The beheading of tech CEO Fahim Saleh, and the tiny clue that may clinch the case against his personal assistant
- It's three years since personal assistant Tyrese Haspil allegedly killed and dismembered tech CEO Fahim Saleh.
- New evidence alleges a massive underlying embezzlement, four times larger than Saleh ever knew.
"This is quite disconcerting, Tyrese," New York City tech entrepreneur Fahim Saleh complained in an email.
"I put my full trust in you," Saleh, 33, lamented to his 21-year-old former personal assistant, who he feared had embezzled tens of thousands of dollars.
Six months later, on July 14, 2020, Tyrese Haspil returned that "full trust" with an unfathomable further betrayal, prosecutors in Manhattan say.
Fearing his ex-boss would discover the true extent of his embezzlement, he followed Saleh home, stunned him with a Taser, and stabbed him to death, prosecutors allege, returning the next day to decapitate and dismember the body in a botched attempt to cover up the murder.
"Where are your joints?" Haspil allegedly searched on his iPhone, while inside Saleh's Manhattan condominium with the body, a cordless power saw, and a backup rechargeable battery.
Then he downloaded an image of the human skeleton, titled, "Illustration-of-types-of-joints," prosecutors allege.
It's been three summers since Saleh's luxe, $2.4 million condo, with its private elevator and floor-to-ceiling windows, became his own abattoir, where his repeatedly-stabbed torso was found facing up on the living room floor, and his head, arms and lower legs were found nearby, inside canvas demolition bags.
Twenty months have passed since lead prosecutor Linda Ford announced she was ready to try Haspil on charges of murder, grand larceny, and concealment of a corpse. Since then, the case has seemingly stood still in time.
More than a dozen scheduled trial dates have come and gone, each one adjourned, as were five "disposition" dates when Haspil could have pleaded guilty, but did not.
His most recent appearance before a judge, last month, presaged more delay. His lawyer said he may seek what's called an extreme emotional disturbance defense, in which he'd argue that something triggered his client to lose control at the moment of murder. That defense could prolong the pre-trial process into next year.
Yet behind the scenes from this seeming stretch of inactivity, Manhattan prosecutors have been slowly filling Haspil's public court file with details of their case against him.
The embezzlement that underlies the murder was massive, totaling $400,000, four times what was first revealed, this new evidence alleges.
But the most fascinating evidence revealed in Haspil's file — potentially clinching both identification and premeditation — is tiny. It's a circular speck of paper that couldn't cover the surface of a dime.
Any time it is fired, a Taser ejects 20 to 30 of these multi-colored ID tags, little paper discs printed with a unique identification number.
Security camera footage entered into evidence shows that an hour after Tasing Saleh in the back, the masked killer tried to vacuum this incriminating, crime-scene confetti from the elevator floor.
His hand-held, purple vacuum missed one single tag.
And the ID number on that tag traces directly back, prosecutors allege, to the Taser Pulse that Haspil signed for himself, when FedEx delivered it to his Brooklyn address a full month before the murder.
Here is a look inside Haspil's case file, now bulging with these and other key details from the prosecution's trove of evidence.
Together, this evidence alleges a tale of reckless cruelty and greed that Saleh could never have imagined in May of 2018, when he first put his "full trust" in his young new assistant, sharing with him the keys and passwords to his multi-million-dollar home and fortune.
Haspil has pleaded not guilty; his Legal Aid Society lawyer, Sam Roberts, declined to comment for this story, as did a representative from the Manhattan District Attorney's office.
"You let them into your house, your bank accounts, believing that it's a trusted, honorable person," Mandy Stein told Insider. Stein's mother, millionaire Manhattan realtor Linda Stein, was bludgeoned to death in her penthouse by her embezzling personal assistant in 2007.
"That kind of betrayal is unthinkable," she said.
The first betrayal
Saleh — "Famy" to his family and close friends — had no idea, to his dying day, how much his personal assistant was allegedly stealing.
But six months before his murder, he believed the $100,000 hole that his accountant had found in his books was troubling enough.
"Hey Tyrese. Hope all is well," Saleh wrote at 8:37 p.m. on Friday, January 10, 2020, according to an email chain included in the case file.
Then he got to the point. "On a recent visit to my accountant, there were several transactions marked on the Adventure Capital Chase Account amounting to over $35,000," the email continued.
"My memory must be failing," Saleh added, broaching the topic of missing money almost gingerly, "but I don't remember authorizing such charges.
"Can you please explain?"
Saleh, a Bangladeshi-American, was an admired entrepreneur and self-taught computer programmer who had made millions through his Lagos, Nigeria-based motorbike ride-share and delivery service, Gokada.
Adventure Capital, based in Manhattan, was one way Saleh gave back. It was a venture capital fund that Saleh set up to help other young programmer-entrepreneurs who hoped to work in developing countries.
For more than a year, as Saleh's personal assistant, Haspil helped manage Adventure Capital's complicated finances.
But he steadily looted the fund, prosecutors allege, siphoning $98,849 into his own bank accounts in the five months between December, 2018 and May, 2019.
When he emailed Saleh back four hours later, Haspil struck a relaxed tone. "Hey Fahim. I'm not too sure myself," he said of the mystery transfers. "Must be a clerical error."
The exchange between the two men continued throughout the weekend, growing more tense.
"What is the explanation here?" Saleh demanded at 11 p.m. on Saturday night.
"I was desperate and needed to pay off debt and help my family," Haspil finally emailed. "I apologize for deceiving you and I'm ready to take responsibility for my actions."
It was Haspil who offered to make things right through what he promised would be "a strict 12-month payment plan." Agreeing, Saleh had an attorney draw up the papers, including a notarized confession of judgment and a promissory note designed to run two full years.
