A federal jury in New York continues to hear testimony in the murder trial of a former suburban New York police officer accused of planning the murder of four people.
NEW YORK — A federal jury in New York began hearing testimony in the murder trial of a former New York police officer accused of planning the murder of four people, one strangled to death with a zip ties and three others shot execution-style, by money on a drug operation.
The four men were found buried on the property of former suburban New York police officer Nicholas Tartaglione, whose trial, which began Thursday, is expected to last a month in the US District Court in White. plains.
But defense lawyers claimed that Tartaglione had nothing to do with the killings and that the government was using him as a convenient scapegoat.
Tartaglione gained further notoriety as a former cellmate of Jeffrey Epstein, before the disgraced financier committed suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting sex trafficking charges.
Prosecutors say Tartaglione lured one of the victims, Martin Luna, to a bar because he believed Luna had stolen money to buy cocaine.
The government says the other three victims, a friend and two of Luna’s nephews who had nothing to do with the drug operation, accompanied Luna to the bar. Luna was strangled with a zip ties and then taken to the defendant’s ranch in Otisville, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) north of Manhattan.
The other three men were alive and tied up when Tartaglione’s associates took them to the same property, where they were shot in the back of the head. Prosecutors accuse Tartaglione of shooting one of the victims.
Investigators unearthed the bodies in December 2016, about eight months after they were killed and buried.
Three of Tartaglione’s associates are expected to testify on behalf of the government, which defense attorneys say do so to curry favor with US prosecutors in their own cases. A fourth associate, also a former police officer, committed suicide.
Tartaglione retired from the Briarcliff Manor Police Department in 2008 after suffering an injury five years earlier.
