A steroids-selling bodybuilder and former police officer in Briarcliff Manor, New York, remembered as a cellmate of the infamous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, was sentenced Monday to spend the rest of his life, four times over, in federal prison for following his convictions in the execution murders of four Mexican men and his failure to get a new trial.
Though he maintains his innocence to this day, telling News 12 “I’m a cop in prison for crimes I didn’t do,” it was no secret that Nicholas Tartaglione, now 56, would face life in prison. That was the “mandatory” sentence, prosecutors emphasized in a letter to U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas, slamming as “monstrous offenses” the drug conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping crimes Tartaglione was found guilty of committing.
Tartaglione, who reportedly retired from policing after an injury in 2008, was convicted of luring 41-year-old Martin Luna to an April 2016 meeting where he strangled the victim to death in front his family members and a friend, believing that Martin “had stolen approximately $250,000 meant for the purchase of cocaine,” prosecutors said.
Luna had traveled to a bar with his 25-year-old and 35-year-old nephews Miguel Luna and Urbano Santiago, and his friend Hector Gutierrez, 43, before the strangulation murder. From there, the three remaining victims were taken against their will to Tartaglione’s Otisville-area property and shot in the back of the head after being “forced […] to kneel.” The Middletown victims, who each “left behind a loving family,” were buried in a “mass grave,” prosecutors said.
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