Jay Salpeter cracked a high-profile case to help exonerate Martin Tankleff. It was a blessing and a curse. For both of them.
Flashes flashed and shutters snapped as an exuberant crowd focused its attention on Martin Tankleff.
It was December 27, 2007, a few days after a New York appeals court had overturned Tankleff’s conviction in the vicious killings of his parents at their waterfront mansion. Now, surrounded by lawyers, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends at a Long Island courthouse, he was a free man after nearly 20 years in prison.
Standing just behind him in the celebratory throng was a beefy man in a dark suit and red tie: Jay Salpeter, a former New York City police detective turned private investigator who had done as much as, perhaps more than, anyone to make the happy occasion possible.
“I’m letting you know you’ll never get rid of me for life since you’ve given me my life back,” Tankleff wrote to Salpeter the day the conviction was set aside.
Fourteen years later, Salpeter, leaner and greyer, was in a Long Island courthouse again, his face behind a blue surgical mask because of the Covid-19 pandemic. He was handcuffed and charged with felonies in connection with a three-year barrage of ominous calls and emails seeking money from a former client: Martin Tankleff.
The Tankleff case had briefly put Salpeter, a son of Bayside, Queens, on the low rungs of celebrity. He was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Phil and Nancy Grace. He and Tankleff formed an investigative firm, Fortress Innocence Group, and introduced it at a splashy Manhattan news conference. Later came financial distress, mental health problems, heavy drinking and claims of impropriety lodged by angry clients.
Now, accused of threatening to harm Tankleff and ruin his reputation, Salpeter was facing the prospect of years in prison.
Salpeter, 71, had once said that, except for when his children were born, the day Tankleff left prison was the best day of his life. But by the time of his arraignment in May 2021, he regretted ever having opened Tankleff’s urgent letter seeking his help all those years ago.
“I never had these problems before Marty,” he said in one of several interviews over the past two years.
How it began
On a September morning in 1988, Marty Tankleff, then 17, woke to find his mother, Arlene, fatally stabbed in her bed, and his father, Seymour, bleeding in the den, stabbed and beaten so badly that he would die in a month. The boy called 911.
Marty, his relatives and others told investigators to focus on Jerry Steuerman, a shop owner who called himself the Bagel King of Long Island and who owed Seymour Tankleff US$500,000.
Detectives homed in on Marty instead, partly because of what they said was his inadequate display of emotion. They obtained a quick confession with a lie: that Seymour Tankleff had briefly come to at the hospital and named Marty as the attacker.
The trial was sensational. When it was over, despite recanting, Marty was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to 25 years to life.
A decade later, in December 2000, a fellow prisoner from Long Island recommended that Tankleff, on a ceaseless drive to prove his innocence, contact Salpeter.
By then, Salpeter had been a private investigator for a few years, starting with matrimonial and minor criminal cases after two decades with the New York Police Department as a beat cop, street decoy, hostage negotiator and homicide detective.
He was sceptical of Marty Tankleff. In fact, he thought he was guilty.
But after explaining that he could help Tankleff only if he was truly innocent — and then arranging a lie-detector test — Salpeter took the case. Unlike Tankleff’s lawyers, he didn’t work pro bono. He wasn’t that liquid.
His fee: a flat US$5,000.
The investigation would last more than six years.
A thread to tug at
Salpeter’s first step was to review the thick case file. He was stunned by what he found. The killings had never been thoroughly investigated. The prosecution rested almost solely on the recanted confession. The supposed motive — a teenager’s anger over a car his father had given him — was shaky; the physical evidence was scant; and police had never treated Steuerman, the Bagel King, seriously as a suspect.
Salpeter found a thread to tug at in the statement of a woman who had told detectives that a local hoodlum had admitted to her his role in the murders, saying he had been at the Tankleffs’ house with someone named Steuerman on the night of the attacks.
No one had followed up on the lead. Salpeter tracked down the hoodlum’s criminal associates. One confessed to being the getaway driver and also implicated a third man in the crime. The statements underpinned a motion to reopen the case.
Salpeter brought a Long Island lawyer with whom he had worked before, Bruce Barket, onto the Tankleff team and continued to dig. He set up a tip line that yielded additional witnesses in an investigation that consumed thousands of hours.
