Old Saybrook — A thread runs through this town, tying friends and enemies in a knot that won't unravel.

There is an accepted air of informality: promises made on a handshake, meetings over coffee.

Even the police department ran as a family, with Chief Edmund H. Mosca as patriarch.

“We used to be a really close-knit department,” said Thomas O'Brien, who retired as Mosca's deputy chief in 2005. “We'd have cookouts. We'd do different things with the whole department and, unfortunately, that changed.”

Mosca came to Old Saybrook when he was 15 years old and never left, marrying his high school sweetheart and raising five children. In time, he would make the community a part of the department's extended family.

When he'd find a teenage boy drunk on prom night, he wouldn't necessarily arrest the teen, whom he might know well enough to call by name. He'd drive the boy home to answer to his parents.

Today Old Saybrook is under a microscope as the state attorney general's office continues investigating a fund Mosca administered for 35 years with no public oversight and few objections from the public. This chapter in the town's history began when a resident successfully argued to the state Freedom of Information Commission that the chief was illegally keeping secret the details of a fund that was supposed to benefit the public.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's office is trying to determine whether the McMurray-Kirtland fund — where it seems nearly every charitable contribution to the police department ended up — was improperly administered.

Whether auditors will find evidence of casual small-town management or deliberate impropriety on the part of the chief remains unclear. But in a town where Mosca has been chief longer than many residents can remember, the old way of doing things may be about to change.

•••••

At 33 years old, Mosca was the youngest police chief in Connecticut's history when he was promoted in 1971. Today he is 69 years old and easily one of the state's longest-serving police chiefs.

To his friends, he is a well-respected, long-standing member of the police community and admired for his expert advice, influence and active membership at nearly every level of policing associations.

To his detractors, he is “King Mosca,” a man they say runs the town with a heavy hand and will protect his friends.

Until recently, Mosca worked every Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's so that his officers could be home with their families, O'Brien said.

“He would loan them money. Guys would come to him with personal problems, he would give them extra time off,” O'Brien said.

Barbara Maynard, first selectman from 1973 until 1989, remembers riding with Mosca on patrol on graduation nights and Halloween. Mosca wanted the kids who broke the law to be picked up by someone who knew who they were, and Mosca knew all of them, she said.

“Very often instead of putting that kid through the process and taking him to the police station, he would be brought home and given over to his parents on the front steps,” she said.

After building up his reputation for more than three decades, Mosca finds himself the target of rumor and intrigue, both in print and around town. He has yet to meet with Blumenthal as the investigation in the Mac Fund continues. He has not responded to requests for comment for this article.

“What gets me about this town, and it's a beautiful town,” O'Brien said, “is it only takes a few people to start bad-mouthing... They can be vicious. They're like piranhas. It's a feeding frenzy.”

Mosca's friends, who have spoken to the chief almost daily since Blumenthal launched his investigation, say the chief is “devastated.”

“I think that when the whole story comes out that people are going to find that this is a mountain out of a mole hill,” said Maynard.

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In 1971, retiring Police Chief Walter Patti endorsed his executive officer, Lt. Edmund Mosca, as his successor.

Mosca, who began as a supernumerary officer in 1960, had graduated first in his class at the State Police Academy and continued to take courses that led to steady advancement, graduating from the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.

He helped build the department. In 1963 he established a detective division, and he and O'Brien were founding members of the Police Benevolent Association. By 1966, Mosca was a lieutenant.

Patti told the police commission that Mosca possessed the character, integrity and professionalism to do the job, according to a newspaper article from that time.

“The police commission, they were thinking maybe he is too young to be a chief,” said O'Brien. “He was only 32 or 33. But they had the Connecticut chiefs set up a board to interview him — older chiefs who were more experienced. And they were so impressed with him that they recommended this guy should be the chief.”

In his interview as the department's new chief, Mosca told The Day he was part of a “new breed” of police, conservative in his thinking but with an outlook sprinkled with “a great respect for individual rights.”

Maynard said it seemed wherever she went, people were always talking about Mosca.

By 1973, he was a member of the town drug commission, the police station building committee, the Connecticut Chiefs of Police Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The next year he was named chairman of the Eastern Connecticut Criminal Justice Planning Supervisory Board.

“He felt a little funny, being young. But he proved himself because he got on these boards. Everything was for the good of the town, to make the town look good,” O'Brien said.

Mosca set up the Mac Fund in memory of a police officer who died in a car accident. In thank-you letters from the fund's beginnings, Mosca told donors the money would benefit youth in town.

But Mac Fund documents from recent years show numerous expenses for travel to and from events for police chiefs' associations and to honor visiting chiefs and their wives.

The chief's detractors say the very tactics and connections that helped him gain the respect of the residents of Old Saybrook present problems now.

“He paid for his rise to power. The McMurray Fund is evidence of that,” said Old Saybrook resident Mary Hansen, who petitioned the state Freedom of Information Commission to order that Mac Fund documents be made public.

“The IPCA, the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association — it's a way to curry favor. This impressive resume he has? You know something? He paid for it.”

