A former cop-turned-drug dealer who once shared a cell with notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was sentenced Monday to four consecutive life terms for a gruesome quadruple murder in New York.
Nicholas Tartaglione, 56, received the maximum punishment from Judge Kenneth Karas, who called him a remorseless "monster" during a proceeding in U.S. District Court in suburban White Plains, New York, the U.S. attorney's office said.
In 2023, a jury convicted Tartaglione of orchestrating the 2016 kidnapping and murders of four men over his belief that one of them, 41-year-old Martin Luna, had stolen $250,000 that was supposed to be used to buy cocaine.
After luring Luna to a bar in Chester, New York, Tartaglione beat him for more than an hour while demanding to know where the money was, then strangled him with a zip tie.
Three men who accompanied Luna — nephew Miguel Luna, 25, Urbano Santiago, 35, and Hector Gutierrez, 43 — were then each killed, execution-style, with a single gunshot to the back of the head because they witnessed the slaying.
The FBI found the bodies buried in a mass grave on Tartaglione's remote property in Otisville, New York, later that year.
While locked up in New York City awaiting trial, Tartaglione, formerly a cop in Briarcliff Manor, New York, was sharing a cell with Epstein when the wealthy financier died by suicide in 2019 rather than face prosecution on child sex-trafficking charges.
Epstein's former girlfriend and accomplice, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted on related charges and sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison.
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