Bodybuilder details strangling, fatal shootings in Tartaglione quadruple murder trial

One man, Martin Luna, was already dead over a $200,000 drug debt, his body wrapped in a blue tarp. His two relatives and a family friend, their hands tied, knelt on the ground as ex-cop Nicholas Tartaglione told them everything would be OK.

But Joseph Biggs, a bodybuilding enforcer who collected debts for Tartaglione, detailed for a federal jury Wednesday how the men would not leave that mountainside clearing in Orange County alive seven years ago. Biggs said he shot one of them in the head, handed the black revolver to Tartaglione and turned away, hearing two more gunshots as the other men were killed as well.

He said he had resisted moments earlier when his fellow enforcer, another ex-cop named Gerard Benderoth, told him he was "going to get his hands dirty" and demanded he take the gun. Benderoth told him he had two choices. "Either you leave here with us or you stay here with them," Biggs recounted him saying.

Biggs as key eye witness

Biggs testified as the main cooperating witness against Tartaglione, who is charged with murder, kidnapping and drug conspiracy in the April 11, 2016, murders of Martin Luna, 41, his 25-year-old nephew Miguel Luna, his niece's husband Urbano Santiago, 35, and Hector Gutierrez, 43.

Biggs said Tartaglione strangled Martin Luna to death hours earlier at a Chester bar where he had been lured. And the others, who had not been expected to show up with Luna, were killed on the property Tartaglione rented at the time in Mount Hope. The bodies were not discovered until eight months later.

Biggs' testimony is the only eyewitness account of the killings the jury will hear. Benderoth, the man he said helped him and Tartaglione restrain and kill the four men, fatally shot himself on March 8, 2017, as FBI agents were approaching his car to arrest him. Benderoth had been a police officer in Haverstraw and New York City and was a strongman competitor known as the "White Rhino."

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Biggs, now 61, lived in Nanuet and was a security guard at the Greenburgh-Graham school in Hastings-on-Hudson when he was arrested in the parking lot there in June 2017.

Biggs' background

Biggs said he was a drug addict from his teenage years until his late 20s when he stopped at the time his youngest child was born. He supported his habit with armed robberies and burglaries but avoided any criminal record.

Biggs said he had been sexually abused by a coach when he was 14 and called himself a "garbagehead" after that, taking cocaine, heroin, LSD, marijuana, anything "to just not feel like me."

He said he met Tartaglione through the local gym scene in Rockland and began buying steroids from him on a regular basis around 2006, usually in the parking lot of the McDonalds in West Nyack. A friendship developed and Biggs said that around 2013 Tartaglione started using him and Benderoth as enforcers to collect debts from steroid customers.

Their typical approach, Biggs said, was to confront the customer as they left a gym, box them in between parked cars and demand the money. If they didn't pay up then, he said, "we'd take him somewhere where the money was."

Biggs acknowledged a "complicated" relationship with Benderoth, including consensual sex between the two even after a bizarre incident in the married ex-cop's bedroom that ended with Benderoth sexually assaulting him. He had gone there because Benderoth asked if he wanted to engage in a threesome with him and his wife. Once in the bedroom, though, the wife was not there and Benderoth came on to him. Biggs said he tried to step away but Benderoth began beating him, pinning him to the ground and forcing him into sex.

"I put myself in a situation," he told Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey. "I didn't see it coming."

Despite the violence of it, Biggs acknowledged having sexual contact with Benderoth on other occasions and said he never told anyone about it until his arrest because he was embarrassed.

He did scale down his collections with Benderoth though, he said, because it was more profitable to get a package of steroids from Tartaglione as compensation for the collections than the cash Benderoth was giving him.

Shift to cocaine

He said he learned in late 2015 that Tartaglione had taken up cocaine trafficking, investing in the purchase of cocaine in Texas and having it sold in Florida with the help of Luna; Luna's boss who lived in Florida, Jason Sullivan, who Biggs knew just as Jay, and Marcos Cruz, a farmhand of Tartaglione's.

But in early 2016, Tartaglione asked for his help getting more than $200,000 back from Luna, who claimed that the second time he went to Texas to buy cocaine the people he paid took off with the money and never gave him the drugs.

He said he met with Luna and Cruz but soon Luna broke off communication. Tartaglione then sent both Benderoth and Biggs to find Luna, but they couldn't.

What Biggs testified about the killings

On April 11, 2016, with the help of Sullivan, they lured Luna to the Likquid Lounge, a bar owned by Tartaglione's brother in a Chester strip mall. Biggs said they had Benderoth meet Luna at the door because the two men had never met.

