Disgraced Suffolk County DA Thomas Spota released from federal prison

Former Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota has been released from federal prison , less than three years into his five-year sentence.

Spota, 82, was sent to a halfway house , where he will remain until March 2025, News 12 Long Island reported. He had been serving time in Danbury federal prison.

In August 2021, Spota was sentenced to five years for covering up then-Suffolk County Police Chief James Burke’s vicious beating of a handcuffed suspect.

Spota, Burke and their ally Christopher McPartland successfully hid the beating for years, but federal investigators eventually put the pieces together.

Burke pleaded guilty to the beating in February 2016, while Spota and McPartland were convicted of the cover-up in December 2019.

The case that brought down Suffolk County’s top three law enforcement officials began as a petty theft in 2012. Christopher Loeb stole a “party bag” from Burke’s officially marked police car , containing dildos, porn, Viagra and ammunition.

Officers captured Loeb and brought him in for questioning, leaving him handcuffed and shackled to the floor. Burke entered the room and assaulted Loeb , punching him in the face and body, grabbing his ears, shaking him and kneeing him.

Other cops choked Loeb , slammed his head against a table and urinated in his coffee cup, according to investigators.

For three years, Burke, Spota and McPartland were able to cover up the attack , even successfully intimidating witnesses to hamstring a 2013 federal probe. But in 2015, one detective spoke up to the FBI, and more followed shortly after.

By 2016, evidence had piled up against Burke. He pleaded guilty and received a 46-month sentence. He was released early in 2018.

Spota was the last of the three men to be serving prison time. McPartland was released in December 2023.

The prison where Spota was held, FCI Danbury, gained another high-profile inmate earlier this month: Steve Bannon .