The husband of a New York police officer who allegedly hired a hit man to kill him has revealed his disbelief and how he helped the FBI by posing for photos pretending he had been murdered.
NYPD officer Valerie Cincinelli, 34, was snared when her boyfriend told police she had given him $7,000 to hire an assassin to kill her estranged husband, Isaiah Carvalho, and her boyfriend’s teenage daughter.
Authorities informed Carvalho, 32, last week that the mother of his five-year-old son, a 12 year veteran of the force, had been plotting to kill him since February, court records state.
‘I didn’t want to believe it, but apparently it’s true,’ Carvalho told ABC’s Good Morning America in an interview that aired on Wednesday. ‘I didn’t think she would be capable of it, but now I don’t put anything past her.’
He was taken to a secret location and asked to pose hunched over in a car with broken glass scattered over him so they could dupe Cincinelli into thinking her hit man had been successful.
Isaiah Carvalho said the FBI told him, ‘”We don’t know how to tell you this, but your wife put a hit out on you.” And my first response was, “Where’s my son?”‘
Valerie Cincinelli (pictured left in 2017 with ex-husband Isiah Carvalho and her daughter), 34, is accused of asking her current boyfriend to hire an assassin to kill her ex-husband. She received a ‘Cop of the month’ award in July 2017 (shown above)
Carvalho told ABC: ‘I don’t see why she would attempt to do this to me.’
He described the moment officers told him of the plot: ‘They told me, “We don’t know how to tell you this, but your wife put a hit out on you.” And my first response was, “Where’s my son?”‘
The Bronx-based mechanic continued: ‘And they’re like, “We need your help. We’re gonna need you to do something for us in order to further our investigation.
‘They ended up taking me to an undisclosed location and had me fake my death and took pictures of it.’
He told the broadcaster: ‘it was absolutely insane… it was the craziest thing I’ve ever had to experience.’
An undercover detective went to Cincinelli’s home in Long Island last Friday to show her the photos and told her she needed to send an additional $3,000 to kill her boyfriend’s daughter.
Afterwards, she began talking to her boyfriend – who was cooperating with the FBI – about their alibis, court records show.
Five months had passed since he filed for divorce from his wife, but he said there was not a heated custody battle for their son and he was stunned by her actions.
“We were about to reach an agreement, so I don’t see why she would attempt to do this to me, or to my son for that matter,’ Carvalho said in the GMA interview.
A week after Cincinelli’s alleged assassination plot was uncovered, her husband he is still struggling to come to terms with it.
‘I’m still in shock,’ Carvalho said. ‘I’m still lost over this whole thing and I’m trying to process everything.’
Ex-husband Isiah Carvalho Jr (above) posed as dead in a photo that federal agents sent to Cincinelli’s boyfriend, which he used to convince her the hit had been carried out
Cincinelli’s family have come out strongly for her, with her father Louis describing Carvalho as a ‘wacko pathological liar’ and a ‘bum.’
‘I don’t know what happened, but I do know my daughter and I knew this was not true when I first heard it,’ Louis Cincinelli told ABC News.
The jailed cop’s added that Carvalho had previously accused his daughter of pulling a gun on him and threatened to kill him, but later recanted his story in open court, admitted that he made it all up.
The twisted saga dates back to February, when prosecutors say that mother-of-two Cincinelli approached her new boyfriend, urging him to find an assassin.
But instead of going forward with the plot, he rushed to the FBI with the information and became a secret informant, according to charging documents reported by the New York Post.
On February 18, prosecutors say that Cincinelli moved forward with the plot by withdrawing $7,000 from a TD Bank branch, giving the money to the boyfriend to buy five ounces of gold coins to be used to pay the purported hit man.
Cincinelli, who has her own children with Carvalho, also wanted the supposed hit man to kill her new boyfriend’s own teen daughter because she was in the way of their relationship, the court documents say.
The cop allegedly told her boyfriend to tell the hit man to ‘run her the f**k over’ to make the girl’s death appear to be a hit-and-run.
The boyfriend strung Cincinelli along as the FBI gathered information, telling her that he was in contact with a hit man and the plot was moving forward.
Cincinelli joined the New York police department in 2007 and worked out of the Queens 106th Precinct (above) in Ozone Park
Last Monday, the boyfriend told Cincinelli that the supposed hit man was stalking Carvalho at his workplace on Long Island, but the NYPD cop protested that the area was too upscale.
Instead, Cincinelli said he should be killed in ‘the hood’ or ‘the ghetto’ so ‘it would not look suspicious,’ court papers say.
Worried that two deaths close together would raise suspicion, Cincinelli advised her boyfriend ‘to have the hit man kill [the teen] over the weekend and then wait a week or a month to kill’ her husband, the documents said.
The investigation came to a head on Friday, when the Suffolk County detective told her that her husband had been found dead.
Cincinelli sobbed during the notification – but hidden devices recorded her response after the detective left her home.
She quickly began discussing her ‘alibi’ with the boyfriend, according to the court papers.
Soon after, a task force of FBI agents and NYPD Internal Affairs officers swooped in and arrested Cincinelli.
Records show Carvalho filed for divorce against Cincinelli last year and a court date had been set for June.
Prosecutors did not offer a motive for why Cincinelli wanted him dead.