•••••

There's a story every police officer hears upon joining the Old Saybrook Police Department: flash back to the early 1950s. Eddy Mosca, 15 years old, arrives in the small beach town of Old Saybrook, skinny, nervous and shorter than the other boys.

“Our principal of the school brought him to me,” O'Brien said. “He came from New York and he wanted me to show him around.”

By day's end, Mosca and O'Brien were friends. In the 1956 Old Saybrook High School yearbook, the graudation year for their class of 32, it seems there isn't a photo of the Italian, blue-eyed and slick-haired Mosca without O'Brien beside him, towering above him with a head full of Irish wave. O'Brien was voted “cutest,” and Mosca was voted “nicest eyes.”

“I think the relationship between Ed and Tom was very, very close. You didn't see one without the other,” said Old Saybrook resident Bill Gesick, who is Hansen's brother.

In later years, as police officers, “they would take their tour of the town together in the morning and they'd eat breakfast. They would have their routines,” said Gesick.

O'Brien and Mosca worked together in construction, before one followed the other to the police department. In the beginning, said O'Brien, they'd work nights together at the department and days together mowing lawns.

“We'd wrestle for the tractor sometimes,” he said. “And usually I would win. It was: Who rides the tractor and who pushed the lawn mower?”

Records show the men owned and sold property together, including a Clinton Laundromat that they sold just three years ago to Old Saybrook Police Lt. Adam Stuart.

•••••

In Old Saybrook, connections aren't hard to find.

On the police commission alone:

Ernest Speraco has been a friend of O'Brien and Mosca since childhood.

Chairwoman Christina Burnham recently began working in the same law firm as attorney William Childress. Mac Fund documents show Childress presented $64,000 that the late Helene Banta had bequeathed to the Police Benevolent Association to the Mac Fund instead. Childress is also O'Brien's landlord at the Old Saybrook Laundromat.

Mac Fund money paid for Commissioner Timothy Conklin's travel expenses in December 2006, according to documents from the fund. He and Mosca traveled to Virginia at that time to attend a ceremony for Lt. Michael Spera, who had completed an FBI training course.

Lt. Timothy McDonald has made donations to the Mac Fund under the name of his business, Off-Duty Painters.

“It's these relationships that make you think it makes for a tidy town,” said Gesick. “But it's kind of like incest and nobody wants to talk about it.”

Police Commissioner Richard Metsack and a handful of people from the police department have expressed concern that Stuart and Spera might have been promoted because of their relationship with the chief rather than their credentials. The police commission made the unprecedented decision to promote both from patrol officers to lieutenants, allowing them to skip a step in the usual process.

Gesick said Mosca and his supporters treat the town the way their old physical education teacher teacher, Ernest Lindner, taught Mosca and his classmates at Old Saybrook High School.

“'There's no 'I' in team,'” Gesick said. “'We stick up for one another.' It's always this team effort.”

Lindner taught that anyone airing dirty laundry in public was a “troublemaker,” Gesick said.

O'Brien said Lindner taught his teams to play hard and play fair, and that winning wasn't everything.

O'Brien said there is no conspiracy or secret brotherhood working within the department but there are a lot of misunderstandings.

He said the promotion decisions were not the chief's alone. A board was set up to aid with promotions, he said, and the police commission also voted on them.

O'Brien said in addition to the promotions, bad blood in the department developed from a recent budgetary crisis.

The state labor board declared that several layoffs in the department were the result of anti-union activity on the part of the police department. According to the records of that decision, First Selectman Michael Pace discussed layoffs in January 2003 at a police commission meeting, but the chief objected to the idea. By June of that year, the chief reported that $55,000 had been cut from the budget and that the first selectman demanded that it be taken from the personnel line item.

In the officers' minds, O'Brien said, it was all because of the chief.

“It used to be a family,” O'Brien said. “It's not a family anymore. It's a dysfunctional family right now. It has been.”

At the Old Saybrook library, someone has gone through every page of the Old Saybrook High School yearbook for 1956, Mosca's and O'Brien's senior year, scribbling insults in child-like handwriting beside each picture of the two: “lousy pig,” “cheap fuzz.”

“In this position, you have to make decisions,” said Ansonia Chief Kevin Hale, president of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association and a friend of Mosca. “You have to try to make the right decision, but that doesn't always make everybody happy.”

It's hard not to make enemies as the chief and deputy chief of police in a town of just over 10,000, said O'Brien.

“Probably at some point in the police department's career or the chief's career, they've had an incident involving them or a family member or friend, and it escalates. You never like anyone who's going to take any action against you,” O'Brien said.

•••••

“I would classify Chief Mosca as probably the ultimate professional,” said Cromwell Chief Anthony J. Salvatore, who said Mosca has been a mentor to him since Salvatore became chief in 1992.

Mosca has refused to speak publicly about the fund or police department practices since documents were released to the public a month ago. He is retaining a new attorney and so far has not met with Blumenthal's office about the investigation.

The lawyer who has been representing the chief, Lisa Lazarek, has said that Mac Fund expenditures on police chief functions were subsequently reimbursed by those organizations. But the financial documents do not appear to show those reimbursements.

The chief returned from a vacation in Florida April 7. Repeated attempts to reach him by phone and in person were unsuccessful.

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