A Manhattan police captain was quietly transferred to another borough after fellow cops spotted him wearing a woman’s wig and a dress, sources said.
The “very embarrassed” captain, the supervisor of a specialized patrol command, offered to resign – but police brass decided there was no legitimate reason to drop him from the force after nearly 20 years.
Sources said the incident happened late last month in the Meatpacking District around West 14th Street, notorious for its transvestite traffic.
Two on-duty cops were parked in a squad car when they noticed another parked vehicle that they suspected was an unmarked police car.
Sources said the officers, thinking they may have been under surveillance by Internal Affairs cops, circled around the block and came up on the other car.
They got out and asked the driver, the sole occupant, to produce identification.
The driver was dressed as a woman, with wig and dress.
“He was dressed to the nines,” one source said.
The driver pulled out his police shield and identified himself as a captain.
“He tried to ‘tin’ himself out of the situation,” the source said.
The cops were unsure of what they were dealing with – and suspicious.
“They thought he might be a man, he might be a woman. But the one thing they didn’t think was that he was a captain,” the source said.
After the cops determined he was, in fact, a captain, they left – but reported what they saw to their superiors.
An internal investigation determined that the captain was off-duty and using a car assigned to him – and had broken no rules.