NEW YORK — Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell was fine with a careful screening by TSA agents before she boarded a flight out of town late in August — but her trip to Kennedy Airport got on the nerves of the cops who accompanied her, police sources told the Daily News.
An Intelligence Bureau detective who for years was the NYPD’s Kennedy Airport liaison with Port Authority cops and other airport law enforcement agencies was given a new assignment following a quarrel involving Sewell’s security detail, the sources said.
The imbroglio happened the last week of August when Sewell headed out of town, alone, on a personal trip.
Sewell was driven to the airport by her security detail and should have gotten to her plane fairly quickly as a member of law enforcement enrolled in the Transportation Security Administration’s PreCheck program.
But that didn’t happen, with Detective Diana Pecoraro, a 37-year NYPD veteran, instead taking the top cop through general screening.
Sewell was asked to remove her shoes and was required to stand for a pat down because a metal detector kept ringing, said a source.
Sewell wasn’t armed, and the problem wasn’t her metal NYPD shield, as a TSA agent thought, police officials said. Instead, the alarm was triggered by a set of headphones.
“The commissioner was frustrated, but it wasn’t the end of the world that she had to go through general screening,” said a source.
Once she was cleared, Sewell got on the plane alone, as planned.
But back in the terminal, Pecoraro and the cops in Sewell’s detail — including other NYPD detectives — began arguing about how long the detail should stay at the airport, said NYPD sources.
The detail insisted on waiting until the plane lifted off in case some incident put Sewell in danger — or in case she needed to disembark for some other reason, according to the NYPD sources.
But Pecoraro, whose responsibilities include ensuring armed members of the NYPD leave the airport without any problems, wanted the officers to exit right away. A source said she even threatened to get Port Authority police involved.
“To threaten the (commissioner’s) detail is insane,” said the source. “That’s why she was moved.”
A source close to Pecoraro and another source familiar with the incident said Sewell’s security team — most of them new to their assignment — are still learning their jobs, and suggested they should have deferred to Pecoraro’s experience.
Port Authority cops, meanwhile, are miffed, one agency source noting they had always worked well with Pecoraro and consider her a member of their own department.
Pecoraro, who is still assigned to the Intelligence Bureau, could not be reached for comment, and Paul DiGiacomo, head of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, had no comment.
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With Thomas Tracy
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