The story of retired New Jersey cop Nicholas Tartaglione seems like the stuff of a Hollywood movie, with a brutal gangland-style murder of four men in 2015 and a coda involving the late billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. However, Tartaglione’s true crime drama is no creation of a screenwriter’s imagination.
Glance at a photo of Tartaglione, and he fits the part: Muscle-bound and handsome like a tough guy selected from Central Casting for an action film. He retired from the Briarcliff Manor Police Department outside New York City in 2008. At that time, Tartaglione turned from life in law enforcement and allegedly got involved in a drug ring linked with Mexican drug cartels, according to The New York Times.
About seven years after he retired, Tartaglione was arrested in connection with the deaths of four men who had been reported missing, and whose bodies were recovered on property the ex-cop rented in Orange County, New York. Those four men — Martin and Miguel Luna, Urbano Santiago, and Hector Gutierrez — met Tartaglione and two of his henchmen at a bar owned by Tartaglione’s brother, reportedly to discuss a drug debt. They were never seen alive again.
The quadruple murder
One of the four men who met with Tartaglione that day, Martin Luna, reportedly owed Tartaglione drug money, and the ex-cop and his two criminal associates reportedly kidnapped all four men at gunpoint. According to the prosecution, Tartaglione brutally strangled Martin, while the other three cartel operatives watched. The three surviving men were then taken to the countryside and shot. All four men were buried in a mass grave on Tartaglione’s property.
Shortly after Tartaglione’s arrest stemming from the quadruple murder, one of Tartaglione’s enforcers, Gerard Benderoth, who was with him when the four men were killed, shot himself in a traffic stop. The other, Joseph Biggs, was also arrested and, like Tartaglione, faced firearms, kidnapping, murder, and drug conspiracy charges. Biggs flipped on Tartaglione, and testified against him in exchange for a lighter sentence.
The Jeffrey Epstein connection
Nicholas Tartaglione is not linked in any way to the sex trafficking and child sex abuse activities of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the late high-profile billionaire who died by suicide in 2019, awaiting trial on related charges. However, in a coincidence, after Tartaglione’s 2016 arrest and imprisonment, the former cop shared a cell with Epstein when he was held at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City in 2019.
That year, Tartaglione became a bit player in Epstein’s story when he reported that Epstein had made a suicide attempt in the cell they shared. For his part, Epstein accused Tartaglione of assaulting him, which Tartaglione denied. The two were separated, but about a month later, Epstein killed himself in his cell, according to CNN.
Tartaglione’s 2023 conviction
Four years after Jeffrey Epsteins’s death, in April 2023, Nicholas Tartaglione’s saga seemed to have come to an end when the former cop was convicted of the murders of those four men in 2016 to settle a drug debt. At that time, Tartaglione’s sentence was expected to be handed down in October of that year. In February 2024, Westchester News 12 reported that Tartaglione’s sentencing was delayed until May, while the retired officer’s legal team prepared a motion for a retrial. Based on Tartaglione’s 2023 conviction, he could spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance for parole.