Mark Raposo

And the worst of it all is we're wearing shirts that say New Bedford Police. Like, what the fuck are you doing? We're not even in our city. We're guests over here. What are you doing?

Now I'm nervous now because he's in there. My gun's in there. And he's hanging out of our hotel room window screaming, suck my dick loud. Like loud.

Well, he's done after this.

The only reason George was there is because they look at a piece of paper, and if those numbers are high, that's it. It doesn't matter the baggage that you bring. Nobody cares about what you did or what rules you bent to get them at that point in time. That would put you on the top, bring in numbers, numbers, numbers.

He would mention that he was always working to cultivate informants because his real goal was to get into narcotics, but they would never take him there.

There were CIs who were even reporting this stuff back to certain people, and still nothing was getting done. CIs that were telling guys in the drug unit that this kid is doing stuff that he ain't supposed to, and it just carried on and on and on.

A male identifying himself as a police officer is breaking into a boat. Here's Mark Raposo. I think at that point, I'm probably already putting two and two together.

George picked his people he would deal with, specifically due to their immigration status.

They don't speak English. You know, I think in his mind, I believe less likely to complain, less likely to understand that they're being subjected to an illegal search.

His Crown Vic, the front of it just caught on fire. It was early, early, early in the morning, 4, 5, 6 in the morning.

He ruffles so many feathers that someone lights his, well, his cruiser catches itself on fire in front of his house.

And I said, you know, I'm not gonna be part of this. This is not a secret what this guy does. I flat out telling him, I'm not backing that kid up. I'm not, I'm not doing it.

I was thinking, I can't be around this stuff. This guy's gonna get in big trouble. And in the end, I get in trouble.

And it's George wearing a black Marine SRT shirt, sweatpants. He's there in his own car.

And I don't even think he has a radio. What is going on here? And I'm already going, oh, man, give me a break. Like, why did I have to be working right now, you know?

I mean, he's a cop, but he's not working as a cop. He's not really dressed as a cop. He tells us, hey, I have information that there's drugs on this boat, but he doesn't call anybody about it. I'm going to see what I can grab, and I'm going to make my way home.

I even get a fucking piece of paper and I look back at the station after everybody leaves and I write drug rip and I fold it and I put it on his desk.

He just shows up and he just says, I'm looking for drugs. I know there's drugs on the boat.

George, what the fuck are you doing? What is this? Well, they got drugs. My CI says there's drugs on the boat.

Even if he did say in a perfect world he does have this person as a CIA, they tell him, hey, we got this stuff on the boat. The last thing anybody's going to do is put their sweatpants on, throw a radio in their back pocket, drive their car down there, not tell anybody what they're doing and start ransacking a boat with four or five guys in it.

So I get the grand jury summons, and I go there. I want to say I go there to testify that day, and I walk in, and I said, hey, let's have a little sit-down. Let's talk.

Well, I says, it depends what you're going to do. Are you going to follow this through? And his words to me is, I'm going to take this wherever the evidence takes me. He tells me this. So Raposo agrees. You know, you can't manipulate this as a grand jury now. You can't. This can't be manipulated now. This is just, this is going to go. This has wheels now. This is it.

These guys are going to have to answer now.

George at the time was erratic as can be. And this is a guy who's proficient with firearms. Not only on patrol level, this guy worked on SWAT for a little while. You know, he was off the wall at this time. You know, he was really upset with his former co-workers. And I can't imagine he was upset with any of them more than he was with me.

My wife knew. I confided in her and told her a lot about what was going on, and she was very nervous.

You can be a police officer, ask to testify at a grand jury, stick your neck out there, go in there, tell the truth. If I knew this was going to happen, I would have refused to testify. I took a lot of grief over this. It is not... It's not a great place to be where you have to testify against another police officer. Culturally, you keep your mouth shut and that's it.

And at this point, I kind of throw my hands up as I can't do anything else.

I'm like, whoa, and I immediately start to back out, back out of the boat. And I think I tell George, hey, George, get out of the boat, get out of the boat. And I tell one of the crewmen, lock the boat, close these doors, don't let anybody in here.

I'll tell you, they made my life pretty hard over this. They took years off my life with this.

The most upsetting thing was the people who were our leaders during this that let this all ride. I mean, George is one thing, but to have my supervisor have the deputy chief of police... brush these concerns off. A DA's office brushed them off. And then on top of it, I get removed from my position. It was pretty disheartening.

Yeah, because what I figured was, hey, I'm now going to have to go on the record with a federal agency, and I'm going to get fucking fried.

I make a call to the Lakeville FBI office. I talk to a female FBI agent, give her my info. It's some issues in New Bedford. I'm a police officer. My editor, Brendan, is with me for the interview.

Yeah, I told her, listen, there's a police officer who was involved in criminal activity. I think it's going to get covered up. I'd like somebody to talk to. And that was it.

You would think.

And I never heard back. Ever. I mean, even, I call the FBI and they don't fucking call me back. It's fucking mind-numbing.

Right?

Yeah.

It's in the interest of the leadership to keep it quiet. They don't want that brought to light because it casts the negative light on the department.

Because I know that these guys always... They always pay you back. They're not known for the upper echelon that are involved in this. They're not known for letting things go.

You know, is this really what's, is this really happening? What did it look like? It looked like a drug rip. It looked like a drug rip. It looked like something out of a fucking movie. A drug rip. Pretty much bad guy robbing a drug dealer. That's what it is. Except in this instance, the bad guy is a cop.

You're a drug dealer who has the advocacy of one of the top police detectives We used to call it a license to deal.

Snitch, informant, CI. You didn't want to be labeled a rat. Not around here.

You live and die in this business on informants and information.

You know, George is a street guy. Reputation is kind of a reckless and wild guy. He made a lot of contacts on the street, made a lot of brazen, bold moves on the street, chased people into houses, searches, extraordinary amount of vehicle searches.

When I got the job, I was ecstatic. I loved being on the water. I loved everything about the job. The boats, the waterfront, the people, the fishermen. The best job in the department, in my opinion.

You get to ride around on boats in the summer. You get a take-home car. You're diving. You're not dealing with, you know, you're dealing with some fishermen, but you're not dealing with very difficult people. That job was a prize.

So to my surprise, when I start hearing George's name being floated around, I can't even really believe it. He doesn't know how to run the boats. He doesn't dive. He doesn't know anything we do down there at all.