Dec 12, 2012 3 min read

PITTSBURGH – A former Pittsburgh-area police officer was sentenced Wednesday to four months under house arrest as part of his two-year probation sentence for filing a bogus claim that his motorcycle had been stolen.

Frank Caligiuri Jr., 42, of McKees Rocks, also was ordered by a federal judge to repay insurer Geico nearly $15,000 it had paid on the claim.

Caligiuri was a 13-year veteran of the Kennedy Township police department when he staged a theft of his motorcycle in July 2009 and filed the claim when he had, instead, taken the motorcycle to West Virginia and sold it to undercover federal agents.

Caligiuri and his federal public defender, Thomas Livingston, declined to comment after the 25-minute sentencing hearing, when he was asked directly what motivated him to file the bogus claim.

Senior U.S. District Judge Maurice Cohill Jr. mentioned that he considered that Caligiuri “had suffered some financial issues prior to committing this crime” but didn’t detail what they were and Assistant U.S. Attorney Lee Karl didn’t explain them either.

Karl asked the judge to consider Caligiuri’s position of public trust in imposing the sentence and said, “When a police officer commits this kind of crime … it runs the risk of eroding the public trust.”

“That’s the thing that jumps out at you in this particular case,” Cohill agreed.

The sentence was at the low end of federal guidelines which take into account a defendant’s criminal history and the seriousness of his crime. The guidelines called for confinement of between four and 10 months, with the flexibility to impose home detention as opposed to prison, which Cohill granted.

Caligiuri’s sentencing brings to an end more than two years of legal troubles.

Although Caligiuri committed the insurance fraud in 2009, it wasn’t publicized until he was indicted in November 2011.

By then, he had already been suspended from the police force for an arrest on charges of drunken driving and aggravated assault by vehicle when he hit a pedestrian at about 2:30 a.m. Aug. 27, 2010 in the city’s bar-laden South Side neighborhood. A breath test showed his blood-alcohol content was more than one-and-a-half times the state’s legal limit, court records show.

An Allegheny County judge dismissed the vehicular assault charge, however, agreeing with Caligiuri’s attorney the officer hit the pedestrian largely because he was wearing dark clothing, which would have made him hard to see whether or not Caligiuri had been drinking.

The drunken driving charge was later withdrawn after another judge ruled police didn’t have probable cause to administer a breath test because Caligiuri didn’t appear drunk after the accident.

Despite the favorable outcome in the DUI case, Caligiuri resigned his police job shortly after he was indicted last year for mail fraud.

His motorcycle has since been seized and sold at auction for $5,800, which will go to Geico. Caligiuri must repay the rest of the bogus $14,925 claim out of his pocket at a rate of at least 10 percent of his gross income each month.