Luna had been expected to come alone. But he brought along Miguel Luna, Santiago and Gutierrez.

Once they entered, Biggs said, Luna recognized him and bolted for the emergency exit. But it had been blocked and he bounced off the heavy door. Benderoth then ordered everyone to the floor at gunpoint. As Benderoth kneeled on Luna's back, Biggs started duct-taping the others' hands, he said. The three men were put in the office and Luna was seated on a chair in the bathroom, his hands bound behind his back.

When Tartaglione arrived, Biggs said, he went into the bathroom to confront Luna. Biggs said he stayed in the office watching the others but could hear the smacking sounds of Luna being beaten and Tartaglione demanding his money.

Biggs said he didn't know any of the others, but described Santiago as the other captive who was then put in the bathroom as well while Tartaglione continue to beat up Luna. Biggs said he heard a gasping, choking sound for about 30 seconds and looked in to see Martin Luna lying motionless on his side, bleeding from his head, Santiago looking "very scared." Tartaglione went to his car to get a tarp and Biggs was directed to wipe up a blood streak.

Biggs said he helped Tartaglione carry the body to the car. Because he spoke Spanish, Biggs was also tasked with making sure Santiago complied when he was directed to call a relative to say there was a problem and he had to go to Mexico. After Tartaglione ended the call, Biggs said, Santiago told Tartaglione he was going to get him his money.

When Tartaglione drove off with Luna's body, Biggs said he urged Benderoth that they should just leave, that the police could show up because someone from the Chinese restaurant next door had heard noises and was asking what was going on.

They soon drove the other men to Tartaglione's property on Old Mountain Road in Mount Hope.

While Biggs said he did not watch the second and third men get shot, he suggested Tartaglione and Benderoth had each shot one of them because he had given the gun to Tartaglione but Benderoth was holding it immediately after the two gunshots.

He said he was directed to cut the duct tape off the men's hands and Tartaglione got a back hoe to start digging a hole and the bodies of the three men who were shot were thrown inside. But they had to stop digging because a piece of the back hoe fell off. When Benderoth told him to get into the hole to retrieve the broken piece and looked at Tartaglione, Biggs got the impression he wanted to kill him. But Tartaglione shook his head and hands, indicating "no" Biggs said.

Before Luna's body was thrown into the hole on top of the others, Biggs said, Tartaglione cut a zip tie from around Luna's neck. They shoveled dirt onto the bodies until nightfall.

Tartaglione then threw the dead men's wallets and other belongings into a furnace near the house, Biggs said. He and Benderoth were sent to pick up Cruz so they could use a key fob taken from the dead men to find the car they had arrived in and move it as far away from the bar as possible. They didn't manage to find it.

On their way back to Rockland County that night, Biggs said, Benderoth threw the spent shell casings and remaining bullets from the black revolver out the window on the New York State Thruway. He wasn't sure if he threw the gun out as well.

Biggs' guilty plea, cooperation

Biggs has pleaded guilty to murder, kidnapping and drug conspiracy charges and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in hopes of some leniency from a mandatory sentence of life in prison. That's the only incentive he needs, he suggested, to testify truthfully. "I'd like to hold my grandchildren," he said.

But he acknowledged on cross examination by defense lawyer Bruce Barket that his truthfulness and cooperation are for the lawyers relying on him, the prosecutors, to determine.

The defense maintains that Tartaglione was framed for the murders, that the drug conspiracy had involved Luna, Cruz, Sullivan, Biggs and Benderoth and not Tartaglione. Barket cited the fact that Tartaglione never had a burner phone like Biggs and Sullivan and that it was Sullivan, not Tartaglione, who had the access to the money and the cocaine in Florida.

Barket questioned Biggs about the contacts in his burner phone that showed Jay (Sullivan) and Marcos (Cruz) with dollar signs next to their names.

And he suggested that it was actually Biggs who had strangled Martin Luna. He cited an incident for which Biggs was arrested in 2015 for squeezing a man's neck until he lost consciousness after his daughter had claimed the man assaulted her. And he got Biggs to concede that five to 10 times he had acted similarly to try to get people to pay their debts.

The defense maintains details had been fed to the cooperators to fit their narrative of the case. Biggs conceded to Barket that a New York state police investigator had told him that he thought Tartaglione had snapped and something bad happened and that Luna had been killed by Tartaglione.

On redirect, Comey asked Biggs if law enforcement had ever told Biggs to frame Tartaglione. They had not, he said.

"If you tell a single lie, what happens?" she asked.

"I go to jail for the rest of my life."

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Joseph Biggs details strangling, shootings at Tartaglione murder trial