Crooked Cop Drove Ferrari to Work

UK officer Osman Iqbal now serving 7 years
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 8, 2015 11:01 PM CST
Updated Jan 9, 2015 3:00 AM CST
Crooked Cop Drove Ferrari to Work
Colleagues became a little suspicious when Iqbal started turning up to work in a red Ferrari 458.   (AP Photo/Ferrari)

Police officer Osman Iqbal of Birmingham, England, had lucrative sidelines in drugs, prostitution, and money laundering—and he might have gotten away with it for longer if he hadn't started driving a $250,000 Ferrari to his day job. After the officer, who made roughly $60,000 a year, according to the Daily Mail, starting driving the supercar to the police station where he was based, colleagues became suspicious. Anti-corruption investigators discovered the 37-year-old sergeant had been making hundreds of thousands of dollars from brothels located in two parts of London, the BBC reports. The Birmingham Mail reports on how Iqbal and his partners operated: Drugs and sex were offered to men outside strip clubs; those who were interested were then taken via car to a brothel, where their credit cards were overcharged.

"Their greed was their downfall, and when they were seen driving around in their supercars, it didn't take us long to piece together exactly what they were up to and take action," a police spokesman says of Iqbal and his associates. Iqbal was sentenced to seven years in prison in September, but reporting restrictions on the case were only lifted this week after he was found guilty on unrelated charges of making unauthorized attempts to access police intelligence systems on behalf of a local religious leader. Police say they're going to try to seize the assets Iqbal gained through criminal activity, as well as his police pension. (In another corruption case, a Porsche-driving Apple exec was jailed and fined $4.5 million last month.)

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