March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Officers honored for protecting federal witness

PRESQUE ISLE — Two Aroostook County law enforcement officers have been honored for protecting a Stockholm man who was a star witness in a federal case that put a man behind bars in Massachusetts last year.

Theodore St. Pierre of Caribou, an Aroostook County deputy sheriff, and State Trooper Kim Espling of Woodland protected Andrew Gerakaris of Stockholm who testified in Boston against his estranged wife’s father, former Rep. Nicholas Mavroules, D-Mass.

Espling, 39, and St. Pierre, 43, were presented with plaques last month at the state police barracks in Houlton and cited by the FBI for their help in a “very complex and sensitive investigation.”

In a plea bargain involving charges of racketeering and tax evasion, Mavroules was sentenced in June to two years in a federal penitentiary, said St. Pierre.

Gerakaris, along with Beverly Pickett, a trustee of the Gerakaris farm in Stockholm, and two young girls were guarded from September 1991 to December 1992 when they were taken into the federal witness protection program before Gerakaris testified.

Gerakaris, a former Massachusetts probation and parole officer, moved to his father’s farm in Stockholm four years earlier to raise sheep and beef cattle and sell hay.

In 1990, Gerakaris’ estranged wife in Massachusetts claimed there were illegal guns and drugs at the farm. In 1991, police from Peabody, Mass., sent a search warrant to Aroostook County based on her 10-month-old allegations.

The request for the search was denied by the Aroostook County District Attorney’s Office on grounds that the information was too old, said St. Pierre.

Gerakaris never had drugs at the farm, said St. Pierre. The officer believes the charges to be a ploy by his wife’s family to discredit Gerakaris’ credibility as a witness.

By that time anyway, the protection wheels were in motion, according to St. Pierre.

“The FBI was involved and had done a search and … I was in the house and doing daily searches of the property,” said St. Pierre. “Gerakaris was taken into the witness protection program when we felt we couldn’t do a good job of protecting him anymore. It was getting to the point where we were worried. There was a lot of criminal activity involving threatening talk against him and we decided to put him in the program.”

St. Pierre said he regularly hears from Gerakaris who is still in the witness protection program. He said the government has given him a new identity and relocated him.

“They will take him anywhere he wants to go,” said the deputy. “But I think he just wants to be left alone.”


Have feedback? Want to know more? Send us ideas for follow-up stories.

comments for this post are closed

You may also like