Nick Tartaglione
By Dan Murphy
Yonkerstimes.com and Rising Media Group have been covering the case of Nick Tartaglione for more than 20 years. Tartaglione, a former Mt. Vernon and Briarcliff Manor cop, was fired from his Briarcliff post after physically assaulting Briarcliff resident and Cable News Access host Clay Tiffany.
Tiffany was a muckraking journalist who was hell-bent on exposing corruption in Briarcliff and Westchester County. When he started to expose Tartaglione for alleged wrongdoing, it annoyed Tartaglione to the point of assaulting Tiffany, with one assault putting him in the hospital.
Tartaglione went on to open a farm in upstate New York for abused animals. But he is better known for his arrest and conviction for the death of four men in a drug deal gone bad.
During his time awaiting trial, Tartaglione was infamously known as the cellmate of Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, THAT Jeffrey Epstein.
Tartaglione was the last cellmate with Epstein before he allegedly committed suicide, but was not his cellmate at the time of his death.
This reporter lived in Briarcliff at the time of Tiffany and Tartaglione, and we have always viewed Tartaglione in a negative light.
However, we recently came across the reporting of Jessica Reed Kraus and subscribed to her Substack page, House Inhabit (https://jessicareedkraus.substack.com/).
Kraus has written extensively about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and has penned several stories on Tartaglione, including two phone interviews with Tartaglione in prison.
The interviews offer fascinating insight into Tartaglione and his belief that he is innocent of the quadruple murders for which he is presently serving a life sentence. And he claims to have the evidence to prove it. He also talks about his brief relationship and interactions with Epstein.
Kraus has uploaded two of her phone interviews with Tartaglione to YouTube.
Interview one focuses on Tartaglione and his case, in which he is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of 4 men. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tf8ckxkQvQ)
Speaker 1: My name is Nick. Nick Tartaglione. Uh, some of you might know me better as, uh, the killer cop, or even more infamously, as the, uh, the guy who shared a cell with Jeffrey Epstein before he committed suicide. But what you don’t know about me is I’m innocent.
I’ve been in prison for eight years now, and I’m innocent. I have all the evidence to prove it. The jury never, never saw any of it. Not a shred of it. The case was investigated and handled by crooked FBI agents. These guys planted evidence. They tampered with evidence. They spliced videos together, and they intimidated witnesses.
One of these witnesses was a Mexican man named Marcos Cruz, who was in the country illegally. Marcos Cruz was involved with the cartel. I had no idea what Marcos Cruz was into or involved with, but I hired him to work on my animal rescue farm. I rescued mostly dogs, horses, cats.
Uh, Marcos Cruz actually confessed to these murders. He even led the FBI to where he buried the bodies. But they beat him into retracting his confession. They threatened to deport his wife and put his kids in foster care. After they did that, Marcos pointed the finger at me. I have the video evidence of this. Marcos withdrew his confession and then said whatever the FBI wanted him to say.
Every day I wake up behind bars knowing the truth. But most of the world only knows the lies. It’s funny. Even Marcus’s own brother, Miguel Velazquez, told the FBI that I wasn’t involved. He said it was all Marcos and that Marcos had fallen in with some bad people. They offered his brother a visa to point the finger at me. The brother refused, saying that wasn’t the truth. What did the FBI do? They deported him.
The prosecutor in this case was a woman named Maureen Comey. Back in 2016, when this case was being investigated and when I was arrested, she was fresh out of law school. And the head of the FBI at that time was her father, James Comey. Given the proof of corruption that we’ve uncovered, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a setup.
It’s the same way she set it up, Maxwell. Once Epstein was dead and out of the way, Maxwell was an easy win for her. Uh, the jury never saw any of this. Truth didn’t fit their agenda. And everybody listening out there, you know, why should you guys care about this?
Why should you give a damn about me or about any of this? Well, because what happened to me could happen to you. It could happen to your family. It could happen to your husband, your son, your brother, your daughter, or anybody who stands in their way.
