He was once an NYPD whistleblower cop – and is now a Rikers Island inmate.
Former New York Police Sgt. Steven Lee, who helped expose a karaoke bar bribery scandal in a Queens neighborhood a decade ago, was convicted of two counts of misdemeanor assault on May 14 for a fight in outside of his working hours at a Chelsea nightclub in 2021.
A judge sentenced him to six months in the infamous prison, where he is held alongside a cop killer and a drug dealer who decapitated a man.
“On the one hand, I have the murderer in the murder of Police Officer (Jonathan) Diller,” Lee told The Post in a cell phone call Thursday.
“There is also the drug dealer who beheaded a man right here. Why am I here for Assault 3?
“If I wasn’t who I am, things would have gone a different way.”
Lee admitted to hitting a man during the melee, but the man was not seriously injured, he said.
He claimed he was protecting a woman who was the victim of a sexual assault.
Another person in his group seriously injured someone during the fight and was also charged.
He said investigators searched his phone and found a text message from him saying the victim “touched a girl and deserved to be hit.”
“They grabbed his chest and his butt,” Lee said of the opposing group during the scuffle.
“The boyfriend knocked them out. It wasn’t even me.
The people who arrested Lee for assault the night of the fight were some of the same officers he had previously helped investigate, including a detective he had arrested, he said.
Lee is in solitary confinement at Rikers to protect him as a former cop, ironically alongside the two hardened criminals.
They seem to like it, he said.
“The cop killer and the man who allegedly decapitated the drug dealer were friends with me,” said Lee, who was fired by the New York Police Department after a trial over the fight.
“They sympathized with me because I’m fighting against the system. They told me, ‘You’re one of the good guys.'”
Lee was referring to Nicholas McGee, who is in jail awaiting trial on charges of murder, robbery and concealing a human corpse in the death of 40-year-old Kawsheen Gelzer; and Guy Rivera, accused of shooting Diller in Queens on March 25.
All are in the prison’s West Facility, which is the Department of Correction’s communicable disease unit that is also used to house individual inmates.
From the beginning, Lee has claimed that the criminal justice system is retaliating against him for his whistleblowing.
“I was exposing the IAB,” he said.
“The IAB is nothing more than window dressing and damage control. »
Lee also committed the cardinal sin of speaking to the media about corruption without permission and appeared on a podcast in 2020, he said.
IAB also opened an investigation into the podcast.
“When I did the podcast, they really attacked me and they really wanted to fire me,” he said.
“So when this incident happened, they were everywhere.”
Lee has an infant son with autism and said he hopes to return home soon.
“I hate that I can’t be there to help her,” he said.
His wife declined to comment.
Lee’s prison sentence is “insane,” said attorney Peter Brill, who represented him at his trial.
“Who goes to prison for a first offense when he has been a police officer for 18 years,” he said.
“I know the judge may have been upset that he didn’t show any remorse, but does that equate to six months in prison? I think New York is the only place where you are treated worse as a police officer.
New York Post
