CASE NOT CLOSED
Crooked PI gets jail but clients in shadows
A New York private investigator who hacked the emails of dozens of people he was investigating got jail time — but a judge stopped short of helping to expose the clients that hired him to do their dirty work.
Manhattan federal judge Richard Sullivan sentenced Eric Saldarriaga to three months in jail for pilfering some 60 email accounts, saying he hoped to send a message about the seriousness of cybercrime.
“Anything less than that would lead people to think … ahh, who cares?” Sullivan told the courtroom on Friday.
Saldarriaga, 41, who lives in Queens, where his firm is based, was also ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and forfeit $5,000.
But victims who showed up in court to read impact statements wanted more than jail time: They wanted the identities of clients who paid the PI to dig up dirt.
Two of those targeted by Saldarriaga said it was unfair to sentence him while letting the clients who retained him not only go free but keep their anonymity.
Tony Ortega, a former editor of The Village Voice, told the court that he was sure Scientology had hired Saldarriaga in response to his hardhitting coverage of the controversial group.
“Why am I not being told what he did to me and who he was working for?” Ortega asked the judge.
RJ Cipriani, another victim who revealed his name only after the judge made it a requirement for his testifying from Los Angeles via teleconference, said he be lieves he was targeted as payback for a Las Vegas encounter with billionaire Stewart Rahr, aka “Stewie Rah Rah.”
This second accusation moved the judge to remind the court that he wasn’t prosecuting, but sentencing.
“We’re not prepared to have you give an exposé on a third party,” Sullivan said before adding that the victim impact statements, as presented, reflected “a misunderstanding of the role of the court.”
That the sentencing could be precedentsetting — given the rising problem of cybercrime — weighed on the judge. But his sympathy toward Saldarriaga was also apparent.
Saldarriaga said he’s the primary caretaker of two young sons, suffers from ailments ranging from cardiac disease to a brain tumor and attends to both his ailing mother and grandmother.
He also noted that his use of hackers for hire — for reasons both professional and personal — didn’t financially fleece a single victim.
“I overstepped the boundaries to be a hero, and now I’m a failure,” he said.
The judge himself acknowledged that the investigator remained cooperative through the case, which ended with a guilty plea in March to one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking.
And while it was true “no one was victimized financially,” the judge said the victims did lose “a deep sense of privacy.”
“We need a jail sentence here because it will have an impact,” Sullivan concluded.
Preet Bharara, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, issued a statement after the sentencing that praised the FBI for its work in the investigation and credited its Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit.