One day in 2023, Bryan Porcello spent nearly five hours out of his eight-hour shift in an altercation with his former girlfriend’s family and dealing with the aftermath.

After the girlfriend’s brother shot a garden hose through his car window, Porcello drove to a park to try to dry off his clothes and his car seat. Then he went home early because he was so miserable being wet.

Still, he claimed he had worked a full day.

Porcello had an extensive history of harassing women going back almost three decades, leading to convictions and jail time. 

In May, he was arrested on suspicion of unlawful imprisonment, harassment and extortion. The Honolulu Police Department said he had bailed a woman out of jail and threatened to have her bail bond revoked unless she had sex with him. 

Hawaii News Now, which did not name Porcello, reported that the victim arrived at the Kapolei police station with handcuffs he had used to imprison her still hanging from her wrist.

So who was the employer that overlooked Porcello’s past and tolerated his behavior until he was finally arrested?

The city of Honolulu.

Porcello was an inspector for the city’s Department of Planning and Permitting for five years until he was fired in September.

Civil Beat wanted to get details on why Porcello was finally terminated by the city, and made a request under the state’s open records law. DPP released more than 200 pages of documents.

But there’s a hitch: almost all of them are completely blacked out. Even a report about the 2023 garden hose incident — which the city had previously released to Civil Beat with only a few redactions — is almost completely black in the larger document release.

The city’s Corporation Counsel says the redactions are required because Porcello has filed a grievance and that process must first play out, which could take months or years. Until then, the public will be in the dark about what was the last straw for DPP. 

Citing the grievance, the city did not answer questions about its policy for hiring people with criminal records like Porcello’s. Nor would it say whether it became aware of his new convictions while a city employee and what its policies are for dealing with such situations.

But much can still be pieced together through other sources about Porcello’s tenure as a city worker and his tangles with the law before and during that time — details that raise questions about how Porcello ever got hired in the first place, and why the 2023 garden hose incident led to a recommendation of only five days of unpaid leave.

Hired In The Midst Of Legal Woes

Porcello has been convicted at least 10 times for various offenses starting in 1996, most of them violations of protective orders filed by women who wanted him to stay away, but also harassment and assault. Many of the cases resulted in probation, although he was sentenced in 2002 to one year in jail after he violated probation, and did jail time in a few others.

In 2017, in three separate cases, he was charged with violating a restraining order, misdemeanor assault and unauthorized entry into a motor vehicle, according to court minutes.

It was as those three cases progressed, on Aug. 28, 2018, that the city’s Department of Facility Maintenance hired Porcello as a groundskeeper. Less than two weeks later, he failed to show up for a court hearing, citing his new job.

“Defense counsel advised that the defendant is unable to get off work,” according to the court minutes.

The city job also played a role in a December 2018 hearing, at which a prosecutor asked the court to reinstate his bail “as the defendant has a lengthy record and is dangerous.” Porcello’s attorney, Jake Delaplane, objected, arguing “that the state has been vindictive; defendant is gainfully employed and he has done what he was asked to do on supervised release.”

The prosecutor later withdrew the motion.

In July 2019, Porcello was sentenced in the consolidated three cases to two years of probation and jail time already served.

The conviction didn’t hurt his position with the city. On the contrary, less than a year later, he was transferred to DPP to be an inspector charged with making sure construction complied with stormwater codes.

When the city first hired him as a groundskeeper, he had made $42,396 a year, according to Civil Beat’s public employee salary database. By 2024, inspectors like Porcello were pulling down between $54,468 and $80,664.

‘I Was So Miserable … I Went Home’

It would be four years before the city took action and launched an investigation, and only after Porcello’s continued harassment of women spilled over into his work performance. 

In 2023, a former girlfriend got a temporary restraining order against him. She said that in January of that year, Porcello got angry when she failed to answer his phone call and texted her messages calling her vulgar names.

He said that he knew people who could make her “disappear” and had friends in the police department, according to her TRO petition. He told her he already had a body bag that she could fit into, she wrote.

He threatened to release explicit videos and photos of her if she didn’t see him, the petition states, and to “take out” her brother.

