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For more than a week we've been reporting exclusive information about the story we broke regarding the Hoboken SWAT team and their now infamous trip to provide post hurricane Katrina relief near New Orleans.

The week has given us a chance to talk to many people on both sides of this issue. To his credit, Lieutenant Andriani, the former SWAT team leader and coincidentally the target of a multimillion dollar lawsuit with allegations that he is a racist, has talked to me almost every single day since the Hooters story surfaced, providing me with his side and we have attempted to give his side of the story since day one.

Here is the SWAT team's whole story as told to me by Lieutenant Andriani. So far he has exclusively talked to Fox 5.

The SWAT team began in 1991 and although the SWAT cops are on salary, Andriani tells us that they have donated approximately 50k of their own money for guns and equipment and more than 200k in man hours for training. The unit itself is voluntary and the members consider their efforts to provide a SWAT team a service to the community in case, god forbid, a serious situation requiring a SWAT team ever occurred in Hoboken.

The city tells us the city coughed up about 110k for ammunition.

In October of 2005 the SWAT team and other people from the city drove to Kenner, Louisiana, near New Orleans, with a tractor trailer full of food and supplies.

In February of 2006, the SWAT team was asked to provide security for the New Orleans area during their first Mardi Gras after Katrina and after the city and its police force were decimated by the hurricane.

While in New Orleans in 2006, the SWAT team worked many 12 hour shifts and their schedule basically was five days on and three days off the days off are called "furlough days"

In New Orleans some controversial pictures were taken which included Andriani and other SWAT team members in uniform doing Jell-O shots with women at a restaurant and Andriani posing with a bare chested woman and appearing to clutch the breasts of the another. Andriani contends both scenes were when the men were off duty and experiencing the fun and sometimes gratitude of the city for their help the year before.

He also says he didn't actually touch the woman's breasts but their was "daylight" between his hands and her shirt.

On the way home, the team stopped at a Hooters in Tuscaloosa Alabama where they posed for pictures with Hooters girls. In many of the pictures the men seem are sharing their powerful SWAT guns with the Hooters Girls and while inside were seen handcuffing the girls and posing for various racy pictures with them. Andriani claims the men were all on a "furlough" day when this occurred which means they were off duty and not even being paid at all for the day. He says they were just having fun posing for pictures for a possible SWAT team calendar. He contends the guns were not loaded.

He also told me that the SWAT team is thinking about suing the city for disbanding their unit.
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Hooters Girls & Guns

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