Former police officer gets 14 years for role as gangster's enforcer

In 2013, for instance, after the owner of a social club in the neighborhood had failed to make a payment, the officer, Besnik Llakatura, held a gun to his head as Dervishaj repeatedly punched him in the face, prosecutors said.

That same year, while helping Dervishaj shake down the proprietor of a seafood restaurant, Llakatura told the man that if he refused to pay what he owed his legs might end up broken.

“Make sure you don’t call the cops,” prosecutors quoted Llakatura saying, “because if you call the cops, you’re done.”

On Tuesday, Llakatura, 38, was sentenced to 14 years and three months in prison.

“The defendant’s crimes — committed by a man entrusted with a badge, a gun and a solemn duty to protect and serve the community — are nothing short of shocking,” prosecutors wrote.

The sentencing, in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, brought an end to the brief but brutal reign of terror that Dervishaj and his henchmen — who, like Llakatura, were largely Albanian immigrants — inflicted on 's residents and businesses. Llakatura was originally charged in the case in 2013 and pleaded guilty in December 2015. Last March, following a two-week federal trial, Dervishaj was sentenced to 57 years in prison. A few months later, another member of his crew, Denis Nikolla, was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Dervishaj was a notorious criminal known for wreaking havoc in and around New York City’s Albanian community. In 2007, he was shot while demanding $20,000 from a contractor in Queens, the authorities said. Five years later, he was accused of stabbing a man to death with a butcher knife at a bachelor party on Staten Island, though a grand jury declined to charge him in that case.

According to his lawyers, Llakatura, who was fired from the police force after he entered his guilty plea, “made a big mistake” by teaming up with Dervishaj, a gangland figure whose brother, Plaurent Dervishaj, is an international fugitive wanted by Interpol and by U.S. authorities.

“He involved himself with the wrong people,” Llakatura’s lawyers wrote, “and did not think of the potential consequences.”

Even after Llakatura was arrested in December 2013, he continued to pursue his victims, prosecutors said. According to an informant he met at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Llakatura sent members of his own family to find the owner of the seafood restaurant in a failed attempt to retaliate against him for cooperating with the government.

Prosecutors also claimed that Llakatura, who was married, terrorized his girlfriend, physically abusing her and tracking her movements with a GPS device that he secretly placed on her car. Though the girlfriend, who was not identified in court papers, told the court last year that Llakatura never harmed her, prosecutors said that she testified to a federal grand jury that he had once dragged her by her neck into a bathroom and flushed her head in a toilet. In a separate episode, prosecutors said, the girlfriend “got scared” during an argument with Llakatura and tried to jump out of a moving car.

While assigned to the 120th Precinct in Staten Island, Llakatura won three Meritorious Police Duty medals, his lawyers said, and once broke his right hand while arresting a man who was high on PCP and tried to stab two fellow officers.

But according to the government, Llakatura led a double life, “serving as an NYPD officer sworn to uphold the laws he so flagrantly violated.”

“He violated his oath,” prosecutors said, “disparaging his badge and the reputation of law enforcement officers more generally.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Former police officer gets 14 years for role as gangster's enforcer

In 2013, for instance, after the owner of a social club in the neighborhood had failed to make a payment, the officer, Besnik Llakatura, held a gun to his head as Dervishaj repeatedly punched him in the face, prosecutors said.

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