A former New York police officer and former cellmate of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was sentenced to life in prison for murdering four men, prosecutors said.

Nicholas Tartaglione was sentenced Monday to four consecutive life sentences for the 2016 kidnappings and killings of Martin Luna, Miguel Luna, Urbano Santiago and Hector Gutierrez, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams, said in a news release.

Tartaglione, who was described by Williams as “a former police officer-turned drug dealer,” was convicted in April 2023 of 11 counts of murder, four counts of kidnapping resulting in death, one count of kidnapping conspiracy and one count of narcotics conspiracy.

“Unfortunately, the life sentences were mandatory given the convictions at trial,” Inga Parsons, lead attorney for Tartaglione, said in a statement to CNN. “We are appealing and will continue to fight to show Nick’s innocence.”

Tartaglione shared a prison cell with Epstein at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City and had been moved before Epstein’s suicide in August 2019, CNN previously reported.

The former officer was one of the first people FBI agents sought to interview after Epstein was found dead in the special housing unit of the facility.

According to prosecutors, Tartaglione suspected Martin Luna had stolen money from him and planned to confront him during an in-person meeting, to which Martin Luna brought along his nephews, Miguel Luna and Santiago, and his family friend Gutierrez.

During the meeting, which turned out to be a “deadly trap,” Tartaglione tortured Martin Luna and then forced one of his nephews to watch as he strangled him to death with a zip-tie, according to a statement from Williams following the conviction.

Tartaglione and two of his associates then brought Miguel Luna, Santiago and Gutierrez to a remote wooded location, forced them to kneel and fatally shot them in the back of the head before burying their bodies in a mass grave, the statement said.

“Nicholas Tartaglione brutally and senselessly murdered Martin Luna over money, and then ruthlessly executed Urbano Santiago, Miguel Luna, and Hector Gutierrez simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Williams said a news release after the sentencing.

CNN’s Emma Tucker and Sabrina Souza contributed to this report.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/12/us/nicholas-tartaglione-sentenced-epstein-cellmate

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Jeffrey Epstein lay in the fetal position on the floor of his jail cell, unresponsive, with an orange fabric noose tied around his neck. The post-midnight quiet of the Metropolitan Correctional Center's secure housing unit was punctured as a corrections officer called for help. 

It was 1:27 a.m. on July 23, 2019, 18 days before Epstein's death. He was breathing, his eyes opening and shutting occasionally, but he wouldn't, or couldn't, respond to officers' questions and commands, according to a confidential corrections officers' memo obtained by CBS News. They hoisted inmate 76318-054 onto a stretcher.

Federal officials have repeatedly said Epstein's eventual death by suicide was foreshadowed by this earlier alleged attempt. Former Attorney General Bill Barr reiterated that claim in an August closed-door deposition before the House Oversight Committee, which released the interview transcript last week. Barr, who did not reply to questions from CBS News, said in his testimony he knew about the July 23 incident, which he "viewed as an attempted suicide." Barr said he considered it indicative of Epstein's "state of mind."

But jail staff memos and other never-before-reported documents obtained by CBS News, as well as interviews with more than a dozen people who interacted with Epstein before and after the incident, reveal a murkier picture than the one depicted by Barr. The new documents have surfaced amid persistent speculation over Epstein's death, despite officials' conclusions that he died by suicide.

As corrections officers entered Epstein's cell on July 23, they were greeted by a chaotic scene, according to a source close to the investigation.

"He's laying on the floor and his bunkie is screaming: 'I did nothing, I banged on my door to get him out of my cell,'" the source said. Corrections officers carried Epstein to a cell on a different floor as he remained unresponsive.

Moments after becoming alert, Epstein gave officers his first account of what happened, the records show. He told them he thought he had been attacked by his cellmate, an ex-cop who was awaiting trial on four murders.

"He sat up on the bed and began telling me that he [thinks] his bunkie … tried to kill him," a responding officer wrote in one memo. A senior officer wrote in a separate incident report that Epstein initially implicated his cellmate in the incident, claiming he had previously said things that made Epstein feel threatened.

Epstein would later back off the claim, saying instead that he couldn't remember what happened. Nicholas Tartaglione, the cellmate, has repeatedly disputed the initial allegation and said he tried to revive Epstein. As with Epstein's eventual death, any camera footage of the incident was either mislaid, lost or never captured by the facility's faulty system.

Tartaglione has not responded to emailed questions from CBS News. His lawyer said Epstein's initial claim that Tartaglione tried to kill him was flatly "not true."

https://www.aol.com/articles/night-jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmate-110600174.html

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVxMQukUWDU

Epstein wasn’t protected by silence — he was protected by powerful people. Letters, banking ties, and elite connections show how he stayed untouchable for decades. 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSQvjbsJfhw

Even though Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, key parts of the files could remain out of the public eye thanks to a little-known loophole. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks. Do you agree with TYT's take?

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Why Are Pedophiles the Most Successful Capitalists?

The same psychological traits that enable billionaires to destroy millions of lives for profit also enable them to rape children—and capitalism rewards both forms of predation.