Um. And look what they’re doing to Donald Trump. The guy was the president of the United States and they are going after him with a vengeance. They’re using the FBI and the Justice Department as a weapon. This isn’t, you know, just my story. This is a warning. You know, right now it’s me. Tomorrow, it could be you. It’s definitely going to be somebody else.
Note: Tartaglione says, “The guy (Trump) was President,” meaning that the conversation took place in 2024 before he was reelected.
Interview #2 is when Kraus asks Tartaglione about Epstein. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVEgiuzzHn0).
Speaker 1: What was your first impression of Epstein when he landed in your jail cell? Did you know who he was? Um. Were you aware?
Speaker 2: I didn’t. I didn’t know very much. I mean, I knew he was a wealthy man because, uh, you heard the guards, you know, talking about it. Um, when they put him in my cell, they said, you know, you’re going to get company. And I said, Why? And they said, Well, we know you’re the only guy that won’t shake him down or beat the hell out of him. And I thought that was funny because I’m charged with quadruple homicide, yet they’re putting the nation’s, you know, highest profile case, and with me, because they knew I wouldn’t hurt him. He was terrified when he first entered the cell. He, uh, they closed the door behind him, and his back was against the wall, and he said. He said, You know, they told me you’re a good guy, and you know you won’t hurt me. I said, Yeah, I’m not going to hurt you. And then he came over. He stuck his hand out. He said, I’m Jeff. I said, I’m Nick. He said, What are you in here for, Nick? I said, quadruple homicide. He then went back against the wall and started yelling for the guards. I told him, ‘Look.’
Speaker 3: This call is from a federal prison.
Speaker 2: I said, look, Jeff, you know I didn’t kill anybody. Believe it or not, you want to leave? Leave? I said, but you’re fine. I’m not going to touch you. After that, in the weeks, you know, following that, he. He knew I wasn’t going to hurt him. He actually tried paying me. I was supposed to return the population soon. He offered to pay me to stay in that cell with him. And I told him I couldn’t do that. I had to start preparing for my trial, you know. And then one day, he left in the morning, and the guard guy was there at five in the morning, banging on my cell door, and he says, ‘Epstein court, Epstein court.’ Epstein says I don’t have court today. And I laughed. I explained that to him, and I said, Epstein, the guards are saying in court, so the other inmates don’t know you’re actually going to talk with prosecutors. So he got up and got dressed. He left. He was gone all day. He came back later that night. Hey, man, he just climbed on the bunk. He didn’t say a word. I was reading a book, wasn’t my business. And finally, he asks, ‘You were a cop?’ What do you know about, uh, proffers and cooperating? I told him, I said, Jeff, it’s pretty simple that the cooperators, I mean, the prosecutors, you know, they caught a fish. You know, they’re not going to let that fish off the hook unless you give them a bigger fish. He said, Yeah, well, that’s what they said. I said, Well, what do you mean? He said, uh, they told me they’ll let me plead out to something small, and I’ll do just a couple of years in a camp if I can give them something on, uh, Trump, get him impeached. And, uh, I said, well, do you know Trump? He says, Well, I know you know, I know him. I met him, but we don’t like each other. I laughed and said, ‘Why?’ He said, uh, Trump threw me out of a party at his place in Florida. I said, Why did he throw you out? He said, Oh, he got mad. I was talking to some girl, and by now I got wind of, you know, of what he was in there for. So I said, Well, how old was the girl? He said, Oh, about 18, 19. So that was a cop. I said, Jeff, that means probably 1415. Well, he threw me out. And, you know, I haven’t talked to him since, blah, blah, blah. And then, uh, He said, I don’t know anything. So okay, he says, but the government told me I don’t have to prove what I say about Trump, as long as Trump’s people can’t disprove it. I said, ‘Yes, he’s the president of the United States.’ His people are the FBI. He said, That’s what I said. And they said, No, the FBI is our people, not his people. And at that point, it was pretty obvious what he was contemplating. Just, you know, making up stuff, looking to say things to throw at Trump. And that aggravated the hell out of me because I was in there at that point for three years because people did the same thing to me. So I jumped off the bunk and I said, Listen, I said, if you’re going to pull that shit, get the hell out.
