NEW YORK — A retired police officer convicted of murdering four people, including a man he tortured and strangled over stolen drug money, was sentenced Monday to four consecutive murders. living conditions in jail.
Nicholas Tartaglione, 56, who had been an officer in the Hudson River Valley village of Briarcliff Manor, was convicted last year. His case attracted attention because of the brutality of the crime and because Tartaglione was his cellmate for a short time Jeffery Epsteinthe politically connected playboy who committed suicide while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
The man who tortured Tartaglione was Martin Luna, who he believed had stolen $250,000 from him, intended to buy cocaine. prosecutors said. The other three victims were friends or family who happened to be at a club with Luna when Tartaglione and two associates kidnapped them in 2016.
Prosecutors said Urbano Santiago, Miguel Luna and Hector Gutierrez were forced to watch Tartaglione strangle Martin Luna with a zip tie. They were then executed by gunfire. Investigators found the bodies of the four men buried together on the Tartaglione property in Otisville, New York.
Tartaglione worked for several suburban police departments before retiring from the Briarcliff Manor force in 2008 due to disability, including the departments in Yonkers, Pawling and Mount Vernon. Tartaglione has maintained his innocence and argued during the trial that he was simply running an animal shelter farm and was not motivated by money. according to The Journal News.
One of his alleged accomplices in the murders shot himself in his car in 2017 as FBI agents prepared to arrest him. Another man, Joseph Biggs, was sentenced to 16 years in prison after pleading guilty to the murder of one of the victims. Biggs described the murders as a witness at Tartaglione’s trial.
Tartaglione was not Epstein’s cellmate at the time of his death, but his lawyer claimed he was a “critical witness” in the subsequent suicide investigation. He had shared a cell with Epstein weeks earlier in 2019, when the wealthy financier was discovered with bruises on his neck and subsequently placed on suicide watch.
