The former top money manager at the NYPD’s sergeants union got zero jail time at his sentencing Tuesday after admitting to committing tax fraud to help his crooked former boss with legal bills.
Dennis Ostermann, who had served as controller of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, claimed he “couldn’t measure his remorse” as he was sentenced to two years of probation for lying on his tax returns about steering $150,000 to his embattled ex-SBA boss Ed Mullins.
“I hope that you see that this lapse in judgment will be in my forethoughts for the rest of my life,” the 68-year-old, reading from a prepared written statement, told Judge Lorna Schofield during a hearing in Manhattan federal court.
“I’ve always prided myself on doing the right thing,” added Ostermann, who was axed by the union Tuesday.
Ostermann pleaded guilty in June 2025 to disguising the $150,000 payoff to Mullins’ lawyers as phony “legal fees” he claimed as expenses for a separate company he founded called HB Consultants.
The bogus tax returns were filed in 2018 and 2019, as his former boss and longtime friend Mullins was being probed for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars in union dues to splurge on high-end meals, clothes and other goodies.
Ostermann kept his job as the union’s controller even after he’d already pleaded guilty in the case — a fact that Judge Schofield said she factored in while deciding not to jail him.
“The union still trusts you, which I think is noteworthy,” Schofield said in court Tuesday.
But Ostermann lost his job within hours of being sentenced, the union said.
“As of today, Dennis Ostermann no longer works for the Sergeants Benevolent Association,” an SBA lawyer, John D’Alessandro, told The Post.
Ostermann will also make a $35,052 restitution payment and pay a $4,000 fine.
Manhattan federal prosecutor Alexandra Rothman had asked the judge to sentence Ostermann to between six months and a year in jail.
Anything less, Rothman wrote in court papers, would be a “mere slap on the wrist, and would not sufficiently reflect the nature and seriousness of the offense.”
Ostermann’s defense lawyer, Peter Brill, had asked for leniency, calling the Long Island native “a decent, honest, hard-working man who had a lapse in judgment when he chose to help a lifelong friend.”
Osterrmann is also a devoted member of his local church in Nassau County, attended Catholic schools as a child in Brooklyn and went to St. John’s University in Queens, his lawyer wrote to the court.
“He was, in fact, an altar boy,” Brill said in court papers.
As of at least last September, Ostermann also “still does people’s taxes and some accounting as a side business,” the attorney added.
Mullins separately pleaded guilty to his embezzlement scheme in June 2023 and was sentenced to two years in prison.
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