Angry and frustrated, Nassau Police Capt. John Sharp took Daniel Volpe's file with him when he went to Albany to joust with state pension officials over disability cases that his department considered questionable.

Sharp was commander of the department's medical administration unit in 1986 when he and several other police officials went to the headquarters of the pension system. "Everybody in my office knew, and it was kind of widely known, that there were people who absolutely should not have gotten three-quarters," said Sharp, now a deputy inspector who commands the Seventh Precinct in Seaford. "Three-quarters" is police slang for disability pensions.

The police delegation met with several state officials including the pension system's counsel, John Black, Sharp said. Black told Newsday he didn't recall the meeting.

"They were determined that this matter was theirs to determine and that's it," Sharp said. " 'You're just the police. We make the determination who gets three-quarters, and that's between us and the member of the retirement system.'

"I said, 'Well, can we provide you with information? Will it be considered?' "Black said, 'Of course it will be considered.' "

So, Sharp handed Black the Volpe file. A few months earlier, Volpe had retired as a police officer at age 38 on a tax-free disability pension of $27,828 a year. He said he had a disorder called narcolepsy that caused him to fall asleep unexpectedly for short periods. The problem started, Volpe said, after he was hit on the head with a rock during a labor dispute in 1978. In an interview, Volpe denied that any fraud was involved in his case.

Internal records of his case show that Volpe told two doctors his skull had been fractured by the rock. But X-rays found no fracture, according to records. He told a third doctor he'd blacked out when the rock hit him, but other records quote him as saying he never lost consciousness.

The records also show that an investigation by a police department physician, Dr. William Victor, concluded that Volpe had narcolepsy before he joined the force. Victor looked into Volpe's medical, driving and military history. He concluded that the disorder was longstanding and that Volpe was using the rock incident to get a disability pension.

Victor discovered that before the rock incident, Volpe had been in four off-duty car accidents in which he'd collided with other cars or driven off the road and hit trees. He found that during Volpe's service in Vietnam he had been hospitalized with shrapnel wounds to his head. And he found a letter Volpe had written to the police department in 1971 while seeking a job, in which he said: "I believe that I suffered from a blackout because of a head wound suffered in Vietnam." Victor wrote in an internal memo that he told Volpe his episodes "go back many years and probably were the cause of his accidents" and that the rock incident couldn't have caused his disability.

A physician who had originally backed Volpe's claim, Dr. John Nicoletti, changed his mind after further research. "It would appear that he indeed had suffered . . . [brief blackouts] prior to the 1978 injury at work . . . He may indeed suffer from narcolepsy but not as a result of the 1978 injury."

As with some other applicants, Volpe began seeking a disability pension after getting in trouble on the job. In 1976, the department had suspended him without pay after a grand jury indicted him on assault charges. He was accused of beating a youth while on foot patrol in Hicksville, then coming back after his tour of duty and beating the youth again, breaking a bone in his foot. The trouble started when the youth cursed at Volpe, police said.

Volpe was cleared of the criminal charges. But the department brought a disciplinary case against him over the alleged assault. He pleaded guilty in 1976 to nine charges and was fined 87 days' pay, according to records. From then on, Volpe said in an interview, his career was "down the tubes - forget it."

Volpe denied having narcolepsy before becoming a police officer. "I was examined by the police physicians before they hired me, and they gave me a clean bill of health," he told Newsday. He said he didn't intentionally mislead any doctors. He said he believed he had a hairline skull fracture that didn't show up on X-rays.

At first, the pension system turned Volpe down in May, 1984, a couple of months after he applied, ruling that his disorder wasn't job-related. Volpe appealed. His neurologist, Dr. Allen Hausknecht, testified that Volpe was disabled with a "post-traumatic seizure disorder" from the rock incident. But a neurologist who examined Volpe for the state, Dr. Ronald A. Housman, testified that he found no medical evidence of a job-related disability.

The opinion by the hearing officer, Arthur Wachtel, illustrates how important an applicant's credibility can be in such cases. Wachtel wrote that Dr. Housman said that "he had no reason to disbelieve the history by the applicant: 'He said he passed out and I believe he passed out. If he said he passed out, I have no reason to disbelieve him, no.' "

Wachtel rejected Housman's diagnosis and found Volpe disabled. Contacted by Newsday, Wachtel said he didn't remember the case. Volpe is now a state-licensed private investigator, working out of his home in Coram.

As Sharp put in more time commanding the medical unit, he said, he realized his trip to Albany had been a waste of time. Repeatedly, his unit developed evidence raising doubts about disability cases, only to find the pension system uninterested, he said.

"I talked to people in the system up there, the bureaucrats, lower-level people who orchestrated the cases," Sharp said. "And they said, 'We don't want to know what the facts are. We're looking at the medical record, and that's it.'" He said he never heard anything further from the state on Volpe's case.

Asked for comment, Deputy State Comptroller John McManaman said, "The hearing officer decided in his favor, and basically we live in a system of rules."