Fired cop, now commission candidate, stands by old allegations of corruption

Michael Thomas, a Republican candidate for Clark County Commission, was fired from the North Las Vegas Police Department in 1999, according to agency and court records that reveal he had faced a long list of accusations about his professional conduct.

Before Thomas, now 59, was terminated, he was acquitted of charges that he assaulted two fellow officers. The department said he had also repeatedly made unfounded explosive claims about in-house corruption to the media and associated with a political activist who was suspected of criminal activity.

But Thomas this month cast himself as a former target of the police union, as one of only a few non-member officers who sought to reveal wrongdoing during a period when the police department was already facing inner turmoil: A series of scandals within the police force had bruised its reputation, as documented by media reports at the time.

During the two years preceding 1999, a police chief was convicted for drunken driving, a deputy chief was cited for totaling a city vehicle and providing differing accounts of how it happened, and roughly $30,000 was stolen from the department’s evidence vault.

Thomas alleged there was more going on within the department, however, ranging from embezzlement to nepotism, and he used public forums in early 1999 to air those claims, including North Las Vegas City Council meetings, talk radio, newspapers and even the national television show, “Hard Copy.”

In an April 1999 internal interview with department officials about his conduct, Thomas brought with him a personal representative — a local political activist who, according to police, was under investigation for suspected felony criminal activity.

“I served with honor while working for a corrupt organization that had a strong union and a reputation of criminal behavior against its citizens,” Thomas said in a statement Friday. “I risked my life to expose the corruption and to send the message that there are good honest cops that go to work everyday and do their job and protect the citizens of the community.”

‘Untruthful, disruptive and insubordinate’

Police officials disagreed in an internal memo more than 20 years ago, outlining their reasons why Thomas could be fired: His public statements, it said, were “inappropriate” and “made for the purpose of discrediting” the department.

Accusations against Thomas were laid out in the July 27, 1999, department memo and led to his firing a month later. A letter of termination from the police agency to Thomas, dated Aug. 31, 1999, showed that officials determined he had violated department rules and regulations on professional conduct, complying with orders and associating with known offenders.

“In summary, you have acted in an untruthful, disruptive and insubordinate manner, and have further brought your department and the City into disrepute by your unprofessional conduct,” the termination letter reads.

Cleared of battery charges

In the most serious charge leveled against him at the time, Thomas was accused of scuffling with two detectives investigating his unproven claim that the police union’s then-president tried to run him over in the department parking lot when he started raising questions about union spending.

He was later acquitted of two counts of misdemeanor battery and on Friday he maintained his long-held position that the detectives roughed him up and sent him to the hospital.

Thomas sued department and union officials in federal court over the matter. In a 2003 decision siding with the defendants, U.S. District Court Judge Larry Hicks noted that it did not appear any of Thomas’ specific claims about corruption had been corroborated, court records show.

One of the detectives who Thomas alleged had assaulted him, William Brooks, was sentenced to 10 years to life in prison in January 2005 for trafficking drugs in an unrelated matter, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported at the time.

Thomas, who is challenging Democratic Commissioner Michael Naft in District A, said Friday he settled with the police union for “a substantial amount” of money in a lawsuit filed in Clark County District Court to force arbitration over his firing. The Nevada Supreme Court in 2006 upheld a challenged arbitration award to the city, however, after an arbitrator determined the city had grounds to discharge Thomas, court records show.

Two firings, one deemed ‘absurd’

Thomas began his law enforcement career with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in 1986 before he moved to the Las Vegas Valley roughly seven years later and joined the North Las Vegas Police Department.

Prior to being fired in 1999, Thomas had been dismissed once before but was ultimately reinstated.

On April 14, 1999, the Review-Journal wrote a story about turbulence within the department, making note of the two crashes and vault theft only a few years earlier. Thomas was interviewed in that story about his first termination from the department in 1996 when, according to the article, he was cited for failing to adequately refuel a patrol vehicle following a shift and then disobeying orders when confronted about it.

An arbitrator ordered Thomas to be rehired, calling the level of discipline “absurd,” the story said, and Thomas was quoted as saying his firing was simply the result of the police department and union seeking to show they held the power.

He returned to work at the end of 1998 and was granted back pay, he said Friday.

Thomas sees past as positive for campaign

In an August interview with the Review-Journal, Thomas said he “left” the department for the private sector and then returned to policing as an officer in the Clark County School District from 2003 to 2017, when he retired after suffering a serious left foot injury on the job.

On Friday, Thomas re-alleged that he witnessed corruption on the North Las Vegas Police Department in the 1990s and had even been interviewed by the FBI. And he insisted that his record of speaking out as a whistleblower — now that his history was being written about in 2020 — will likely gain him thousands of more votes in the November general election.

Contact Shea Johnson at sjohnson@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272. Follow @Shea_LVRJ on Twitter.