Speaker 3: This call is from a federal prison.
Speaker 2: I said, you know, I’m in here because guys like you are lying to save their own ass. I said, So, are you going to do that? Get out of this cell. And he got quiet for a while. Then he said, All right, I have a hypothetical for you. I said, Okay, Jeff, go ahead with your Hypothetical. He said, ‘Give me the name of somebody you love more than anything.’ I didn’t want to give, you know, Jeffrey Epstein, anybody? Name in my family. So I said to my dog. Wink. Because he only has one eye. I rescued him from some piece of garbage. Poked his eye out before I got to him. So I said Wink. He said Okay. He said the government’s going to take Wink and put him in a cage for the rest of his life, unless you help him. I said, well, Wink didn’t do anything wrong, so they couldn’t do that. He said, Well, neither did she. I said, Who? She says, My old girlfriend. He said she had nothing to do with any of this, any of my girl stuff. She actually hated it. He said, but they’re going to go after her unless I help them. I said, Jeff, listen, I said I would die before I let anybody use me as a weapon to hurt somebody in my family. And, um, you know, he got quiet again. And that was the last we really talked about that. So I don’t know, you know, I don’t know what personal decisions he made as far as coming up with stuff or whatever, but I never heard of it again,” end of interview.
Most people in Briarcliff, and in Westchester County, believe that Nick Tartaglione should spend every one of his remaining days in prison for the quadruple homicide he was convicted of, and for his abuse of Clay Tiffany. The NY Post labeled Tartaglione the “Killer Cop.”
We had agreed with this assumption until now, until we read Jessica Kraus’s Substack stories on Tartaglione, Epstein, Comey, and Maxwell.
After listening to Tartaglione’s phone call again and again, and after reading more of Straus’s dozen or so stories on Tartaglione, Epstein, Comey, and Maxwell, this thought came to my mind.
Yes, Tartaglione abused and attacked Clay Tiffany, who was my acquaintance in Briarcliff. But does that assault correlate to Tartaglione committing four murders upstate?
I don’t think so. Based on the reporting and documentation we are reading about regarding the misinformation about the Russiagate hoax, and how federal law enforcement and the intelligence community in DC lied about President Donald Trump, I am inclined to listen to Tartaglione and review his evidence.
It’s also interesting to note that the media tends to overlook Tartaglione’s work in rescuing abused animals on his farm in upstate New York.
And why would Tartaglione bury the bodies of four men he killed on his own farm? Wouldn’t he find a more secluded location?
In an attempt to balance this story, I would remind my readers that I did write a story about Epstein’s last attorney, David Schoen, who recalled Epstein telling him about the alleged suicide. “What he said happened was that this other inmate (Tartaglione) had tied something around his neck as part of some experiment that Jeffrey didn’t feel he was in a position to say no to. And the guy pulled the thing, and it left a mark on his neck, and that was the end of it; he didn’t pass out, but it was a scary episode for him. But it was not an attempted suicide. He explained it to me in some detail,” said Schoen. When asked what Epstein was afraid of, Schoen said “retaliation from the inmate,” (Tartaglione).
Schoen added that Epstein did not want to kill himself but was working on his defense and his upcoming application for bail.
We encourage you to subscribe to Kraus’s Substack, as we have at
She wants someone to delve into the Tartaglione case and his alleged proof of his innocence.
Documentarians are still in search of Tiffany’s recording of his cable access shows. We continue to receive email inquiries. There is one individual who claims he has the tapes and has posted a few on YouTube. Please let us know when you are willing to share more.
