By Dan Murphy
The sad story of jailed pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who has been charged by U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for sex trafficking and faces up to 45 years in prison – a lifetime gig for someone 66 years old – now has another connection to Westchester County. Last month we reported that noted attorney and Westchester resident David Boies had taken the cases of several alleged victims of Epstein.
Recent reports about Epstein’s injuries while an inmate at the Manhattan Correctional Center include one inmate who said he found Epstein lying on the floor with bruises to his neck. That inmate was former Mt. Vernon and Briarcliff Manor cop Nicholas Tartaglione.
To call Tartaglione a disgraced former police officer is an understatement. After leaving the Briarcliff Police Department on a disability pension, and after being suspended for three years after lying about a drunk driving case, Tartaglione was charged in 2016 with killing four men in Orange County, in what was characterized as a drug deal gone bad.
We’ll get to more on Tartaglione and the laundry list of allegations and lawsuits against him while a cop later in this story.
Epstein was found with marks around his neck late last month when his cellmate, Tartaglione, found him and alerted corrections officers. A prison investigation has yet to determine if Epstein attempted suicide or was assaulted, but one law enforcement source believes it was suicide.
“Epstein is on suicide watch. You don’t go on suicide watch if you’ve been assaulted, do you?” asked our source. “You’ve got a guy who is a millionaire who is now living among rats and mold and wants to go home.”
Initially, Tartaglione was identified by the New York City media as someone who may have assaulted Epstein. That claim was loudly denied by Tartaglione’s attorney Bruce Barket, who said that Tartaglione did not harm Epstein, but instead intervened in an attempt to save his life, adding, “In the short time they were together, they became friends.”
Tartaglione’s lengthy and crime-filled career, both while a police officer and after, includes:
In December 2016, Tartaglione was arrested for the murders of four Hispanic men in the Likquid Lounge bar in Chester, owned by Tartaglione’s brother. The day after his arrest, the bodies of the four missing men were found buried on property that Tartaglione had rented in Otisville, Orange County.
Tartaglione was charged with conspiracy to purchase 5 kilograms of cocaine in a drug deal that went bad and ended up with four men dead or missing. Federal prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigations believe that only one of the men killed, Martin Luna, was involved in drug deals with Tartaglione, and the other three men were not involved but were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Tartaglione has pled not guilty to all of the charges, but earlier this year prosecutors said they will seek the death penalty against him, and last month, corrections officers found an illegal cell phone in Tartaglione’s prison cell. He remains in jail until his trial and verdict.
Attorneys for the woman that have accused Epstein of sexually abusing them as underage teenagers commented. “We want him to stay alive to face the justice and accountability which is so long overdue,” said attorney Lisa Bloom. “And it’s coming.”
“We want him to be forced to face a jury and respond to the serious charges that he is facing,” added attorney Gloria Allred. “Justice for victims whose young lives he has impacted is long overdue.”
Epstein was recently denied bail pending his trial, after the FBI found a fake passport and piles of cash and diamonds stashed in the safe at his NYC home. U.S. District Judge Richard Berman cited risk of flight and danger to the community in his decision against Epstein, a registered sex offender and private island owner who faces new federal charges of exploiting dozens of underage girls in New York and Florida in the early 2000s.
Some believe Epstein tried to take his own life after the decision that will force him to remain behind bars until his trial,
Epstein and Tartaglione bunked together in prison for two weeks. Both men are facing life in prison with no chance for parole. The Special Housing Unit wing of the MCC where both were staying has no windows and is infested with rodents, insects and has standing water, according to a complaint about the living conditions in the MCC by Tartaglione.
Tartaglione was in the SHU because corrections officers found a cell phone in his cell. Another disturbing incident reported by Tartaglione’s attorney, who stated in federal court, “About a week ago, (Tartaglione) woke up, got up, looked down at his cot, and apparently he smothered, unbeknownst to him, a rodent that was dead on his cot.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Swergold said at the hearing that MCC staff wondered whether the rat was a Godfather-style warning and had “concerns that it was put there by a cell mate, perhaps as some kind of message.” Tartaglione has complained about conditions at the jail for years since being arrested in 2016. He has pleaded for books to read and batteries for a radio in the SHU, but claims that corrections officers told him to ‘stop complaining or it’s gonna get worse.”
Barket called Tartaglione’s living conditions “borderline torture,” saying he has no way of knowing what time of day it is and can’t concentrate. In addition to Epstein, the MCC recently had another famous inmate – Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Years ago, this reporter lived in the Village of Briarcliff Manor at the same time Tartaglione was a police officer with Briarcliff Manor P.D. One of the local public access channels featured an odd host of his own show. His name was Clay Tiffany.
Tiffany enjoyed taking the local government to task and suing them for violating his First Amendment rights on a few occasions. Westchester’s dean of reporting, Phil Reisman, wrote about Tiffany in 2015 calling him a “crank” and someone with “a persecution complex.”
While I usually enjoy and appreciate Reisman, I didn’t agree with his characterization of Tiffany, who I believed to be a strange, yes, but honest Briarcliff resident looking out for the public’s good and was, overall, no harm to anyone.
After talking about Tartaglione again and again on his cable access show, Tiffany was beaten almost to death by Tartaglione on the shores of the Hudson River after taking a swim in 1999. While Tartaglione was never charged nor found guilty of a crime, which was the motivation for many of the accusations and charges made against him as a cop in Mt. Vernon and Pawling, Tartaglione settled out of court with Tiffany for $200,000 and the village for $1 million.
Reisman said Tiffany had an “acute sense of victimhood” and that as a result of his successful lawsuits “had bought a winning scratch-off lottery ticket.”
While the U.S. Attorney’s Office investigated and found there was not enough evidence to charge Tartaglione with a civil rights violation, he was suspended from the Briarcliff P.D. for three years and was fired in 2009 – the same year he beat Tiffany to near death. Eventually, Tartaglione sued and was put back on the job, winning more than $300,000 in back pay in 2003, and retired on disability in 2008.
Tartaglione was the target of an FBI civil rights investigation for physically abusing several people, including public access television host Tiffany. The town settled with the now-deceased Tiffany for $1 million.
While 99 percent of our police officers are good men and women living and upholding our laws, Tartaglione was a bad apple who caused a lot of people a lot of harm. Now he claims he helped corrections officers save Epstein. Can anything this guy says be considered the truth?
