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Dalia Dippolito Hires Undercover Cop to Kill Her Hubby
She was smiley and sweet, a surgically enhanced beauty. And for one day at least, she was for sale.
With his wife out of town in October 2008, Michael Dippolito called an escort to his Boca Raton office. To his door came 26-year-old Dalia Mohammed.
They quickly hit it off and saw each other often. Whatever she had, he liked it a lot. When Michael's wife returned later that month, he stunned her by announcing he wanted a divorce.
In less than four months he and Dalia married at a county courthouse, not bothering to alert their parents. In a year's time, authorities and divorce attorneys say, she persuaded him to give her his home and $240,000 of his life savings.
By then, they say, she also had tried, and failed three times, to kill him. She was finally busted in August when a former lover and confidant tipped off police.
Palm Beach County's most infamous call girl worked fast, but she also cut a broad, blundering trail.
The revelations of her escapades, well-documented on police video and in court records, have fed a media frenzy ever since her sensational arrest in August on a charge of solicitation to commit murder.
And yet the barrage of reports about her ham-handed schemes have offered nothing to explain the spell she seemed to cast so easily over her husband and, it appears, other men as well.
Enamored with Dalia, Michael lost his wife and two best friends. He strained his relationship with his mother and was thrown out of an outraged attorney's office.
Now, he is fighting in court to recover his home and life savings. Police say he nearly lost his life.
"This broad just smashed me," Michael told detectives after Dalia's arrest, "besides trying to kill me."
Acquaintances say Dalia, now 27, was raised in a friendly, tight-knit family. But she grew into a woman they described as two-faced: quiet and sweet at times but arrogant, quick to tantrums and obsessed with money.
The image of Dalia Dippolito that emerges from court documents and interviews with acquaintances suggests a puzzling transformation, one from frizzy-haired Santaluces High School student to professional escort and attempted murder suspect.
She was born in New York, the first of three children. Her parents moved to Florida when she was 13 and bought a four-bedroom home in a gated community in Boynton Beach. Her father worked as a waiter, her mother for a health insurer.
She was 17 when her father left her mother for another woman, divorce records show. Longtime neighbors say Dalia's mother raised the family alone, keeping her three children close. (All of the children still live in their mother's house; Dalia is confined there on house arrest.)
In her 20s, Dalia made her way to California. She lived in Los Angeles County and drove south to work in Orange County.
She used a fake name and told people she worked for a chiropractor, according to a medical-supplies salesman who befriended her one night in a bar.
"She told me her name was Jessica," the man said. "I thought that was her name as long as I knew her. I didn't know her real name until probably a month and a half ago."
In California she honed her ability to break rich men's hearts, a former lover told police. She had bragged to him once about a wealthy man in California who made the costly mistake of asking her to marry him.
"It was all about money," the former lover said. "She got a $40,000 engagement ring from him. She got a brand new Mercedes from him, then left him."
She traveled between California and Florida frequently and always seemed to have money, the medical-supplies salesman said. And then one day in 2008 she was gone, her cellphone number disconnected.
She had met Michael Dippolito Michael, now 38, told detectives that when he solicited her to come to his office she was still living primarily in California. But that soon changed.
"After that one time, we started dating," he said in a sworn statement. "She lived in California at the time so she moved home and immediately moved in with me."
The woman who lived with Michael was very different from the young Dalia who came to Palm Beach County with her parents and younger siblings. She spent hours at the gym keeping herself fit. She had had breast and lip implants done, acquaintances said.
With a real estate license she sold Michael his home, a three-story townhouse in the Renaissance Commons community in Boynton Beach. She offered to help pay off Michael's restitution, payments he was required to make to victims of a fraud scheme he had been convicted of perpetrating years earlier.
One day in February, she and Michael called their mothers to the townhouse and delivered shocking news: They had married.
"I was floored that he would do something that quickly," said Michael's mother, Karen Dippolito.
The news didn't sit well with her. Something about Dalia didn't either. Dalia didn't return her phone calls or text messages. And she thought it strange that Dalia didn't seem to have any female friends.
But Michael was enamored, his mother said. He gushed that they got along perfectly.
Less than a month later, he had added her name to the deed to the house.
Then began what Michael later called the six strangest months of his life.
He began giving Dalia cash payments of $6,000 or $7,000 at a time so she could send his restitution payments to his attorney. But the payments never arrived. Dalia invented excuse after excuse, all the while taking $240,000, says his divorce attorney, Jason Brodie.
She also pressured him to put the house solely in her name, arguing it would protect the property from seizure while he paid off restitution. Eventually he agreed.
As she schemed against her husband, she also was apparently carrying on a relationship with a man in California. Cell phone records subpoenaed by investigators reveal intimate text messages, confessions of love and plans for a hotel rendezvous between her and the man, who identifies himself on his voice mail as Mike Stanley.
All the while, police say she was contemplating how to take Michael Dippolito out of the picture: by either arrest or death.
An arrest would mean a violation of his probation and could send him back to prison. Police say she planted drugs in his car and called cops to tip them off.
"She wanted to basically wipe him out of his money," said the ex-lover who alerted police. "And that plan didn't work. So her second plan now was she was asking people to kill him."
She pestered her ex-lover to find a hit man, he told police. Horrified, he said he wanted nothing to do with it.
One day while she was arguing with him at his cousin's business in Riviera Beach, Dalia's plan was overhead by street toughs who hung out in front of the store, the ex-lover said.
They offered to do the killing for her and even accompanied her to Boynton Beach to see where Michael lived.
But the street toughs reneged. Police say Dalia resorted to poison, taking Michael an iced green tea from Starbucks laced with odorless antifreeze.
She put too much in, police say. It tasted like gasoline and Michael spit it out.
The beginning of the end came in late July. Dalia's ex-lover turned her in to the Boynton Beach Police Department after he said she tried to steal a gun from his glove compartment. He had found it in her purse and decided he'd had enough.
Detectives had him arrange a meeting between Dalia and an undercover officer posing as a hit man. In a car rigged with microphones and a camera, she told the officer she was "5,000 percent sure I want it done," sealing her arrest even before cops famously filmed her crying Aug. 5 at a staged crime scene outside the townhouse.
"I'm a lot tougher than what I look," she told the undercover officer, a microphone recording every word. "I know you're thinking, you're like, OK, like what a cute little girl. But I'm not. I'm not."
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