The effort paid off. In 2007, the appeals court, citing the testimony unearthed by Salpeter and questionable police tactics in the original investigation, ordered a new trial. Suffolk County officials declined, and the attorney general dismissed the case entirely.
The alternate theory of the killings Salpeter had developed — that the three small-time criminals had executed the Tankleffs at Steuerman’s behest — was never tested in court. Steuerman has always denied any role; no one else has ever been charged.
Still, Salpeter had done what he was hired to do.
Playing catch-up
Tankleff made up for lost time. There were welcome-home parties, college classes and a gift of a custom-made suit from actor James Gandolfini. (Salpeter had introduced them.) Tankleff spoke of becoming a lawyer and helping others who had been wrongly convicted. And he sued Suffolk County and New York state.
Salpeter was catching up too. He appeared on TV; collaborated on a book about the case; and joined the defence team that won the release of the West Memphis Three, three Arkansas men convicted as teenagers of killing three boys in what prosecutors called a cult ritual. Author Dominick Dunne hired him for help in a lawsuit. He aided the defence of Anthony Marshall, convicted of stealing from his mother, socialite Brooke Astor.
In 2008, Salpeter and Tankleff teamed up to start the Fortress firm. The goal: Get work from corporate law firms on their pro bono cases. They celebrated at Peter Luger steakhouse the night before announcing the venture, whose logo showed a silhouette of two birds flying free. Rubin Carter, a former prizefighter and exoneree known as Hurricane, was at the news conference. A beautiful day, he called it.
But the firm never got off the ground, and by 2011, Tankleff and Salpeter had fallen out.
Salpeter blamed Tankleff’s wife, Laurie, whom he had met and married after leaving prison. The split came after a confrontation at the Long Island offices of Barket’s firm, where the Tankleffs worked and where Salpeter kept an office.
After appearing suddenly at the door one day, the couple entered. They talked for a time, and then Laurie Tankleff unloaded on Salpeter, accusing him of maintaining his ties to her husband only for money.
Salpeter was livid. There was no money to speak of. The litigation against Suffolk County and New York state had not been resolved. The exchange became heated, and Salpeter screamed at Laurie Tankleff. Martin Tankleff, in Salpeter’s telling, sat by silently. (Martin Tankleff filed for divorce from Laurie last year; efforts to contact her through her lawyer were unsuccessful.)
Tankleff, who declined to be interviewed, offered others a different explanation for what had caused the estrangement. He felt as if Salpeter was trying to control him. He resented, among other things, being asked to help promote Salpeter’s book and he thought Salpeter had invited him to his daughter’s wedding to show him off. Yes, Salpeter had given him his life back. Why wouldn’t he let him live it?
The relationship between the two men had gained one of them freedom and both of them a measure of fame. Suddenly, they were not even on speaking terms.
A downward spiral
Salpeter appeared to move on, often working for tabloid-infamous figures whose cases generated headlines, if not vindication — or the success he had enjoyed with Tankleff.
The financial problems that had begun while he worked on that case mounted, court records show. His home in Glen Cove went into foreclosure. Tens of thousands of dollars in federal and state tax liens piled up.
As Salpeter’s fortunes declined, Tankleff prospered. After graduating from college and getting married, he earned a law degree. In 2014, he settled his suit against the state for US$3.4 million. His lawyers took the typical third.
Salpeter, who had been paid several thousand dollars to consult on the civil suits, turned to Barket: Would he arrange a meeting with Tankleff to discuss whether there might be anything in the payout for him?
Tankleff did not want to meet, Barket said. And, he added, legal ethics prevented someone who was not a lawyer from participating in the settlement.
Salpeter sank into depression.
Sometimes, he went to his office and slept. He spent a year, maybe two, mostly at home. His drinking increased. Several clients complained to state officials that he had not provided them with written contracts or detailed reports of the work he had done. He settled the matters with nominal fines.
The residual fame from the Tankleff case still attracted clients. One, Marina Lebron, met Salpeter in August 2014.
Lebron, whose husband was in prison for murder, was put off by how Salpeter bragged about his importance. Nonetheless, she paid him a US$6,000 retainer to help get her husband out. Then, after hearing nothing for months, she confronted him. He apologised, sent her US$2,000 and vowed to repay the rest. When he did not, she got a judgment against him. When he failed to pay that, she filed a complaint with the state.
