The Pima County Sheriff's Department says a former burglary detective with years of accolades stole items from evidence, used police reports to illegally seize pawn shop items and replaced valuable jewelry in storage with fake pieces.
David Tarnow, 55, was arrested in the San Diego area Monday and has since been sent to Tucson, where he is being held on a $250,000 bond. He faces charges of trafficking in stolen property, fraudulent schemes, theft and theft by extortion. It's unclear whether Tarnow has an attorney.
The sheriff's department says Tarnow worked for them for 15 years, during which he had a solid reputation and received recognition for good work dozens of times. He was twice named "detective of the quarter" for his investigative work.
But the department says over a five-year period, Tarnow swiped recovered stolen items, including jewelry, gold coins and a silver belt buckle.
Investigators began looking into Tarnow after a citizen filed a complaint saying he didn't receive a gold coin that had been stolen from his home and that police had seized from a pawn shop and were supposed to return to him, Sgt. Luis Cornidez said.
The case stemmed from a 2011 burglary at the victim's home that Tarnow helped investigate. The victim told police that when he asked Tarnow for the gold coin, he told him the process was ongoing.
The victim filed a complaint in June and the department opened an internal investigation.
Tarnow quit in July.
A criminal inquiry followed. It found that Tarnow had been taking recovered stolen items from both evidence storage and pawn shops, often replacing valuable jewelry with fake items.
"You know, we're held to a higher standard in the public's eye and within our own department, and it's very upsetting to us that it was one of our own, especially Detective Tarnow, who was held very high in the eyes of other detectives because he was a good detective," Cordinez said.
Cordinez, who supervised the criminal investigation, said Tarnow checked recovered items out of evidence and then replaced them with similar items that were fake. In other cases, he seized valuable items from pawn shops but put into evidence fake replicas. Cordinez says Tarnow used case numbers from irrelevant calls, such as peace disturbances, to illegally seize items from pawn shops that he never put into evidence because they hadn't actually been stolen.
In one bizarre instance, Tarnow took a silver belt buckle belonging to the same victim who reported him, sold it at a pawn shop and kept the money. He later bought it back, kept it for a year, and sold it again to a different store, Cordinez said.
The investigation is closed, but the sheriff's department expects more victims to come up, Cordinez said. The department will investigate any other cases on an individual basis.
