By Earl Rinehart, The Columbus Dispatch, staff and wire reports
COLUMBUS – A former Knox County police detective who was accused of drug trafficking and pleaded guilty to a federal extortion charge has been sentenced to six years in prison.
READ MORE: In The Columbus Dispatch
Matthew L. Dailey faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. U.S. District Court Judge Algenon L. Marbley imposed the sentence.
Dailey, 45, of Howard, a sergeant who was evidence custodian of the property room, resigned from the police department where he had worked for 10 years.
Investigators said the Howard man misused his police job to traffic in narcotics, extort people and use a firearm in drug-trafficking activities. He pleaded guilty in March to extortion in a bill of information negotiated by his attorney, Sam Shamansky, and the U.S. attorney’s office. The agreement requires him to pay $8,000 in restitution to the Mount Vernon Police Department and to never work in law enforcement again.
Besides stealing money and drugs from the property room of the Knox County police department, Dailey admitted using a police informant to sell narcotics.
Shamansky had asked that his client serve a year in prison, saying Dailey was addicted to painkillers for years following an on-duty injury. He said he strictly stole to feed his addiction, not for money.
Shamansky said that he and Dailey respect and accept the judge’s decision.
In court documents, investigators say that, for approximately seven years, Dailey provided the informant with marijuana, methamphetamine, bath salts and ecstasy pills, some of which came from the police department’s property room, to sell and split the profits.
Investigators said Dailey bought oxycodone pills from a second informant, who told investigators that Daily had asked him to sell marijuana, methamphetamine, and cocaine for him. The investigation revealed that Dailey possessed a firearm during the drug trafficking offenses.
Dailey was placed on administrative leave in September 2015, when an inventory of the property room showed that a kit used to teach drug awareness was missing crack and powder cocaine and ecstasy pills and that methamphetamine, bath salts and hundreds of oxycodone pills were missing from the property room as well.