NYPD gunrunning

Trouble getting a permit to carry a gun in NYC legally? Well you can get an illegal one from one of the fine officers of the NYPD:

Eight current and former New York Police Department officers were arrested early Tuesday on federal charges including gun trafficking and conspiracy to smuggle cigarettes, according to people briefed on the case.

The charges allege that the officers — five are still on the force and three are retired — were involved in illegally transporting more than a dozen handguns as well as M-16 assault rifles and shotguns and a variety of stolen property, the people briefed on the case said. The officers, along with a former New Jersey correction officer and three civilians, were arrested at their homes before sunrise by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and investigators from the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, the people said.

The gun-trafficking allegations strike at the heart of one of the New York Police Department’s most hard-fought and robust initiatives, and one that has been a central theme of the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg: getting guns off the street of New York City.

And the arrests come at a difficult time for a department already besieged by corruption allegations large and small, including a case in which 16 officers are expected to face charges in the coming days in a ticket-fixing scandal in the Bronx. In recent weeks, testimony at the trial of narcotics detective has featured accusations that he and his colleagues in Brooklyn and Queens planted drugs or lied under oath to meet arrest quotas and earn overtime, leading to the arrests of eight officers, the dismissal of hundreds of drug cases because of their destroyed credibility and the payout of more than $1 million in taxpayer funds to settle false arrest lawsuits.