SNOOPER BAD
Fed forgery rap for ex-prosecutor who eyed love obsession
A FORMER Brooklyn prosecutor was hit with a federal indictment Monday for allegedly forging wiretap orders so she could snoop on her police detective boyfriend.
Brooklyn federal prosecutors accused Tara Lenich (photo inset) of illegally wiretapping two cell phones.
According to the indictment unsealed Monday, Lenich, 41, who served as deputy bureau chief of the Violence Criminal Enterprise Bureau until her November arrest, forged the signatures of multiple state judges and concocted 24 fake orders that allowed her to monitor calls and texts on the two phones.
She allegedly cut the judges’ signatures from legitimate court documents, taped them onto her phony orders and made copies.
The court papers didn’t name the person whose phones Lenich allegedly tapped. But when she was arrested months ago, news reports said she was keeping tabs on her then-love interest, narcotics Detective Jarrett Lemieux, 46, and monitoring the calls of fellow Brooklyn prosecutor Stephanie Rosenfeld, 37.
Lenich, who is single, suspected Rosenfeld and Lemieux were also having a relationship, according to a source. “Tara Lenich violated her duty to the public when she engaged in a long-running scheme to forge judicial documents in order to illegally wiretap telephones,” said Acting Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Bridget Rohde.
Court records and sources said Lenich brought the bogus wiretap authorizations to Verizon and AT&T between June 2015 and November 2016. She is charged with two counts of illegal interception of communications — one for each cell phone. Lenich is looking at up to five years’ incarceration on each count. Prosecutors said she also cooked up fraudulent search warrants in order to get her hands on text messages from the two phones. Lenich lied to colleagues to keep her snooping scheme secret, prosecutors charged. She allegedly told them she was keeping an eye on the two targeted cellphones “as part of a confidential law enforcement investigation that she was conducting.” Lenich also allegedly told co-workers not to listen, read or review the communications coming phones.
In November, the Daily News learned a staffer in the DA’s office thought there could be problems with the probe because it was going on longer than a year. Sources said that staffer then went to superiors.
Lenich was arrested in her office on Nov. 28 and fired the same day.
Her former colleagues at the Brooklyn DA’s office already have a case pending against her.
The state case charges Lenich with 20 counts of possession of a forged instrument and two counts of eavesdropping. But the state case is going to be dismissed at some point this week, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The ex-prosecutor, clad in all black, pleaded not guilty Monday afternoon and was released on a $500,000 bond. She was already out on bail for the state case. to and from the two