Top Cops At Precinct Removed From Jobs After Alleged Sodomy Giuliani Wants To Know Why Ambulance Delayed At Station For 90 Minutes After Arrival

The top officers at a Brooklyn police precinct were relieved of their commands Thursday in the wake of an alleged sodomy attack on a Haitian immigrant in the station house restroom.

Police Commissioner Howard Safir also suspended the desk sergeant on duty at the time of Saturday’s alleged attack and placed on modified duty a second sergeant and eight officers who were in the 70th Precinct in Flatbush that morning.

Meanwhile, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said an Emergency Medical Service crew languished for an hour and a half at the station house after arriving to tend to Abner Louima’s critical injuries.

According to a law enforcement official who asked not to be identified, the crew was not provided with the police escort required for transfer of injured prisoners to the hospital, delaying Louima’s needed surgery for a punctured small intestine and a ruptured bladder.

“I’d like an explanation for why people sat around while he was in suffering and in pain,” Giuliani said.

In a graphic hospital interview, Louima described the alleged attack, and reiterated his lawyer’s claim that the police invoked Giuliani’s name while they were assaulting him.

“One of them said, ‘This is Giuliani time, this is not Dinkins time,”’ Louima said in an interview, referring to former New York Mayor David Dinkins.

“If, in fact, any cop said this, he does not know what I stand for, he doesn’t know what the Police Department stands for and doesn’t belong in the New York City Police Department,” Giuliani said. Louima said that an attacker inserted a toilet plunger handle into his rectum, and then put it in his mouth.

The security guard said his assailants told him not to report the attack. “They said they will kill me and everyone in my family,” he said.

“If God himself could forgive, I must forgive, but they must pay for what they did,” Louima said.

While deriding talk of a “blue wall of silence,” Giuliani pleaded with police officers to come forward. “They’re tested by this,” the mayor said. “And the test is, what do they really stand for? Do they stand for law, decency, humanity?”

Louima Thursday began taking liquids after surgery Saturday at Coney Island Hospital. “He can drink and he can smile and talk a little,” said his personal physician, Dr. Jean-Claude Compass. He said Louima may need further surgery for a broken jaw.

Louima was allegedly sodomized with a toilet plunger by Officer Justin Volpe, 25, around 5 a.m. Saturday. The attack came after Louima was arrested at a Brooklyn nightclub during a fracas between a largely Haitian crowd and police. Volpe, the son of a retired detective, was released on $100,000 bond Thursday after he was arraigned on first-degree assault and sex abuse charges in Brooklyn Criminal Court. He appeared in court Thursday with his lawyer, Marshal Trager.

Investigators believe that officer Thomas Bruder, 31, who was placed on modified duty Tuesday night, was Volpe’s accomplice. Volpe, Bruder and a third cop said they were injured after Louima’s arrest, police said.

Swept from the precinct Thursday in the reshuffle were the commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Jeremiah Quinlan, 45, who was not on duty during the attack, and the executive officer, Capt. William Walsh, who arrived at the precinct before Louima was rushed to the hospital. Walsh, 56, was placed on modified duty, and stripped of his badge and gun.

Sgt. Jeffrey Fallon, 32, the desk sergeant that night, was suspended and faces departmental charges for failing to supervise the station house. The bathroom where the attack is alleged to have happened is some 20 feet from the precinct’s front desk.