The man Rochester police officers overwhelmingly elected Thursday to represent them as president of the Locust Club police union is no stranger to the organization.
While a young officer, Geoffrey Wiater, 54, arguably had a more intimate view of the inner workings of the union than most, as the son-in-law of the organization’s former longtime president, Ron Evangelista.
When Evangelista retired in 2008 after 27 years as president, Wiater campaigned to replace him, but reportedly lost by a wide margin to the colleague he handily defeated this week, Michael Mazzeo.
In recent years, Wiater, 54, held several executive positions in the union, according to the organization’s tax filings. He was the vice president between 2018 and 2020, and prior to that spent a few years as the union’s treasurer and secretary.
Wiater reportedly received 372 out of a possible 488 votes to oust Mazzeo during a regularly scheduled union election. He is expected to be sworn in as president on Jan. 1. Wiater did not immediately return phone messages left for him Friday by WXXI News for comment on his new post.
Wiater takes the helm of the Locust Club with a largely unblemished record, with one exception, and inherits a union that has been battered in the court of public opinion.
There is no record of Wiater, who holds the rank of sergeant, being disciplined or the subject of a misconduct investigation, according to personnel files available to the public under state law.
But he was named as a defendant in a wrongful arrest civil lawsuit brought against him and other officers in 2021.
The complaint alleged, among other things, that Wiater unlawfully ordered the arrest of prominent civil rights activist Ashley Gantt on trespassing charges outside Locust Club headquarters on Oct. 1, 2020, and fabricated evidence against her.
A portion of that altercation, which involved others who were either arrested or temporarily detained, was captured on video and published by the Democrat and Chronicle.
At the time, Gantt was a lead organizer of massive citywide demonstrations protesting the death of Daniel Prude at the hands of Rochester police and had been shut out of a news conference at the Locust Club on Lexington Avenue. A judge dismissed the charges against her four months later.
The civil lawsuit is pending in state court.
Wiater is a graduate of the State University of New York at Brockport, where he studied criminal justice.
He joined the Rochester Police Department in 1993 and two years later married his wife, the former Julia Evangelista. The couple lives in Chili and has two daughters. He has held the rank of sergeant since 2002.
Under the Locust Club’s labor agreement with the city, Wiater as president will be eligible to retain his rank and his salary and earn overtime pay while working full-time for the union.
He will also be eligible for a stipend from the union, a perk he received in the past when he held executive positions in the organization.
The perk is result of a “release time” clause in the union’s labor contract that allows union officials to devote hours, days, weeks, or months to union business while employed by taxpayers.
For instance, in 2021, the last year for which Locust Club tax records are available, the union paid Mazzeo $25,270 for working 40 hours a week. That year, according to Rochester Police Department payroll records, Mazzeo also earned $121,474 as a police officer.
Last year, Wiater earned $192,307 as a sergeant on the force, according to department payroll records.
Release time provisions are not uncommon in labor pacts in the public and private sectors and trace their roots to the middle of the last century.
The outcome of the Locust Club election this week brought to an end 15 years of Mazzeo’s leadership at the union.
He rose to prominence among his colleagues after fending off federal criminal charges that could have sent him to prison.
In 1991, Mazzeo was one of several Rochester vice squad officers, along with the police chief at the time, Gordon Urlacher, who were accused of corruption and violating the rights of suspects.
Urlacher was convicted in a separate trial and sentenced to four years behind bars. But Mazzeo and the other officers were found not guilty after a 10-week trial, at which the prosecution’s star witness testified to Mazzeo’s innocence.
Mazzeo was the only one among his colleagues to return to duty, and his star rose.
When he campaigned against Wiater for union president the first time in 2008, he reportedly defeated Wiater by a margin of four-to-one.
Mazzeo’s tenure was marked by steady growth in salaries and benefits for Rochester police officers. But it also coincided with a steady erosion in public trust in law enforcement here and nationwide.
That erosion was exacerbated by confrontations between police and civilians, particularly people of color, caught on videos that went viral online. Locally, perhaps no incident contributed to the decline in confidence in police more than the death of Prude.
Mazzeo, 64, who did not return phone calls for comment on the election, was more often than not the public face of the officers accused.
In most cases, he aggressively defended his officers, sometimes to wide ridicule. In 2021, the itinerant liberal news and sports broadcaster Keith Olbermann lambasted a video clip of Mazzeo’s response to police officers using pepper spray on a 9-year-old girl.
Mazzeo appeared to take his lumps in stride, while fighting progressive initiatives locally and statewide to make police departments and officers more transparent and accountable for their actions.
The Locust Club under Mazzeo fought hard in court against the creation of a Police Accountability Board and a state law allowing public access to police personnel disciplinary files.
In an interview with CITY Magazine in 2021, Mazzeo said a fair review of the Locust Club’s record over the last decade would show that the union has consistently pushed back against public safety initiatives “that have not been in the best interests of all in our community.”
“I believe our most important function,” he said of the union, “is to be the watchdog against bad public safety policy by city, county, and state governments.”
With reporting by Gino Fanelli.