The grievance was one of at least nine filed against Salpeter, state records show. One said he should be investigated “because he is taking advantage of inmates.” Another said he had replied to inquiries with “excuses and mild threats.”
Salpeter acknowledged he had not always accomplished what the aggrieved clients had hoped, but he said they had unrealistic expectations. Do a miracle once, and everyone assumes that’s what they’ll get.
Whatever he earned was not enough. In July 2017, he began to borrow money from a friend of a friend from Bayside.
Over the next two years, Salpeter borrowed US$120,000 in transactions documented on ATM receipts, memo-pad pages and other paper scraps, according to a lawsuit the lender filed but later abandoned. With interest tacked on, the debt had reached US$200,000 by late 2019.
Tankleff settled his suit against Suffolk County in April 2018 for US$10 million. When Salpeter again asked Barket if he might arrange a meeting with Tankleff in hopes of getting a share, he was again told no.
By then, when the workdays, such as they were, ended, Salpeter would hit the bar at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse at the Roosevelt Field mall and have four or five vodka and tonics.
Drunk and depressed, he would bombard Tankleff with emails and phone messages demanding money. As time passed, the badgering turned darker.
“So Marty, do you think your freedom is worth 150-200k?,” Salpeter wrote in a February 2020 email shared by someone close to Tankleff. “It’s better than being at Clinton,” he added, referring to the upstate prison where the two had first met.
In another email several months later, he asked whether Tankleff could “recommend a good lawyer for a homicide arrest.”
Salpeter would contact Tankleff several times a day, dropping references to how strong he was or how he had just seen the movie Dead Man Walking. Sometimes, he commented on changes in his former client’s appearance in ways that made Tankleff feel he was being stalked by a man who he knew was licensed to carry a gun.
Tankleff tried at least once to defuse the situation, telling Salpeter via email that he was not ignoring his messages but blocking them on the advice of lawyers and others. When the time was right, he wrote, he would arrange a meeting.
No meeting ever occurred.
Case ended quietly
Barket warned Salpeter repeatedly to stop. He did not. That left Tankleff with three choices: Let the calls and emails continue, pay Salpeter or go to the authorities. He chose the last one.
When Salpeter was indicted, Tankleff responded with a brief statement calling it a sad day. Salpeter denied doing anything sinister and insisted he would never hurt his former client but he admitted to the calls and emails.
His lawyers suggested a psychiatric defence: Depression, aggravated by heavy drinking, and post-traumatic stress caused by his police career and his experience with Tankleff were to blame.
A few months after he was indicted, a hearing on Lebron’s complaint was held in a drab government room in lower Manhattan. Because of the pandemic, the participants — an administrative judge, a state lawyer, Lebron and Salpeter — appeared via video monitor. A reporter and two state employees were the only ones physically present in the room.
Salpeter’s defence was halfhearted. He did not deny the gist of the allegations, although he produced a document that he said he had secured for LeBron’s benefit. He was a victim of unrealistic expectations, he maintained.
Several weeks later, the administrative judge, citing dishonesty and incompetence, suspended his license. Salpeter had already contacted state officials to relinquish it.
The criminal case ended quietly. Salpeter pleaded guilty in June to aggravated harassment, a misdemeanour. He was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to stay away from Tankleff, now a lawyer at Barket’s firm. When the brief hearing ended, Salpeter thanked the judge politely and headed out into the sweltering heat.
Nine months later, at the Glen Cove apartment he shares with his third wife, Amy, Salpeter appeared sober, reflective and mostly retired — although he still sends hectoring emails to Barket. He said he was mainly filling his time with exercise, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and sessions with a psychotherapist. He and his wife live off his police pension, Social Security and what she brings in.
He can no longer carry a gun and is, for all practical purposes, done investigating.
“That was my passion,” he said wistfully. “I was good.”
As he spoke, he paused and pulled out a list of his most notable clients and cases. At the top was a familiar name: Martin Tankleff.
Was it a source of pride or regret?
“I would do it again,” Salpeter said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ed Shanahan
Photographs by: Mary Inhea Kang, Joe DeMaria, Marilynn K. Yee and Joyce Dopkeen
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES