11 Investigates: It’s official, retired Pittsburgh police chief doubles pension

PITTSBURGH — The Police Pension Board just approved retired Pittsburgh Police Chief Larry Scirotto’s nearly $100,000 yearly pension.

By returning to the force as the chief with a higher salary,  and serving at least one year, Scirotto nearly doubled his pension.

Retired Pittsburgh Police Chief Larry Scirotto will get a pension of more than $8,100 a month, or slightly more than $97,000 a year.

Scirotto, who’s originally from Monessen, spent more than 20 years with Pittsburgh Police, retiring in 2018 as an assistant Chief.

His pension at the time was approximately $55,000 per year.

The long-time college basketball official retired for the first time in 2018 to continue officiating.

But when he was hired as chief last year at a $180,000 salary, he only needed to work at least one year to nearly double his pension.

He did just that, leaving after 18 months at the helm.

That drew the ire of some Pittsburgh city council members, who questioned if Scirotto only planned to stay a year to pad his pension.

“Unfortunately, many people have told me that was the intent from the beginning. I don’t want to believe that and I don’t even know if I still believe that, but obviously it looks that way.  Larry (Scirotto) was a fine chief.   I think he was doing a good job but nobody is worth cutting into our pension like that for 18 months,” said councilman Anthony Coghill.

Scirotto denied that he only planned to stay a year and said if that was the case he would have left in May when the year was up.

After 11 investigations broke the story that Scirotto had already returned to officiating, Mayor Ed Gainey announced that he had a handshake deal that Scirotto could return to refereeing after reaching certain benchmarks dealing with the department and crime.

The mayor also said Scirotto planned to start a youth officiating program and take youngsters from the city to watch him referee.  The mayor never provided any more details about that program.

City council members expressed frustration that they were not aware of the deal and said it could have influenced their decision to hire Scirotto.

“It was really under false pretense that we hired him. Little did we know about the backdoor deal with Mayor Gainey,” said Coghill.

The mayor agreed to let Scirotto do up to 65 Big Ten conference basketball games between November and March, taking him away from the city for nearly five months.

The Big Ten has schools across the country, from the East Coast to the West Coast.

The two closest to Pittsburgh are Penn State and Ohio State.

Council members planned to question Scirotto about the arrangement, but he decided to retire and never appeared before council.

There had been some talk among council members about trying to block his inflated pension, but that never happened.

Scirotto officially retired earlier this month.

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