BY BETTBEAT MEDIA

The question haunts every honest observer of power: Why do sexual predators rise to the pinnacles of capitalist society with such disturbing regularity? Why does the same system that rewards the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the alleged child molester Woody Allen, the rapist Harvey Weinstein, and countless other monsters also elevate them to positions where they can inflict maximum damage? The answer reveals the most horrifying truth about our economic system—capitalism doesn’t just tolerate sexual predation, it actively selects for it.

The Epstein case exposes a terrifying pattern that extends far beyond one billionaire’s island of horrors. The psychological mechanisms that drive powerful men to sexually abuse children—the ultimate form of exploitation, the need for absolute dominance, the complete dehumanization of others, the divorce from empathy—are precisely the same mechanisms that capitalism rewards in its most successful practitioners. This is not coincidence. This is selection pressure.

Consider the psychological profile of the successful pedophile: They must be master manipulators, capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerability. They must possess an almost supernatural ability to compartmentalize, maintaining public personas while committing unspeakable acts in private. They must be skilled at reading power dynamics, understanding instinctively who can be victimized and who must be courted. They must be comfortable with the complete objectification of other human beings, viewing them as resources to be consumed rather than people deserving dignity.

Now consider the psychological profile of the successful capitalist: They must be master manipulators, capable of identifying and exploiting market vulnerabilities. They must possess an almost supernatural ability to compartmentalize, maintaining public philanthropy while devastating communities in private. They must be skilled at reading power dynamics, understanding instinctively who can be exploited and who must be courted. They must be comfortable with the complete objectification of other human beings, viewing workers as resources to be consumed rather than people deserving dignity.

The overlap is not accidental—it is systemic. Capitalism rewards psychopathy because psychopathy is useful to capital accumulation. The same emotional architecture that allows a man to rape a child also allows him to foreclose on a family’s home, to dump toxic waste in poor communities, to lobby against cancer treatment funding while profiting from carcinogenic products. The capacity for dehumanization is not a bug in the capitalist system—it is the essential feature.

Jeffrey Epstein’s operation was not an aberration but a perfect expression of capitalist logic. His island served as both a laboratory for sexual domination and a networking hub for economic domination. The same men who raped children on Epstein’s planes were simultaneously pillaging entire economies through their hedge funds and private equity firms. Bill Clinton, who flew on the “Lolita Express” many times, also championed the financial deregulation that enabled the 2008 economic collapse. Donald Trump, who allegedly raped a 13-year-old girl at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, built his real estate empire through systematic exploitation of contractors and workers.

The connection runs deeper than shared moral bankruptcy. Sexual predation and economic predation require identical psychological tools: the ability to identify the vulnerable, the skill to isolate them from support systems, the capacity to exploit power imbalances, and the willingness to destroy lives for personal gratification. Epstein’s genius was recognizing that men who had perfected these skills in the economic realm would eagerly apply them in the sexual realm.

This explains why Epstein’s client list reads like a who’s who of global capitalism: hedge fund managers, investment bankers, real estate moguls, media executives, and their political enablers. These were not wealthy men who happened to be pedophiles—they were pedophiles who became wealthy precisely because the psychological traits that enable sexual predation also enable economic predation under capitalism. And because economic power enables sexual power over children.

The tentacles of Epstein’s network inevitably lead back to Israel, that laboratory of racist capitalist brutality disguised as ‘democracy’. Multiple sources suggest that Epstein operated as a Mossad asset, using sexual blackmail to control political and economic elites on behalf of Israeli interests. This connection is not surprising—it is inevitable. Israel represents the purest distillation of predatory capitalism combined with colonial violence, a system that requires the complete dehumanization of its Palestinian victims.

The psychological profile of the settler who burns Palestinian children alive in their homes, kidnaps and disappears 8-year-old Palestinian girls, and beats up Palestinian old ladies with laughter is identical to the psychological profile of the billionaire who profits from child labor in his factories: both require the complete severance of empathy, the total objectification of their victims, and the ability to justify any atrocity in service of their desires. The Israeli state that operates the world’s largest open-air prison in Gaza while claiming to be a beacon of civilization operates according to the same logic as the capitalist who imposes starvation wages while lecturing about 'economic freedom'.

Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s primary accomplice, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a media mogul with extensive ties to Israeli intelligence. The operation’s sophisticated surveillance capabilities, international scope, and protection from prosecution all bear the hallmarks of state-level intelligence operations. But more than operational support, Israel provided the ideological framework that made Epstein’s crimes possible: the belief that some humans are inherently superior to others and therefore entitled to use inferior humans as objects for their pleasure.

The same supremacist ideology that allows Israelis to shoot Palestinian children for sport also allows billionaires to destroy the lives of workers’ children through environmental destruction, healthcare denial, and educational defunding. Sexual predation and imperial predation spring from the same poisoned well of human supremacy that capitalism depends upon for its existence.

