The head of an RCMP-led special task force examining Toronto police drug squads has broken his silence, saying that despite evidence of more widespread problems, his mandate was to focus on just one team of officers.

The comments by RCMP Chief Supt. John Neily came after a CBC investigation for the first time published the findings of his task force that led to criminal charges being brought against six veteran officers.

In 2004, Neily handed Toronto's then police chief Julian Fantino a final report on the results of a three-year, $8-million anti-corruption probe, the largest ever conducted in Canadian history.

Neily told CBC News in an exclusive interview Friday that it was a tough internal investigation.

"We didn't ignore things," he said. "When issues came in, like I say, we did initial reviews. But other than that it became a matter of managing this particular operation."

Neily referred a total of 218 charges against 12 officers to the Crown's office, but in consultation with the Crown, police charged just six officers from a single drug team with 22 counts at the end of the lengthy probe.

Neily said the Crown advised that laying criminal conspiracy charges against so many at one time would prove a nightmare prosecution.

"There was a series of options, there's no doubt about it," he said. "But the conspiracy made the most sense. It certainly fit with the pattern of how we got to that point in the investigation."

The officers pleaded not guilty and have steadfastly maintained their innocence. The prosecution against them was stayed in January after a judge ruled the Crown took too long to get the case to trial.

The conclusions and allegations in Neily's report have never been proven in court and may never be fully examined because of the case against the officers being thrown out.

'We did hand it off'

The task force report is blunt in accusing Det.-Sgt. John Schertzer, a senior drug squad officer, of leading his team on a crime spree.

Neily's report alleges Schertzer's team lied to judges, conducted illegal searches and stole illicit drugs and cash.

He said it was a decision of Toronto police not to do similar forensic audits against a seperate drug squad team that was also accused of beating and robbing drug dealers.

Asked why he didn't fully probe similar allegations against other drug teams, Neily told CBC News Friday he was told it was outside the scope of the task force's mandate.

"It was not my decision," he said. "We did hand it off, and at that point in time, Toronto police took certain action."

Neily did not provide details, but added: "I know it's a controversial issue."

But it appears Toronto Police did no followup investigations.

Neily writes in his report that many allegations were hard to corroborate, as they were complaints from drug dealers that they'd been beaten and robbed by officers.

The report also says one informant, someone RCMP investigators considered reliable, made allegations to the task force that drug officer Ned Maodus stole cocaine, heroin and weapons, and then funnelled them back to high-level criminals.

It's not clear why Maodus was never charged with those offences, although Neily wrote investigators couldn't independently corroborate the informant's story.

In an e-mail to CBC News, Maodus's lawyer Patrick Ducharme called the allegations false and spurious.

In the report, Neily lays out the lengths to which the task force went to build the case, including audits of officers' bank accounts — and in one case, an attempted sting.

Neily said an FBI agent posing as a criminal befriended officer Joe Miched, and secretly audio-taped him hoping to get a confession.

The sting ultimately failed to yield any admissions, but Neily alleges that in the course of the sting, Miched had without hesitation entered into what he thought was a money laundering scheme.

Again, it's not clear why Miched was not charged in relation to the sting.

Contacted by CBC News, the now retired officer called the allegations "lies, and not true." Miched's lawyer Peter Brauti said the sting recorded his client denying any misdeeds while on the drug squad.

Neily said he still feels the task force members served a purpose, despite the case resulting in a stay after all the work they did.

"I think that we did our job as individuals most certainly," he said. "There are feelings that come to be especially when you dedicate so much of your own time and life in a very complex and very difficult circumstance, as those men and women in that task force did.

"So everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I'll reserve mine at this point and time."

Concerns over squad raised in early '90s

CBC News has learned that public complaints against certain drug officers aroused suspicions and concerns dating back to the early 1990s. But when one complaints investigator, Sgt. David Eagleson, tried to alert senior brass in 1997, he said he was told to back off.

Eagleson gave a taped interview to the task force in 2002, detailing how he identified problems, investigated them, and tried to bring his findings to the attention of then deputy chief Bob Molyneaux, only to be dismissed.

Although he acknowledges he never met personally with Molyneaux, Eagleson said the deputy chief's subordinates made it clear they weren't interested in pursuing allegations against hard-working officers who were "very high on their arrests."

"I brought forward my concern that there was no other drug squads that were eliciting this type of criticism from the public, in their conduct, and it was said to me, by, and supported by both of them … that, 'you know, you get public complaints if you're out there, hard-working officers,'" Eagleson told the task force. "I was told to be very careful."

He said the team's commanders demonstrated what he called a "wilful blindness" over the numerous allegations piling up against the officers.

"They had a responsibility to take at least one step further and either qualify or disqualify the concerns that were being brought forward at that point in time," Eagleson said.

According to documents obtained by CBC News, another veteran officer, one of Schertzer's supervisors during the early 1990s at 11 Division, expressed concerns about the squad and tried to demote Schertzer from head of Major Crime Investigations back to uniform.

That supervisor said he complained to Molyneaux about Schertzer, only to be overruled and watch Schertzer be promoted to lead a team of drug squad officers.

Brass failed to see signs: former mayor

John Sewell, a former mayor of Toronto who now heads a group called the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, said the Neily report spells out how police management ignored or quashed signs of problems until public pressure forced them to set up the task force.

"This is one of those great feelings of hopelessness, where you think you know there's something here; you want to have some kind of conclusion," Sewell told CBC News. "And all of a sudden there's no way of getting a conclusion on it … because we've had that failure in the senior management, and then the prosecution."

The Crown has filed an appeal over the staying of charges against the six officers, but many legal observers doubt it will succeed.

Molyneaux, now retired from the force, told CBC News that he received plenty of praise about the drug squad officers, but can't recall any complaints from other officers about their conduct.

"I'll tell you what I told the RCMP, that those drug guys did a marvellous job for the time I had them in Central Field Command," Molyneaux told CBC News. "We asked them to do a real nasty job. I never had one complaint."

The only things he remembers hearing about the team, he said, were "accolades from all the unit commanders in what a great job they did cleaning up the streets in and around some of those downtown areas."