Ex-NYC undersheriff sidelined for whistleblowing about illegal cannabis raids: lawsuit

The Bronx’s former undersheriff was relegated to a cubicle and stripped of his duties for sounding the alarm that the pot raids under Mayor Eric Adams’ initial crackdown were illegal, a lawsuit says.

Derek Skuzenski had a sterling 10-year career with the New York City Sheriff’s Office that all came crashing down after Anthony Miranda took over as city sheriff in May 2022, according to a Brooklyn federal lawsuit filed last week.

Miranda immediately began discriminating against Skuzenski — who skyrocketed into his role at just 32 — because of his age and his leadership role as a vice president in a sheriff’s union, court papers claim.

The plaintiff eventually ended up in the agency’s version of no man’s land after revealing the illegality of the Adams administration’s initial pot-shop crackdown, his lawsuit says.

“I was working as a police officer for a reason — I loved it, I wanted to help people,” Skuzenski recently told The Post. “Being moved to a room where I had a two-hour commute in each direction to serve no function is completely demoralizing.”

Skuzenski — who has a PhD and is slated to start law school in two weeks — was retaliated against after he started warning Miranda that the raids of illegal cannabis vendors were unconstitutional because they were being conducted “under the guise of tobacco inspections” and the officers also showed up armed without search warrants, said the court papers and the plaintiff.

None of the businesses the office raided actually sold tobacco, the lawsuit says.

The agents’ actions violated search-and-seizure protections under both the Fourth and 14th amendments of the US Constitution, the suit says.

To date, the city has helped close 1,009 unregulated pot outlets across the state and seized $63 million in illegal weed as it tries to halt the wild proliferation of rogue shops after New York legalized marijuana.

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Skuzenski’s suit also says that as shops were being shuttered, the sheriff’s office was seizing enormous amounts of the drug — and struggling to find places to store the substance, which sickened “an overwhelming number of deputies and staff.”

Many workers “were experiencing significant health issues as a result of handling and storing seized marijuana,” and in fact E. coli, salmonella and lead were found in some of the drugs that were seized, the suit says.

In just under three months alone, from November 2022 through January 20, 2023, the office confiscated a whopping600 pounds of marijuana, the suit says.

“The amount of marijuana seized was so vast, that defendant Miranda ordered deputy sheriffs to store the marijuana in unsafe conditions without any regard for the safety of his employees,” the papers allege.

Skuzenski claimed, “They were storing marijuana wherever they could.

“They had cargo containers filled with marijuana, we had offices and closets filled with marijuana, vehicles filled with marijuana.

“They were literally storing it anywhere they could think of,” he said.

This was all done without any training or procedures on how to confiscate, handle and store the contraband bud, Skuzenski and the filing allege.

Skuzenski said that after he questioned the legality of the raids and raised the health issues, he was demoted.

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That included being stripped of his guns, badge and all duties — to the point he wasn’t even allowed to access work email or enter any facility other than the building where he was reassigned, the suit and Skuzenski says.

Then May 2, 2023, after he attended a funeral at a church for the mother of a deputy sheriff, Skuzenski was met with a SWAT team and frisked by a superior who eventually slapped him with disciplinary charges for a previously unsubstantiated 2021 city Department of Investigation investigation, the filing claims.

The charges were tied to a probe from November 2020 through January 2021 against Skuzenski and some colleagues accused of “misconduct while seizing contraband/evidence during an enforcement operation,” the lawsuit says, noting the case was eventually dropped.

Skuzenski’s lawyer, Paul Liggieri, told The Post, “Magically, right after my client, through his union, complains [about the pot-shop crackdown and health issues] … this DOI referral and complaint comes back up from years ago.”

The SWAT team drove to the plaintiff’s home and illegally seized his personal weapons and other belongings such as his diploma, family photos and kitchen appliances that he had at the office, claiming it was part of its probe, the suit says.

Skuzenski was suspended for a month over the debacle, only to get reassigned in June 2023 to a position in Manhattan — two hours away from his home in Nassau County, LI — for a no-work job in a cubicle where he was barred from earning any overtime pay, the suit and Skuzenski claim.

In his new role, Skuzenski wasn’t allowed into any other department facilities, and when he entered the Manhattan building where he was assigned, he had to go through the security line with civilians since he was stripped of his work badge, he said.

He also couldn’t help or speak with any of his staff because he didn’t have access to his work email or other work communications, he said.

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Skuzenski said his breaking point came after “months and months of that without any real end in sight, and it was progressively getting worse.

“It came to a point where it wasn’t worth it to do it anymore,” he told The Post. “They won. They got their pound of flesh.”

He eventually quit his job in October 2023 after roughly five months of showing up for his no-work job, but he continued to be paid through July 27 for vacation time he never used, he said.

Skuzenski started a new position in May 2024 as the commissioner of public safety for the town of North Hempstead on Long Island.

“They chose to punish him,” Liggieri said of city officials and his client. “They did everything they could to silence him, and that’s not going to stop him.”

Liggieri said he hopes the lawsuit will help make his client “whole” again after his alleged mistreatment.

The city Department of Finance — which oversees the sheriff’s office — said the claims in the suit are from before the city’s “Operation Padlock to Protect, “which are our current operations” — suggesting changes have been made.

“We will review the complaint,” the office added.

There are now 103 legal cannabis stores open throughout the Empire State.

The surge in unlicensed shops — of which there are an estimated 2,900 in the Big Apple — came after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill legalizing recreational marijuana in 2021 .

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