It was April 20 that same year, during his normal work shift, when Porcello drove to the former girlfriend’s home and got into an altercation with her brother and other family members, according to DPP’s subsequent investigation. The brother later said in a TRO petition that Porcello had taunted him and threw a punch at him.

Porcello told the DPP investigator that the garden hose soaked him and the inside of his car. “My seat was like a sponge,” he said. 

After trying to dry off at a city park, he did six inspections in about an hour, he said, but “I was so miserable driving around with wet shoes, socks and underwear, and I went home.”

DPP wrapped up its investigation in November 2023 — more than six months after the incident. It found that Porcello had falsified his timesheet, which “essentially amounts to stealing from the City.” He had also misused his city-issued cell phone by calling or texting his girlfriend 114 times. 

Porcello said he’d never been told that he couldn’t use the phone for personal communications, only “not to surf the internet and look at pornography.” But the investigator found that Porcello had attended ethics training when he first was hired that clearly showed he understood the proper use of city phones.

The investigation also concluded that he had harassed his former girlfriend’s brother. It recommended a five-day unpaid suspension and counseling on ethical behavior at work. DPP said that, because Porcello filed a grievance in the current discipline case, it could not disclose whether he actually received that suspension.

Balancing Work And Court Appearances

As the city’s investigation was underway, Porcello was frequently in court to answer charges against him, juggling his legal responsibilities with his job and, at least a couple of times, claiming on time cards that he was working when he was appearing before a judge.

A judge granted the former girlfriend a TRO, but Porcello violated it on three days in May 2023. That led to two more court cases, one for the TRO violations and another for harassment involving striking, shoving or kicking.

At one hearing, his lawyer stated that he needed to check whether a plea deal would affect Porcello’s job. Apparently, it didn’t, because after pleading no contest and being sentenced to probation in May 2024, he continued on as a DPP inspector.

The TRO and the two other court cases required Porcello to frequently attend hearings during work hours at a courthouse in downtown Honolulu or one in Pearl City.

Civil Beat obtained his timesheets and compared them to his court appearances in downtown Honolulu. That showed that Porcello often took vacation days when he was required to appear. Once he took a sick day and twice he claimed to have worked a regular shift despite court minutes showing he was physically present in the courtroom.

The court hearings started around 9 a.m. and were short — lasting just a few minutes — but Porcello would also have needed time to drive to the courthouse, park, walk to the courtroom and then get back to his workplace afterward.

Yet on both days, Porcello claimed on his timesheet that he worked a full shift, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. DPP inspectors are allowed a 45-minute lunch break between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Porcello claimed in the earlier DPP investigation that he was allowed to take lunch any time after 9 a.m., but the city’s investigator called that assertion “questionable.”

A Familiar Complaint

It took the allegation of unlawful imprisonment and extortion for the city to finally come down on Porcello. Even then, the process would take months — and is still going on. Meanwhile, another woman came forward with a similar story.

The city opened a new investigation of Porcello two days after his arrest on May 3 in the unlawful imprisonment case. He has not been charged criminally in that case and the redacted file released to Civil Beat contains no clue of what the city’s investigation was about.

The few parts not blacked out show that on May 28, the city sent him a notice of the second investigation’s findings and invited him to a hearing to discuss them on June 12.

Before then, on June 3, DPP informed Porcello that his administrative leave without pay would be continued for another 30 days.

The investigation was completed on Aug. 7 and five days later DPP sent Porcello a letter notifying him of that. Porcello then was on paid leave for the last half of September before being fired, a DPP spokesman said.

By the end of October, another woman had filed a petition for a temporary restraining order with a familiar claim. She wrote that she first met Porcello when he bailed her out of jail in November 2024, and told her he only did it because he wanted to have sex with her. 

She said she got a job and paid him off, but lost the job because she was distracted by his behavior, which made her uncomfortable. She claimed he shot her with a pellet gun one time when she refused to get in his car “because I knew his intentions.”

The two appeared in court on Nov. 10, where they told the judge they had reached an agreement allowing the TRO to be dissolved.

Civil Beat’s reporting on women’s and girls’ issues is funded in part by the Frost Family Foundation.