Ali Winston and Ali Watkins

Instead, he was told that his estranged wife, a New York City police officer, had been plotting to kill him all winter.

Five months had passed since the 32-year-old had filed for divorce from his wife, Valerie Cincinelli. But after a messy custody battle, the matter appeared almost settled.

It was, but not the way Carvalho had hoped.

Law enforcement officers informed Carvalho that Cincinelli, a mother of two and a 12-year veteran of the Police Department, had arranged to hire someone to kill him and her current boyfriend’s school-age daughter.

Instead of going through with the scheme, her boyfriend contacted the FBI.

The details provided in court documents paint a troubling portrait of a botched murder-for-hire plot ripped from the pages of a true-crime thriller.

The complex scheme hatched by Cincinelli — who once worked in a domestic violence unit in Queens — involved making her husband’s death seem like a fireworks accident, and a suggestion that the killer run over the girl with a car near her school, according to court documents.

“It’s your worst nightmare scenario,” said Matthew Weiss, Carvalho’s lawyer.

Cincinelli, 34, and Carvalho, a machine operator in Nassau County, married four years ago. In January, he filed for divorce, his lawyer said, and the couple appeared to have reached an agreement that would settle the case before trial.

But by February, according to an affidavit unsealed Friday, she had asked her boyfriend to hire a hit man to kill Carvalho, and his own daughter.

On Feb. 18, Cincinelli withdrew $7,000 from a bank in Wantagh, New York. That same day, her boyfriend bought 5 ounces of gold coins worth $6,935 in Massapequa Park, New York — the agreed upon method for paying the killer.

The couple had discussed the plot repeatedly in conversations the boyfriend recorded. According to court documents, Cincinelli also used social media to track the whereabouts of her boyfriend’s daughter.

On May 13, Cincinelli met with her boyfriend to discuss the two hits, unaware that her boyfriend was wearing a wire. She offered a warped explanation of why the murders would not appear linked: They would take place on different days, and the attack at Carvalho’s workplace in Holtsville would not arouse suspicion “because the murder would take place in ‘the hood’ or ‘the ghetto,’” court records show.

Authorities went to great lengths to convince Cincinelli that the plot had succeeded. Shortly after 10 a.m. Friday, a Suffolk County detective contacted Cincinelli at her home in Oceanside and told her they were investigating the death of Carvalho. Less than an hour later, FBI agents sent her a text message, purportedly from the hit man, along with a photograph of the supposed murder scene.

Immediately afterward, Cincinelli contacted her boyfriend to align their alibis, and told him to delete their text conversations from his phone.

Later that day, she was taken into custody by the FBI and charged with use of interstate commerce for murder for hire.

Cincinelli joined the Police Department in 2007, according to police officials. She worked in the 106th Precinct in Queens as a domestic violence officer until 2017, when she was placed on modified duty and reassigned to a unit that monitors surveillance feeds in public housing developments. She was no longer permitted to carry a gun.

According to a detention memo, Cincinelli had been disciplined by the department for sharing confidential information with a boyfriend. It is unclear if that boyfriend is the same one who informed federal authorities of the murder plot.

On Friday, Cincinelli was suspended without pay. The Police Department has had no comment on the allegations.

A police official, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal investigation, confirmed that the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau assisted the FBI in its investigation but said the department was not contacted until the last stages of the case.

Cincinelli has had a tumultuous romantic history.

According to the detention memo, her first husband had obtained a restraining order against her; she and Carvalho, her second husband, each had restraining orders against one another.

And she had sought a restraining order against her current boyfriend, the memo said.

On Friday, Cincinelli was held without bail.

“There is very strong evidence of guilt of the crimes of trying to get these two individuals murdered,” said Judge Anne Y. Shields of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, citing the “danger” and “serious risk” she posed to her estranged husband and the young girl she is accused of targeting.

This article originally appeared in <a id="d9a60200-8999-336c-a393-6095bd5893fe" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nypd-officer-hitman.html">The New York Times</a>.

Police officer hired hit man to kill her husband and a young girl, officials say

NEW YORK — Isaiah Carvalho Jr. woke up Friday hopeful that his life was about to turn a corner.

<h1>NEW YORK — President Donald Trump, who has frequently pointed to the violent MS-13 street gang to justify his immigration policy, could not have choreographed a better political talking point if he had tried. Two days before Tuesday’s State of the Union address, a deadly shooting on a Queens subway platform catapulted the gang’s brutality back onto the national stage.</h1>

The police have said the man charged with the killing, Ramiro Gutierrez, is a member of MS-13, a transnational gang founded in Los Angeles with ties to El Salvador. The slaying featured prominently in Trump’s address.

Gutierrez, 26, was in the country without documentation and had a long arrest record, the authorities said. He is accused of firing six shots at close range into a rival gang member’s head in front of horrified straphangers. At the time, Gutierrez was out on $2,500 bail after being arrested in a gang takedown last December.

But missing from Trump’s speech was an important nuance: The shooting does not signal a recent rise of the gang in Queens, experts said. Neither MS-13, nor its rival, the 18th Street gang, are new to New York City. They have been a violent presence in the city for two decades, despite repeated prosecutions, and the shooting Sunday was just the latest incident in a complicated history between the two gangs.

What happened Sunday?

Around 12:45 p.m. Sunday, a fight broke out between four men on a Manhattan-bound 7 train. When the train pulled into the 90th Street-Elmhurst Avenue Station, the brawl spilled out onto the platform.

