad days later, leaving Sharpe in charge as commanding officer.

“How many other cases you were assigned were taken away from you and assigned to another detective?” Assistant District Attorney Cristiana McSloy asked Franklin, who replied, “none.”

Franklin said he didn’t properly log in as evidence the two stolen laptops and projector because it was another detective’s case and that it also hadn’t been logged in by the Fifth Precinct, where Zachary Parker’s friend originally turned some of the stolen proerty in.

Coffey said he was “conflicted” about asking the school’s principal, Lorraine Poppe, to drop the charges when they met shortly after the theft. So he went through the motions of interviewing, but not taking sworn statements from witnesses—and never asked for videotape of Parker fleeing the scene the night of the burglary.

“She was very adamant about wanting him to be arrested,” Coffey testified. “It wasn’t the time to do it. I had to show her some respect.”

Also revealed at trial was that another detective had tried to get Poppe to sign a form indicating she wanted to drop the charges a month after the theft, but she refused. Coffey eventually had Poppe sign a form accepting the property Sept. 1, 2009, but she again refused to sign the form dropping the charges, he testified.

Later that fall at a retirement party, “I was sitting down at a table, [Deputy] Commissioner Flanagan came up, shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you,’” Coffey testified.

“I thought it was obviously for the John F. Kennedy case,” he said, “for handling the return of the property.”

When it was Coffey’s turn to retire in October 2010, he said he wrote a memo to close out the Parker theft case indicating that Poppe did not want the suspect arrested—a fact he testified he knew to be untrue.

The detectives’ testimony came after Gary Parker testified for four days last week. Barket asked Parker’s feeling Thursday about how his son blew his chance at probation in the burglary and unrelated drug and traffic cases, landing himself in prison instead of college.

“In hindsight, wouldn’t it be fair to say your son should have been arrested in May 2009?” Barket asked. “Yes,” Parker said after a pause.

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), who Parker testified attended one of many police dinners he paid for, sat with Flanagan’s supporters Friday. “Bill’s an old friend,” King told the Press outside the courtroom. “I worked closely with him on homeland security issues.”

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano, left, who went to Washington D.C. Tuesday to lobby for Sandy aid, meet with House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Reps. Peter King and Steve Israel.

Seventy eight days after Sandy, the remaining $51 billion of the $60-billion northeast aid package finally passed the U.S. House of Representatives, sparking praise from Long Island lawmakers who two weeks ago were at war with the Republican majority that initially snubbed superstorm survivors.

“Tonight’s vote to provide $60 billion in Hurricane Sandy relief was an outstanding victory,” said Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), who famously blasted House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) for the delays. ”It is unfortunate that we had to fight so hard to be treated the same as every other state has been treated. But we did fight this bias against the northeast and thank god our residents won.”

Rep.  Steve Israel (D-Huntington) said, “New Yorkers can finally rest assured that help is on its way. I’m delighted that the House finally passed the Sandy relief bill, but the real heroes are the New Yorkers rebuilding their lives, homes, and businesses.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Conn. Gov. Dannel Malloy released a joint statement saying, “We are grateful to those members of Congress who today pulled together in a unified, bipartisan coalition to assist millions of their fellow Americans … at their greatest time of need.”

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said he expects the bill to easily pass the Senate and be sent to the President’s desk for signing.

Sandy victims gather in Island Park before bus trip to Washington D.C. (Rashed Mian/Long Island Press)

A group of Superstorm Sandy victims loaded into a bus in Island Park early Tuesday morning as they prepared to descend on Capitol Hill where they will try to convince a divided Congress to approve a full relief package two months after Sandy ravaged the area, crippling infrastructure and leaving many to fend for themselves.

Going along for the ride to Washington, D.C. was 12-year-old Island Park resident John Byrne who stood at a podium in his hometown and passed along a stern message to members of Congress: stop the “political shenanigans,” he said to applause.

That rallying cry seemed to galvanize the dozens of storm weary residents who boarded the bus just after 6 a.m. with the hopes of coming back to Long Island with two “yes” votes in their back pockets.

“We should be getting the money, we should’ve gotten it already—it’s time to stop,” said 38-year-old Roy Gunther.

Storm victims have grown frustrated with Congress’ inability to approve a full relief package despite emotional testimony from local lawmakers. Those making the trek to Washington D.C. hope personal testimony will help convince lawmakers to approve two aid packages that are expected to go in front of the House Tuesday.

A $18 billion bill is expected to address emergency needs and another $33 billion bill—the most controversial—would help allocate funds and resources to assist in recovery efforts and also includes long-term projects focused on preventive measures for future storms.

So far, Congress has only approved a $9 billion bill for the national flood insurance program.

“I feel like the only one’s helping each other are us,” said Melissa Van Wickler of East Rockaway, before boarding the bus. “I’m only one person and I’ve been volunteering so much time all up and down from East Rockaway, Oceanside, Island Park.”

She added: “We need more people to make a difference.”

Sandy victims board a bus that will take them to Washington D.C. where they will push for Sandy aid. (Rashed Mian/Long Island Press)

Historically, the federal government is quick to approve funds for relief efforts. It only took Congress two weeks to approve $62.3 billion in federal emergency appropriations after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans.

Also making the trip to the Nation’s Capitol are Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano and is Suffolk County counterpart Steve Bellone.

“We bring our voices to members of Congress today,” Mangano blasted into a microphone.

“When Americans are hurting and suffering our country has always been there to support them…until now,” added Bellone. “We need this bill passed now.”

In December, the Senate passed a $62 billion recovery bill with bipartisan support but the legislation was never brought to the floor of the House, leading Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) to blast his fellow Republicans and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Last week, King said on his Facebook page that “I think we’re going to have the votes” to pass the Sandy aid package.

Despite the delay in aid, some attending the rally said a federal relief package is better late then never.

“We can still save homes, still save business, we can still save lives if we effectively apply this aid,” said Walk A Mile in Our Shoes co-founder Peter Corless, who organized the trip.