Hamburg First has been working on a couple articles of some old political protection stories that never seen the light of day. (I apologise if any of the names are misspelled.) One of those stories is about political protection for sexual harassment charges against the Town of Hamburg Police Department and several of it’s employees while the town was firmly in the control of the Democratic Party.
The first charge was brought by Officer Diane Schwiezer who is no longer on the Police Force and is supposedly living in the Washington DC metro area. Upon information and belief from impeccable sources it has been relayed to me that several years ago Diane had filed a sexual harassment case in NYS Supreme Court naming at least 6 defendants. Those Defendants included (D) Chief of Police Matt Czerwiec, (D) Assistant Chief of Police Joe Coggins, a few Police detectives Including Tom Best and a couple officers on the force.
This lawsuit was ultimately dismissed in NYS Supreme Court with none of the defendants being found guilty of any infraction.
Approximately a year or so later, Diane filed another case of sexual harassment in NYS Supreme Court with only Chief Czerwiec and Assistant Chief Coggins as the defendants. No other officers were involved. This case was ultimately settled out of court with Diane receiving approximately $200,000 to go away. Reports indicate that there was never an admission of guilt by any of the defendants. This begs the question, if no one was guilty then why the settlement?
The facts seem to point towards the Democratic Town board and Democratic Town Attorney Jim Sorrentino willing to hand out public dollars to prevent an embarrassing court case and public examination of the Town Police Department and its high ranking officers.
There must have been some truth to the second suit and Mr. Sorrentino, Supervisor Hoak, and the Dems on the Town Board knew this would hurt the Democratic Party so why not just give away your hard earned tax dollars to cover it all up.
Hamburg First is in the process of getting copies of what ever is filed and open to the public at the County Clerks office. We don’t expect much since former Democratic Board member Kathy Hochul is now in charge of that department.
This is however consistent with the abuses and recent lawsuit of harassment filed by Hamburg Police Detective Glenn Zawierucha against Chief of Police Coggins. It seems Mr. Coggins hasn’t learned his lesson from the first two lawsuits.
It is important to say out right that Tom Best was never involved in harassment and has never testified as to any harassment. It is expected that Diane Schwiezer will so state this if called upon in this election to clear Tom Best’s name. It is also my opinion that recent attempts to smear Toms name in this is the motivation of the Democrats and their campaign manager, Larry Adamczyk, who has a long history of this kind of negative campaigning.
I think it’s time for the Democrats to own up to what they have done to this town and show that they are willing to clean up the Police Department. However, all they ever do is damage control and cover ups. Think about that at the polls this November.
