Ex-cop denies he gave tip-off

He's lost the job that he loved.

He's been publicly humiliated.

Now, he faces a potential prison sentence of 10 to 20 years for a crime he insists he didn't commit.

Rickie Durham, a 12-year Philadelphia Police Department veteran, is to be sentenced Monday in federal court for tipping off a major drug kingpin about a pending raid just hours before it went down in August 2005.

Durham, 44, was convicted of obstruction of justice during a two-day jury trial in September. The jury also found him guilty of lying to federal investigators who were trying to determine how cocaine kingpin Alton "Ace Capone" Coles found out he was about to be arrested at his $450,000 home outside Mullica Hill on that summer morning five years ago.

In a highly unusual post-conviction letter sent to a federal prosecutor, Durham insisted he never intended to leak information to Coles, whom he did not know.

"There can't be any justice in trying and convicting an innocent man who's spent his entire life upholding and obeying the laws," Durham wrote.

The letter, attached to a federal sentencing memorandum filed this month, is the latest twist in a bizarre and highly personal case that has cost Durham his career.

He was fired shortly after his indictment and has been on house arrest since his conviction.

Friends and advocates describe Durham as a highly regarded police officer who, in their worst-case scenario, used bad judgment on the day of the raid.

But federal prosecutors and several law enforcement agents working with him that morning say Durham was a cop gone bad who put dozens of fellow officers at risk.

"It's uncharacteristic as well as unimaginable to think I would have in any [way] compromised a criminal investigation of any sort," Durham wrote in a letter sent in November to Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Lloret, one of the prosecutors in the Alton Coles case.

After praising Lloret, who has built a career prosecuting major drug dealers and their associates, Durham wrote that "growing up in the inner city and experiencing the carnage caused by [the] influx of drugs, all I ever wanted to do was rid the city of drugs and drug dealers."

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Bresnick said Durham's words rang hollow, showed his failure to accept responsibility, and underscored his lack of remorse.

In a sentencing memo, Bresnick, who prosecuted Durham in the obstruction of justice case, said the ex-cop "continues to howl at the wind."

In the 36-page memo, Bresnick pointed to the arsenal of weapons and ammunition seized on the morning of the raids - nearly two dozen locations were hit by a task force of more than 200 law enforcement agents - and argued, as he did during the trial, that Durham's actions put others at risk.

Bresnick has asked U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Savage to adjust Durham's sentencing guidelines upward, to a range of 188 to 235 months. The guidelines are currently 121 to 151 months.

He has also asked Savage to sentence Durham at the high end of the new range, pointing to five other cases of corrupt Philadelphia police officers and the sentences they received as examples.

These include a 360-month sentence handed out in November to Malik Snell, convicted of using his badge and his gun to rob drug dealers during phony police stops.

"The institutional damage caused by the defendant to the Philadelphia Police Department and the criminal justice system is substantial," Bresnick wrote in urging a high-end sentence for Durham.

Prosecutors have taken a hard line in the case despite the fact that the alleged leak to Coles had little effect on the investigation.

Coles was arrested without incident on the morning of the raid after a dozen agents broke down the door of his home.

At nearly a dozen other locations, drugs, guns, and cash were seized in raids that capped a two-year investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) into Coles' multimillion-dollar cocaine-distribution network.

Coles was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to life plus 55 years in prison.

Durham became the focus of an investigation launched in the aftermath of the raids.

ATF agents, who had tapped Coles' cell phones, heard him make a series of calls around 3 a.m. in which he cryptically warned associates of a pending raid.

Authorities subsequently charged that Durham had made a call that morning to his longtime friend, Jerome "Pooh" Richardson, a former NBA player who had been a basketball star at Benjamin Franklin High School and UCLA.

Durham, working on an FBI drug task force at the time, had been tapped to assist in the raids that morning. He was one of 200 law enforcement agents who gathered around midnight at Philadelphia International Airport and planned to fan out across the region at 6 a.m.

Durham knew that Richardson's half-sister, Aysa, was Coles' live-in girlfriend and was at the home in Mullica Hill, authorities charged.

Pooh Richardson, who testified under a grant of immunity at Durham's trial, said his friend called to alert him that the feds were about to raid the house and told him that if his sister was there, she would be arrested.

Richardson said he called his sister and warned her.

Federal authorities argued that Durham knew his call to Pooh Richardson would lead to Coles learning of the raid.

Durham insisted that was not his intention.

He was, he said, trying to gather information for investigators.

In the letter, Durham alleged that Richardson manipulated the facts to fit the government's case and twisted the truth in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

Durham's attorney, Fortunato Perri Jr., has asked for substantially less jail time than what Bresnick is advocating.

As to the letter Durham wrote to Lloret, Perri acknowledged that it was unusual, but said "it's frustration boiling to the top over the way he's been treated by the criminal justice system."