Report: Officers Set To Be Fired For Bogus Tickets
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A suburban man who has received a steady stream of Chicago parking tickets says he feels vindicated now that the Police Department is acknowledging they were bogus.
As WBBM Newsradio's Regine Schlesinger reports, for four years, Mark Geinosky of Orland Park received ticket after ticket in the mail for four years for parking violations on Chicago's South Side, the Chicago Tribune reported.
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But Geinosky insists the car was elsewhere when the tickets were issued, and in fact, he says some were issued after he sold the vehicle, the newspaper reported. He fought each ticket in court and won, but the tickets kept coming – 24 in all, the newspaper reported.
Now, the Tribune reports police Supt. Garry McCarthy is moving to have three officers – identified as Steven Sabatino, Horst Hegewald and Paul Roque – fired for allegedly writing false tickets, while a fourth, William Whelehan, was fired last week on an unrelated matter. Charges against the officers were filed with the Police Board on Sept. 26, the Tribune reported.
Geinosky tells the Tribune he is shocked, and says it has restored his confidence in City Hall.
The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police says it stands by the officers, and their attorneys say they didn't write the tickets, the newspaper reported.
In a separate issue involving bogus tickets, 2 Investigator Dave Savini last week revealed several cases in which suburbanites were ticketed n Chicago for not having a city sticker, even though the cars are not registered in Chicago.
One North Riverside woman received more than 20 tickets in two and a half weeks while visiting her brother in the city, each for $120. All the tickets were written by the same officer, Gary Sanabria, who allegedly has been blanketing the cars of suburban visitors with tickets.
