Murder-For-Hire Guilty Plea Follows Mortgage Fraud Conviction

Hand, however, was not ready to settle in and just do his time.

 

Instead, in July 2011, he began attempting to arrange from prison the murder of one of the witnesses who had testified against him at his trial (the “Witness”). Based on a tip that one of its investigators received in August 2011, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, working with the Inspector General’s Office of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision and the New York City Police Department, began an investigation.  

 

According to documents filed in court, on August 26, 2011, an undercover investigator from the District Attorney’s Office, posing as a “hit man,” met with Hand at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility. During a lengthy, recorded conversation, Hand provided the undercover investigator with details of where the Witness lived and outlined ways in which the investigator could carry out the hit. Hand also told the investigator that if the hit occurred at the Witness’s home, the Witness’s spouse and young children would likely also have to be killed so that law enforcement would be unable to link Hand to the hit. 

 

Hand agreed to compensate the undercover investigator, both once the hit happened and also with an upfront payment to buy a firearm and other supplies for the crime. Hand later also provided the undercover investigator with the phone number of an associate whom the investigator could contact to get the money (the “Associate”).  

 

In order to obtain the Associate’s assistance—and in order to obtain money from his unwitting parents to make the upfront payment—Hand concocted a story that he needed the cash to bribe a Correction Officer at the Coxsackie Facility. Ultimately, prosecutors say, Hand’s parents provided $150 to the Associate, at Hand’s request, during a roadside exchange off the Long Island Expressway. Investigators from the District Attorney’s Office captured the exchange on surveillance video after learning of the planned hand-off through Hand’s prison calls and communications intercepted via a court-authorized wiretap of the Associate’s cell phone.  

 

Just days after the hand-off, on September 10, 2011, the Associate met the undercover investigator outside a diner on the east side of Manhattan and gave him the $150 in cash that Hand’s parents had provided. After receiving the money from the Associate, the undercover investigator visited Hand a second time at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility on September 15, 2011. During that meeting, Hand again told the undercover investigator that he wanted the Witness murdered and agreed to pay the undercover investigator $2,000 for the hit. Hand and the undercover investigator agreed that the murder would occur within two weeks and that the plot was in motion.  

 

Hand now has pleaded guilty to Conspiracy to Commit Murder in the First and Second Degrees. Hand will be sentenced on February 6, 2012, and his sentence will run consecutively with the sentence he is serving on his mortgage fraud conviction.