‘Slay-plot’ cop’s law & ‘ardor’

Met hubby through NYPD connection

It was a match made in the station house — that ended in the Big House.

The NYPD cop charged with trying to arrange a hit on her estranged husband met him through a fellow officer — the target’s stepfather, The Post has learned.

Officer Valerie Cincinelli was introduced to Isaiah Carvalho Jr. (pictured together) by Detective Patrick Roach, who knew her from the 106th Precinct in Queens, sources said.

Roach, who is married to Carvalho’s mother, didn’t deny setting up the illfated romance during a brief interview at his Long Island home on Sunday, but told The Post, “I’m just glad my son is safe.

“This is a surprise to all of us,” he said. “The family is still trying to wrap their head around it . . . It feels like a bad dream.”

Roach said “it was a shock to all of us when we were notified by the FBI on Friday,” the same day the feds busted Cincinelli on a murder-for-hire charge that rocked the NYPD.

He wouldn’t say where Carvalho — who has a 5year-old son with Cincinelli — was staying.

Carvalho’s father, Isaiah Sr., lives in a ranch house in Old Bethpage, where there was a minivan in the driveway Sunday evening but no one answered a knock on the front door.

A large oval window in the door was covered with brown wrapping paper and the curtains in the front windows were drawn.

Actor Vincent Pastore — who played gangster Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero on HBO’s “The Sopranos” — declined to comment on a report that he and late co-star Tony Lip were pals with Cincinelli’s boyfriend, John DiRubba, who sources have identified as the FBI informant who ratted her out.

“No, I don’t want to talk about it,” Pastore said before hanging up.

Cincinelli — whom Carvalho sued for divorce last year — allegedly gave DiRubba $7,000 in February to hire a hitman to kill both her estranged hubby and DiRubba’s 15-year-old daughter.

But DiRubba —who’s referred to in court papers as an unidentified “confidential source” — secretly went to the feds and provided evidence by recording his meetings with her and letting the feds tap his phone.

Prosecutors didn’t disclose a motive for Cincinelli’s alleged plot, but a source familiar with the case has said she wanted the girl killed because she was “in the way.”

Cincinelli, 34, launched an affair with DiRubba, 54, after meeting him on the job working as a domesticviolence officer, sources have said, and court papers say they have a “volatile history.”

She was suspended in 2017 following a dispute that led DiRubba to tell the Internal Affairs Bureau that she spent time at his Howard Beach home while on the job, sources have said.

Court papers say she’s also been brought up on departmental charges of sharing “confidential information” with him.

Cincinelli is being held without bail.