CANADA - New trial for cop accused of leaking papers to Hells Angels

OFF THE WIRE
Tracey Tyler
 thestar.com
The Ontario Court of Appeal has ordered a former Niagara Region police officer to stand trial a second time on allegations he leaked confidential police documents to the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.
Dean Rudge, who denies the allegations, was acquitted of breach of trust last year. But in setting aside that verdict Friday, the appeal court said the judge who presided at the trial, Justice Harrison Arrell, overlooked important evidence that undermined Rudge’s claim the documents were provided to the Hells Angels by an unknown third party, who broke into the Port Colborne police detachment and stole them from his mail slot.
“This court does not lightly overturn an acquittal,” said Justice Gloria Epstein, writing on behalf of Associate Chief Justice Dennis O’Connor and Justice Robert Blair. But Arrell’s failure to take stock of all the evidence, she said, amounted to an error of law.
Rudge fell under suspicion in 2006 after the Niagara police intelligence branch learned the Hells Angels had possession of a confidential police document about the rival Outlaws Motorcycle Club planning to reopen a chapter in St. Catharines. The document came from the Port Colborne detachment, where a monitor had secretly been installed on a printer used by the officers.
Logs generated by the monitor showed five confidential documents relating to biker gangs had been printed, four of them by Rudge. The fifth had been printed by another officer, whose explanation was accepted by his superiors.
Meanwhile, a series of raids by the province’s biker enforcement unit on Hells Angels’ clubhouses and homes in September 2006 turned up other documents linked to Rudge, many bearing his fingerprints. Among them was a calendar indicating his work shifts, found at the Cedar Bay Inn in Port Colborne, which was owned and operated by Ken Wagner, president of the Niagara Hells Angels chapter, and his spouse, Sandra Taylor.
In early 2007, police obtained a court order for access to Rudge’s cellphone records, which showed he’d had numerous phone conversations with Taylor.
Rudge insisted there was an innocent explanation for the calls, namely that he’d been trying to help Taylor’s daughter get help for her substance abuse problems.
But testimony from a local soup kitchen worker and pharmacist suggested he’d exaggerated his efforts to help the girl, Epstein said.
Many of the calls to Taylor were clustered around the times the documents were being printed, she added.
Other evidence, said Epstein, was “completely incompatible” with Rudge’s theory the documents were stolen by someone who burgled the Port Colborne detachment.
One, for instance, was a police occurrence report that had no connection to the Port Colborne detachment and had in fact come from the Welland detachment, to which Rudge also had access. Another document — a memo about Hells Angels members seen at the Cedar Bay Inn — had been kept in a binder behind a sergeant’s desk in the Port Colborne office, said Epstein