In a bystander’s video, a man the police later identified as Gutierrez is shown extricating himself from the melee and standing up, grasping what appears to be a small revolver. Gutierrez, who is from El Salvador, can then be seen pointing the gun at a man on the ground wearing a Mets jersey — later identified as Abel Mosso.

Six shots rang out, as bystanders screamed and ran for cover on the stalled train. Mosso was struck several times in the face and died on the platform. The police arrested Gutierrez on Monday on charges of murder and gang assault.

Mosso, a Mexican citizen, was a purported member of the 18th Street Gang. Both men, according to immigration officials, were in the United States without documentation.

MS-13, 18th Street, and New York’s complicated history

Though both gangs began in Southern California in the mid-1980s and quickly became archrivals, MS-13 and 18th Street had established a presence in eastern Queens, and neighboring Nassau and Suffolk Counties by the mid-1990s.

Lou Savelli, a former sergeant and head of the Police Department’s first citywide gang unit, said MS-13 and 18th Street have been active in New York City and the surrounding region ever since. Savelli, who retired from the department in 2004, first encountered MS-13 while working gang cases in the 109th precinct in Flushing.

During MS-13’s early years in New York, the gang would sometimes be targeted by the squad for acts of violence, he said. “We did some short-term things on machete cases where they chopped up one guy, shot and killed another guy, and another case where they ran an auto-theft ring,” Savelli said.

The rival 18th Street gang was less organized, Savelli said.

Raphael Ramos, a former sergeant in the Queens gang squad, said the 18th Street gang controls the lucrative trade in forged documents along Roosevelt Avenue between 90th Street and 82nd Street.

“Historically, that’s been their territory, and they’re known as M-18,” Ramos said.

The Queens district attorney and the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn have filed dozens of criminal cases against MS-13 members over the past decade, with charges including racketeering, conspiracy, murder, fraud and robbery.

A penchant for brutality, inflated by politics

Aided by statements like Trump’s in his State of the Union address, MS-13 has achieved an almost mythic level of infamy in the world of street gangs. Their notoriously gruesome killings — members have been known to cut the hearts out of victims or hack people to death with machetes — began surfacing in New York and Long Island as far back as the mid-1990s.

The gang has plagued Long Island and Queens in recent years with a series of brutal slayings. In 2016, the gang killed two teenage girls in Brentwood — Nisa Mickens, 15, and her best friend Kayla Cuevas, 16 — in a case that drew national attention and landed the victims’ parents an invitation to Trump’s first State of the Union address.

Last summer, 15-year-old Angel Soler was found in a Long Island field, hacked to death by a machete, a murder law enforcement officials attributed to MS-13. And in December, a 23-year-old man was found dead in a Queens bird sanctuary after MS-13 members lured him there, prosecutors said.

Beyond murder and assault, the MS-13 gang has also been linked to drug and gun trafficking, as well as extortion and racketeering schemes; the 18th Street gang is better known for prostitution, protection rackets and selling forged documents.

The gangs exist in pockets of the city, and the violence they generate is seldom random, law enforcement officials said. Often, it involves turf wars and other immigrants. Other gangs — the Bloods, the Crips, the Latin Kings, the Trinitarios — are a higher priority for the New York Police Department.

“I wouldn’t put them at the top of the pecking order of what we see day in and day out,” said Chief Dermot Shea, who runs the department’s detective bureau.

A street gang with a Mafia-like style

It took years for law enforcement to sketch out MS-13’s inner workings, and to recognize its hierarchy. It was far more organized than most street gangs, almost akin to the Mafia, prosecutors said.

That learning curve helped MS-13 survive.

“The guys who get caught with the gun at the murder scene, they’re going to be replaced,” said James Trusty, a former prosecutor who led the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Division. “The only way you’re going to actually dent the organization as a whole has got to be holistic.”

As MS-13 established its foothold in the mid-2000s, approaches to crackdowns varied between the three major U.S. metropolises where the gang existed — New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

Prosecutors in Los Angeles and outside the capital built complicated conspiracy cases, taking out MS-13 leaders, but in New York, prosecutors favored striking fast, arresting two or three people at a time after murders and robberies.

Long Island prosecutors changed their tactics after a spike in MS-13 violence in 2016 and 2017 led to at least 22 killings. Madeline Singas, the Nassau district attorney, indicted 17 MS-13 members in January 2018, including the man believed to be the highest-ranking member in the Northeast.

“It’s tough for the organization to bounce back from that,” Singas said.

Still, Singas said she does not believe that Long Island’s crackdown pushed the gang west into Queens.

“They were in Queens before, too,” she said. “It’s not like they moved there because Nassau became inhospitable to them.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="b558d1bb-f55c-4c49-9acf-0965adfd515d" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/nyregion/trump-ms-13-subway-killing.html">The New York Times</a>.

What Trump Left Out About MS-13's Rise in New York

The police have said the man charged with the killing, Ramiro Gutierrez, is a member of MS-13, a transnational gang founded in Los Angeles with ties to El Salvador. The slaying featured prominently in Trump’s address.

What Trump left out about MS-13's rise in New York

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Ali Winston and Ali Watkins

Articles written by the author

Police officer hired hit man to kill her husband and a young girl, officials say

What Trump left out about MS-13's rise in New York