FBI agents had been investigating allegations of corruption in the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department for some months; while they had strong suspicions and tantalizing leads, the pieces didn't yet add up to a case they could take to court.

Then a motor-mouth meth dealer named Shawn Phillip Arvin Sr. walked into their lives.

Arvin was facing a long prison stretch after being charged with trafficking more than 10 pounds of methamphetamine in 36 days. Hoping to reduce his time, he told FBI agents he could provide information on a longtime St. Paul street cop — who also is a longtime friend of Sheriff Bob Fletcher — temporarily assigned to the sheriff's elite Special Investigations Unit.

More than four years later, Arvin's cooperation resulted in federal convictions last week for the cop, Timothy Conrad Rehak, and the sheriff's spokesman, Mark Paul Naylon. Naylon himself is a close friend and confidant of Fletcher — he was best man at the sheriff's second wedding — and colleagues say he was given carte blanche in the department to do whatever he wanted and answered to no one except the sheriff.

Although Naylon wasn't a licensed peace officer and had no law enforcement training, he spent virtually all his time playing cop, testimony in the trial in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis showed. He was assigned to the investigations unit, and Fletcher let him carry a sidearm, participate in arrests, conduct searches, seize and handle property and do other work that state law generally reserves for licensed peace officers.

When the need arose, deputies even used him as their "confidential reliable informant" when they filled out requests to judges to grant search warrants, according to testimony.

"If the sheriff has to be a sworn peace officer, it's incomprehensible that the sheriff would have the power to invest police powers in a civilian," said C. Peter Erlinder, professor of constitutional criminal law at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. "What you have is a misuse of the sheriff's power writ large."

Rehak and Naylon, both 48, each were convicted of theft of government funds and conspiracy to violate civil rights. No sentencing date has been set. The jury of nine men and three women acquitted them of four wire fraud counts, and the judge acquitted them of two similar counts.

Fletcher declined to be interviewed for this article; his spokeswoman, Holli Drinkwine, said that with the Republican National Convention about to start in St. Paul, he was too busy Friday to talk. After Rehak and Naylon were convicted, the sheriff issued a brief statement saying both men had resigned.

Rehak and Naylon have declined to comment. Kevin Short, a lawyer who represented Rehak, did not return a call for comment for this article. Paul Rogosheske, who represented Naylon, declined to comment.


The men were indicted this year after they failed an FBI "integrity test" in November 2004. The FBI stuck $13,500 in a bag in a St. Paul hotel room, then had Arvin call Rehak and tell him a drug dealer named "Vinnie" from Chicago had left drugs and money in the room and was looking for someone to retrieve it.

Rehak asked Naylon to accompany him on the search. After the hotel desk clerk refused to let them in the room without a warrant, Naylon asked sheriff's Sgt. Rolland "Rollie" Martinez, supervisor of the investigations unit, to ask a judge for a search warrant for the room.

In his affidavit, Martinez said a "confidential reliable informant," or CRI, had told him drugs and money could be in the room. Martinez, who was not a target of the sting, testified at trial that Naylon was the informant he was referring to, and there is no indication he knew Arvin was the original source of the information or even whether he knew Arvin. The affidavit was written as though he had spoken directly to the original source. Ramsey County District Judge J. Thomas Mott swore in Martinez, read the affidavit, agreed it amounted to probable cause and signed the warrant.

Kathleen Gearin, chief judge of the 2nd Judicial District, said judges rely on the veracity of law enforcement officers when they read and decide whether to sign a search warrant.

"We just do it on the four corners of the document and having put somebody under oath. It's a legal determination," she said. "If they say it's a CRI, unless there's something unusual about the rest of the document, we don't ask any questions."

Mott said that while he doesn't recall signing the warrant — as a judge, he's signed scores, if not hundreds, of warrants since then — he is concerned about trial testimony indicating that the Sheriff's Department sometimes used one of its civilian employees as an informant for search warrant applications.

"I think I will share that with some of my colleagues," he said.


Search warrant in hand, Martinez, Naylon and Rehak entered the room to search it for the drugs and money. They didn't know FBI agents were in the adjacent room, filming them.

In the video shown to the jury, Martinez leaves the room briefly, Naylon points to rolls of money Rehak had dumped on the bed. Rehak picks up a roll and hands it to Naylon, who stuffs it in his pocket. It was $6,000, and the two men later watched as Martinez filled out a search warrant receipt indicating that only $7,500 had been found.

In separate phone calls later that night, Naylon and Rehak called Martinez at home and told him they had found another $6,000 in the hotel room. He testified that he told them to turn it in the following morning and alter the search warrant receipt so it would show that $13,500 had been found.

The defense Rehak and Naylon presented to the jury: They never intended to keep the money. They said they took it as a practical joke on Martinez; they wanted to make him get out of bed and trudge down to the Sheriff's Department to place the money into an evidence locker.

Prosecutors offered a different explanation: The men intended to skim the money but got cold feet and turned it in when they suspected they had been set up. They had that suspicion, the government claimed, after they couldn't find any computer record of the drug dealer who had supposedly left the money in the room. (The wire fraud counts involving those computer checks were the ones the men were acquitted of.)

The drug dealer, Vincenzo A. Pellegatti, was an invention of the FBI. But in a foul-up, agents failed to "backstop" Pellegatti by creating a false record of him in law enforcement databases.

Federal officials have said Rehak was the target of the investigation and Naylon happened to be there.


Rehak, a fireplug with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut, grew up on St. Paul's West Seventh Street, became a police officer in 1986 and was even named the department's Officer of the Year in 1994. Because of his friendship with Fletcher, the sheriff had personally asked the Police Department to lend Rehak to the Special Investigations Unit.

Some colleagues considered him, in the words of one, "a cop's cop." But others he worked with, including some of his superiors, had misgivings.

Police Department records show Rehak was given oral reprimands in 1996, 1998 and 2003. But in 2006, he was suspended for 10 days for conduct unbecoming an officer, and last year, he was suspended for five days for improper procedure. Despite those problems, Fletcher hired him for a $78,752-a-year job as "internal affairs/special projects officer" in February 2007.

For his part, Naylon had received the highest possible job reviews from Fletcher since Fletcher hired him as "public information associate" in January 1999. His last reported salary was $65,973.

Legal experts and state regulators said they would be concerned about Naylon's role as a civilian performing police work. Paul Monteen, standards coordinator of the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards & Training, said he couldn't talk about the case specifically, but generally, if "an individual practices law enforcement outside the license system of the state, it may violate the statutory obligations of impersonating a police officer."

Stephen Cribari, who teaches criminal law and procedure and evidence at the University of Minnesota Law School, said it seemed an unusual case.

"I frankly have never encountered a Police Department that has used its civilian personnel in their investigations, other than in the forensic sense," he said. "It's odd, but I'm not sure there's anything illegal about it. It's certainly interesting if they've got a civilian employee who is acting as peace officer without the qualifications of a peace officer."

David Hanners can be reached at 612-338-6516.