A Queens prostitute who fatally drugged several of her sex clients, including a Cipriani chef, in a twisted robbery scheme was hit with 30 years in federal prison on Tuesday.
Angelina Barini’s greed left four men dead in the summer of 2019 — and she didn’t let the rising body count deter her plans to incapacitate and rob the men who hired her for sex.
District Judge Brian Cogan sentenced her in Brooklyn Federal Court to 30 years behind bars.
Barini, 43, gave fatal doses of fentanyl-laced drugs to three men on July 4, July 11 and Aug. 5, 2019. And on Aug. 18 that year, she and her ex-boyfriend, Leslie Lescano, lured Cipriani Dolci head chef Andrea Zamperoni to a seedy room in the Kamway Lodge in Elmhurst, Queens, according to federal court filings.
Lescano hid in the bathroom on Barini’s orders as the escort and the 33-year-old chef walked into the motel room.
She slipped Zamperoni a deadly dose of a date rape drug, and left his body to rot as she and Lescano came and went from the motel over the next three days, federal prosecutors said.
She brought in sheets to wrap Zamperoni that day, hauled in a garbage can from outside and even went as far as asking two people if they could bring her a hack saw, the feds said. Barini also searched the internet for reports of the chef’s disappearance.
When NYPD officers knocked on the hotel room door on Aug. 21, 2019, they were greeted by the stench of a dead body and burning incense. Barini blurted out that “her pimp made her do it,” according to court documents, and the officers found Zamperoni’s corpse, wrapped in bleached sheets and stuffed in a garbage can, in the corner of the motel room.
The feds say Lescano bought Gatorade and other groceries using Zamperoni’s credit cards and even tried to make withdrawals of the chef’s money at a casino.
“[Barini’s] petty greed had fatal consequences. And regardless of whether the defendant intended to kill her victims, she showed an astonishing disregard for human life,” the government’s sentencing memo reads.
Barini knew she was dealing death early into her spree, prosecutors said.
In a series of Facebook messages on July 11, 2019, she mentioned “one of them died,” then said a female acquaintance blamed her for the first victim’s death because she gave the man “dog food” — slang for heroin.
“The defendant drugged and killed multiple people for a few quick dollars. She stole their personal belongings while they lay unconscious dying from the lethal drugs she gave them,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for New York’s Eastern District, said Tuesday.
Barini pleaded guilty last August to two counts of distributing narcotics that caused the deaths of a person, one count of distributing fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine and one count of conspiring to distribute gamma-butyrolactone.