A crooked gun broker secretly made thousands of recordings of conversations with corrupt NYPD cops, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. The revelation likely will send shock waves through the department. In a letter filed in Manhattan Federal Court, prosecutors said Alex (Shaya) Lichtenstein secretly recorded some 70,000 conversations, including many with cops. In November, Lichtenstein pleaded guilty to bribing NYPD officers to obtain pistol licenses.Lichtenstein saved the conversations to an e-mail account, “many of them contemporaneous memorialization of dealings of questionable legality with members of the NYPD,” according to the letter written by Assistant U.S. Attorney Martin Bell.

“During our initial review of those recordings, we learned that some of these calls implicated at least one of the defendants in this case.”(nydailynews)…[+]