Surprisingly yet unsurprisingly, Epstein was a devoted believer in eugenics—the pseudoscientific 19th-century racist ideology that his own Jewish ancestors had been victimized by—and harbored grandiose fantasies of seeding the human race with what he considered his “superior Jewish DNA.” The irony was lost on him: a man who embodied every antisemitic stereotype about Jewish financial manipulation and sexual degeneracy had reinvented himself as the master race. Epstein’s eugenics obsession reveals the final psychological piece of the predator-capitalist puzzle—the megalomaniacal belief that wealth proves genetic superiority, that economic domination justifies any form of human breeding program, and that the right to rape and reproduce flows naturally from the right to buy and sell. 

His New Mexico ranch was reportedly intended as a breeding facility where he would impregnate multiple women to spread his “superior” genes—the ultimate fusion of sexual predation, capitalist accumulation, and fascist ideology. The man who trafficked children for billionaire rapists saw himself not as a criminal but as an evolutionary benefactor, using his wealth to “improve” the species through forced reproduction. Capitalism had so thoroughly warped his psychology that he genuinely believed his financial success proved his genetic worth.

The most damning evidence of capitalism’s complicity in sexual predation is not what it does but what it refuses to see. Despite overwhelming evidence of systematic child abuse among the global elite, the mainstream media treats each revelation as an isolated scandal rather than a systemic feature. Despite clear patterns linking economic power to sexual violence, academia refuses to examine the connection. Despite obvious signs that pedophile networks operate at the highest levels of government and finance, law enforcement consistently fails to investigate or prosecute.

This silence is not incompetence—it is self-preservation. Capitalism cannot afford to acknowledge that its most successful practitioners are also its most depraved predators because this would expose the moral bankruptcy at the system’s core. The same corporate media that celebrates billionaire “philanthropy” cannot simultaneously expose billionaire child rape, genocide and theft without undermining the entire mythology of virtuous wealth creation.

The legal system that protects corporate criminals from accountability cannot suddenly develop a conscience about sexual criminals without calling attention to its systematic bias in favor of wealth and power. The political establishment that serves corporate interests cannot prosecute the sexual crimes of their financial backers without severing their own sources of funding and support.

The same psychological mechanisms that enable the abuse of individual children also enable the abuse of entire populations. The billionaire who can rape a child with no sense of moral conflict can also engineer famines, fund genocides, and destroy democracies with equal emotional detachment.

This is why every fascist movement in history has been funded and supported by capitalist elites: fascism is simply capitalism with its mask removed, the open acknowledgment that some humans exist only to serve the pleasures and profits of others. The concentration camps of Nazi Germany were built by the same corporate executives who built the factories that exploited workers to death. The genocide in Gaza is funded by the same billionaires who profit from the destruction of Palestinian society.

Sexual predation against children represents the ultimate expression of this fascist logic: the complete negation of another human being’s autonomy, dignity, and right to exist as anything other than an object for consumption. Once this psychological barrier has been crossed—once a person becomes capable of sexually abusing a child—no other moral boundary can restrain them. They become capable of any atrocity in service of their desires.

The connection between pedophilia and capitalist success is not a conspiracy theory—it is an observable pattern that demands explanation. That explanation reveals the most uncomfortable truth about our economic system: it does not reward virtue, innovation, or social contribution. It rewards the capacity for predation, the willingness to treat other humans as consumable resources, and the ability to sever all emotional connection to the suffering one causes.

Jeffrey Epstein was not a monster who happened to be rich—he was rich because he was a monster. His wealth came not from productive economic activity but from his willingness to provide other monsters with access to victims they could not obtain through their own efforts. His clients were not wealthy men who happened to be pedophiles—they were pedophiles who became wealthy because capitalism rewards the psychological traits that enable both sexual and economic predation.

The Epstein network reveals capitalism in its purest form: a system where those most willing to inflict suffering rise to positions where they can inflict maximum suffering. The children destroyed on Epstein’s island are not fundamentally different from the children destroyed in sweatshops, the children poisoned by industrial pollution, the children murdered by American bombs purchased with taxpayer money. All are victims of the same system, sacrificed to the same gods of profit and power.

Breaking this system requires more than prosecuting individual predators—it requires acknowledging that predation is not a bug in capitalism but its essential feature. It requires recognizing that the same system that elevates pedophiles to positions of supreme power will never voluntarily reform itself. It requires understanding that the choice before us is not between different types of capitalism but between capitalism and human survival.

The children crying in Epstein’s dungeons and the children dying in Gaza are calling out with the same voice, demanding that we choose between preserving a system that rewards monsters and building a world where human dignity becomes the foundation of economic and political organization. Their cries echo across time and space, asking the same question that haunts every moment of our historical crisis: How long will we tolerate a system that rewards our destroyers and punishes our protectors?

The answer lies not in reforming capitalism but in replacing it with an economic system based on human cooperation rather than human predation, on shared prosperity rather than concentrated wealth, on the protection of the vulnerable rather than their exploitation. Only when we build such a system will the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world lose their power to turn children into commodities and suffering into profit.

Until then, every day we allow this system to continue is another day we choose the predators over their victims, the monsters over the children, the system over our souls. The choice has never been clearer. The time for choosing has never been shorter. The cost of choosing wrong has never been higher.

- Karim

https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/why-are-pedophiles-the-most-successful

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.