Former Nassau probation officer sentenced for bribery

A judge sentenced a former Nassau County probation officer who admitted receiving a bribe to a 5-year probation sentence on Friday.

“My actions were a dereliction of my duty as a probation officer and I could never be able to undo the damage to my reputation,” Andy Jean-Louis, 46, of Dix Hills, said in a Mineola court.

The married father of three also told Nassau County Supervising Judge Teresa Corrigan he accepted “full responsibility” for his actions, saying his life “forever changed” after a “great error in judgment and conscience.”

Prosecutors arrested Jean-Louis in August 2017 after a grand jury’s 37-count indictment that included charges of official misconduct, coercion, attempted grand larceny, attempted criminal possession of stolen property and attempted criminal impersonation.

The Nassau district attorney’s office accused him of coercing a female probationer to steal goods and funnel the profits to him. Prosecutors said then that Jean-Louis threatened the woman with a probation violation that would send her back to jail for a year if she didn’t cooperate. They had alleged he coerced her into stealing items and returning the goods for gift cards from T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and Best Buy.

A county official said after Jean-Louis’ arraignment that the probation officer, who started his job in 2009, would be fired.

Defense attorney Joseph Lo Piccolo told Corrigan on Friday that prosecutors did an extensive review and didn’t find any evidence his client committed any other crimes in connection with probationers he supervised.

“He’s got to live with it and learn from it and he will,” the Garden City lawyer said of his client’s felony conviction.

Nassau District Attorney Madeline Singas, in a prepared statement, called Jean-Louis’ actions a “criminal betrayal of the public trust” and an outrageous abuse of authority from someone whose job it had been “to help those in their charge lead law-abiding lives.”

Prosecutor Robert Cavallo, deputy chief of Singas’ Public Corruption bureau, said in court his office would stand by its recommendation from the time of Jean-Louis’ March guilty plea to one count of third-degree bribe receiving — a felony — that the defendant spend 6 months in jail on top of a probation sentence.

Cavallo also told Corrigan he’d spoken to the victim and she also wanted Jean-Louis to serve jail time, and had called probation “a slap on the wrist,” and “a joke.”

But in meting out punishment, Corrigan told Jean-Louis “probation is no joke,” and warned she’d seriously consider putting him in jail if he committed a single probation violation.