From the NY Times: The meeting took place at a gas station near Exit 58 of the Long Island Expressway last month. There, the parents of Aaron Hand, a mortgage broker in prison for a fraud scheme, met with an associate of their son and handed over $150. Mr. Hand’s parents and the associate thought Mr. Hand needed the money to bribe a prison guard, prosecutors said, and the associate went to a diner on the Upper East Side and gave the cash to a man he believed to be a friend of the guard.
Everybody, it seems, was mistaken. Mr. Hand, prosecutors say, wanted the $150 as a down payment for a killing. The man in the diner turned out to be an undercover investigator working for the Manhattan district attorney. He had pretended to be a hit man in meetings with Mr. Hand, who wanted someone to kill a witness who had testified against him, prosecutors said.
Mr. Hand, 39, was charged on Thursday with conspiracy and first- and second-degree attempted murder in State Supreme Court in Manhattan. He pleaded not guilty before Justice Laura A. Ward. The case was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
“This defendant,” said Peirce Moser, an assistant district attorney, “took every step he could to ensure that a witness was murdered.” Mr. Hand’s lawyer, Kevin Michael Canfield, said his client had been the victim of a setup by the Police Department and prosecutors.
Find out more at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/nyregion/prisoner-aaron-hand-is-charged-with-trying-to-get-a-witness-killed.html?_r=1
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