A New York man said he was shocked to learn his estranged wife of four years, a New York Police Department officer, was allegedly plotting to hire a hit man to murder him.
But that’s what federal law enforcement agents told Isaiah Carvalho Jr. when they showed up at his door Friday and asked him to stage his own death as part of a sting operation against his wife, Valerie Cincinelli.
“I didn’t want to believe it, but apparently it’s true,” Carvalho, 32, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview that aired Wednesday.
“I was shocked,” he added. “I didn’t know how to react.”
Federal prosecutors say Cincinelli, 34, told her boyfriend in February that she wanted him to hire a hit man to kill his teenage daughter and Carvalho, who filed for divorce a month earlier. She allegedly gave her boyfriend $7,000 to pay the assassin.
But the boyfriend, who is not named in the complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, did not follow through with the scheme. Instead, he alerted police and agreed to have his conversations with Cincinelli recorded by the FBI.
Cincinelli, a mother of two and 12-year NYPD veteran, told her boyfriend she would be at home when the killings were carried out and would have an alibi, according to the complaint. She later said Carvalho should be killed near his job in Long Island because the area is “ghetto” and the murder wouldn’t cast suspicion on her.
On May 17, FBI agents informed Carvalho of his wife’s plan and asked him to help fake his death as part of the investigation.
“They ended up taking me to an undisclosed location and had me fake my death and took pictures of it,” Carvalho told ABC. “They had me sit in my car. They put glass on the floor and all over me. And had me hunch over into the passenger seat.”
“Craziest thing I ever had to experience in my life,” he said, becoming visibly emotional.
FBI agents, posing as the hit man, sent photos of the purported murder to Cincinelli’s boyfriend, who shared them with her. Cincinelli then instructed the boyfriend to delete text messages and photographs from their respective cellphones, according to the complaint.
Cincinelli was arrested by the FBI later that day and charged with use of interstate commerce for murder for hire. The NYPD has suspended her without pay.
Cincinelli, who once worked in a police domestic violence unit in Queens, has a history of turbulent romantic relationships, reported The New York Times. Her first husband reportedly obtained a restraining order against her. She and Carvalho, her second husband, had restraining orders against each other.
Her boyfriend also sought a restraining order against her, the Times reported, citing a detention memo.
Cincinelli’s family maintains that she’s innocent and that her boyfriend was trying to set her up, ABC reported.