By The Diary
Aug 30, 2024, 00:47 AM EDT
Reshma Massarone was sentenced in Westchester, NY for hiring a hitman to kill her brother-in-law, telling an undercover accomplice that “rat poison can do a great job.”
Massarone, a native of Guyana and a bank manager, was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison in federal court in White Plains on Tuesday after pleading guilty in March to murder-for-hire charges, the court reported. Daily News.
According to prosecutors, the 40-year-old woman conspired with a police officer from her native country to recruit a hitman to kill her brother-in-law for the “low price” of $10,000 between July and August 2023, unaware that her alleged accomplice would report her in the United States.
Federal prosecutors said Massarone also sought to undermine his actions and potentially committed perjury when he pleaded guilty earlier this year.
In a convoluted scheme, Massarone said she had a protection order against her brother-in-law and had ordered a bodyguard to accompany her to her grandmother’s funeral, where they were to cross paths, and that she had not intended to kill him when she wired the bodyguard $2,500, but he talked her into it.
But prosecutors argued that a series of text messages made clear that Massarone’s claims were flatly false and “that she was the mastermind behind the entire scheme and someone who already knew what she was paying for.”
Correspondence cited in court documents shows Massarone becoming increasingly frustrated by the delay in the plan, swearing on her children’s lives that her accomplice would get paid if she “got rid” of her brother-in-law and even promising him other “jobs.”
The feds cited CCTV evidence showing Massarone wired $2,500 via Western Union to the Guyanese officer to deliver to the hitman, after which the agent told him a shootout was coming and there was “no turning back.”
“The defendant devised a chilling plan to murder a member of her own family for the modest price of $10,000,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, whose jurisdiction covers Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester and several upstate New York counties, in a statement. “Her plan was unconscionably cruel. For this depraved crime, Reshma Massarone will spend 114 months in federal prison.”
In a similar case, a 42-year-old woman was charged in July with searching online for a hitman to make her lover’s wife and adult daughter disappear, but the dark website for “hitmen” she used was a scam, according to federal authorities.
Last week, a man was extradited from Guyana to New York to face charges in the death of a pedestrian who was struck and killed in Queens on Christmas Day 2019.
- More than 120 New Yorkers have contacted an alleged hitman online for murder “services”
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