Why I (Still) Don't Believe Jeffrey Epstein Killed Himself Part 3

A so-called "suicide" note had been buried for seven years

Seven years ago, in a federal prison in Manhattan, a place so insidious that the rats crawl in bed with the inmates, a bodybuilder accused of torturing and murdering four people was bunked with one of the most infamous sex traffickers in history.

Nicholas Tartaglione was 49 years old, a corrupt ex-cop who in 2016 ordered the gangland-style slayings of four men whose bodies were later found buried in a mass grave on a 178-acre property he owned in Otisville, New York.

After retiring in 2008, Tartaglione, a former cop in Briarcliff Manor, Westchester County, operated a puppy rescue while selling cocaine and steroids. He had once bragged he had ties to organized crime, and the story of how he killed one of his associates sounds like a page torn from a Sopranos episode: a drug deal gone bad, a tortured execution, witnesses whacked because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bodies dumped in a shallow grave on a rural farm, their remains unearthed in a snowy forest that neighbors later recalled “smelled of death.”

According to prosecutors, in April 2016, Tartaglione suspected one of his bagmen was skimming his drug money, so he lured him to the Bronx, to a club his brother owned, called the Likquid Lounge. (Yes, that’s how it’s spelled).

The associate brought three friends with him for protection. But Tartaglione enlisted two fellow bodybuilders to strangle him with a zip tie at the club while the others were forced to watch, according to court records.