An NYPD officer is prepared to plead guilty over her plot to hire a hitman to kill her estranged husband and her boyfriend’s daughter.
According to the New York Times, officer Valerie Cincinelli is facing federal murder-for-hire charges and two counts of obstruction of justice for the attempted hit job. After first entering a not guilty plea, she’s now ready to sign a deal with prosecutors for the scheme. Part of that deal includes her guilty plea, though it’s unclear which charges she will be pleading guilty to.
Beginning in February 2019, the 36-year-old mother of two reportedly started asking her boyfriend John DiRubba to hire a hitman to kill her former husband Isaiah Carvalho Jr. During that time, Cincinelli and her husband were in the middle of a contentious separation and divorce that included a legal battle over custody of their son and division of property. The two had been married for four years.
Court filings state that she withdrew $7,000 from a Long Island bank on Feb. 18, 2019. The same day DiRubba allegedly bought gold coins worth $6,935 in a nearby town. The couple planned to pay the hitman using the gold currency.
The complaint also states that the two discussed the plot multiple times in conversations recorded by DiRubba, after he had agreed to cooperate with federal investigators. On May 13, 2019, DiRubba recorded a conversation where they discussed a plot to set up two separate murders: one of her husband and another of his own daughter.
The two killings were planned to take place on different days. Cincinelli told her boyfriend Carvalho’s murder wouldn’t raise suspicion “because the murder would take place in ‘the hood’ or ‘the ghetto.’”
On May 17, 2019, a detective went to Cincinelli’s home and pretended the plot to murder her husband had succeeded and questioned her about his “death.” Afterward she contacted DiRubba to scrub all records about the plan and coordinate alibis. The FBI arrested her later that day.
Following her arrest, Cincinelli was suspended from her position without pay. Her attorney told the Times the plea deal was a “favorable” outcome for his client after arguing that she did not believe DiRubba would act on “his plan to commit these murders and that she most certainly did not pay him to do so.”
“Nobody’s a winner here,” DiRubba told the Times. “Everyone suffered.”