On February 10, six weeks before the papers were signed, Saleh threatened to call the police if Haspil kept ignoring his phone calls, according to emails in the case file.
But ultimately, on March 31, Haspil signed, and the police were never notified, although, "Haspil was warned that if he did not repay the money, he could be criminally prosecuted," prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
Months passed where, as far as Saleh knew, the repayment plan was working well.
"Haspil made an initial payment to the victim of $20,000 on March 3, 2020 and made four subsequent monthly payments of $2,916 on April 2nd, May 5th, June 2nd, and July 1st of that year," prosecutors wrote.
Haspil, not surprisingly, was no longer working as anyone's personal assistant. Saleh had fired him back in May of 2019, prosecutors say. He was a bit of a slacker, Saleh's business associates would claim to reporters, after the murder of Haspil, who was an award-winning, 16-year-old programmer when Saleh had taken him under his wing.
But Haspil, prosecutors allege, had devised a way to keep getting paid.
He had opened a PayPal account under the name Nethertek Switzerland way back in September of 2018, four months after he was hired, a name chosen "to mimic the appearance of legitimate transactions on the victim's financial statements," prosecutors wrote.
Even while repaying Saleh, "Haspil continued to steal money from the victim through the PayPal scheme, which had not yet been discovered," prosecutors wrote, describing the equivalent of robbing Peter to pay Peter.
"Haspil was also plotting to murder Fahim Saleh," prosecutors added.
The telltale Taser tag
On June 8, 2020, Haspil signed for a small FedEx package, its contents weighing little more than eight ounces, that was delivered to his fourth-floor, one-bedroom rental apartment just south of Brooklyn's Prospect Park.
Inside the package was his new Taser Pulse, described by the manufacturer as "packing the same knock-down punch trusted by law enforcement," but "built with civilian self-protection in mind."
Haspil had used his iPhone XS Max — the same phone he would use to Google "Where are your joints" — when he shopped for the stun gun on the website Taser.com, according to a search warrant affidavit now unsealed and in the case file.
Inside each of his new Taser's two firing cartridges were dozens of tiny ID tags, candy-colored little paper circles ready to eject when the weapon was fired, like tossed handfuls of debris from a hole puncher.
One tag would end up inside an evidence bag sealed by detectives from the NYPD's Seventh Precinct.
It was labeled "Anti-felon Identification Disc," on a list of physical evidence in the case.
Saleh's murder came one month after the Taser came, on July 13, 2020, a Monday.
At 5:53 a.m., minutes after sunrise, a security camera outside Haspil's fourth-floor apartment recorded the image of a man walking through the hallway.
The man's dress shirt collar was white. His suit, tie, shoes, COVID mask, sunglasses and baseball hat were all dark colors — black, or maybe navy.
Prosecutors allege that this man was Haspil, his Taser and knife believed to be concealed inside the large black duffel bag he carried.
About three hours passed. Then, at 8:37 a.m., another security camera captured a man with the same clothing, head covering, and duffel bag entering the lobby of Saleh's luxury apartment building. Prosecutors say that was Haspil, too.
Haspil allegedly hid in plain sight for some five hours, waiting.
"He was in the lobby, just sitting in the corner," a law enforcement source told Insider, asking to remain unnamed because they were unauthorized to comment on the case.
Then, at 1:45 p.m., Saleh returned home from running outside in the mid-July day's 86-degree heat.
Saleh wore a tank top, images from the elevator security camera show. Meanwhile the killer had added a dark, plastic face shield to the dark baseball hat, sunglasses, and COVID mask already covering his face.
Once inside the elevator with his killer, Saleh inserted the key fob that instructs the doors to open directly into his condo, a two-bedroom he'd purchased eleven months prior.
"The key fob only allows the residents to access their own floor, and any other floor is inaccessible," Saleh's cousin, who would discover his body, testified during a pretrial hearing three years ago, according to a transcript in the file.
The man in the dark suit appears to fumble with a key fob of his own, prosecutors say the elevator footage shows.
Saleh appears to speak to the man during their brief ride together to Saleh's seventh floor apartment, the law enforcement source said, though the camera recorded only video, not audio. It may never be known if Saleh recognized the heavily-obscured face of the man who was about to kill him.
"As the elevator door opened into the victim's 7th floor apartment, Haspil stunned the victim with a Taser," prosecutors allege in one document. A still photo from the case file shows that Saleh was stunned from behind.
"The video then depicts Fahim Saleh falling to the ground as the elevator doors closed," the statement read.
A fight for his life
According to the manufacturer's website, the Taser Pulse, now retailing for $399, disables an "attacker" for "as much as 30 seconds."
That brief half a minute was not long enough for Saleh's killer to finish the job without meeting resistance. The autopsy results suggest Saleh regained consciousness, and fought for his life.
In addition to the five stab wounds to Saleh's neck and torso, the medical examiner noted "multiple incise wounds to the arm, multiple wounds to the left hand, contusion to the left forehead."
Cuts to a victim's hands are tell-tale signs of self defense, medical examiners typically testify in murder cases.
A search warrant affidavit, newly unsealed and included in the file, suggests that the killer soon summoned back the elevator.
The following sentence was sworn to three years ago by the lead detective on the case, Salvatore Tudisco of the NYPD's 7th Precinct:
"A review of video surveillance indicates that approximately an hour and ten minutes after said individual entered the 7th floor apartment, he is depicted having appeared to have changed clothes, in that he was then observed wearing a light-colored hooded sweatshirt, black and white shoes, and black or dark colored pants, and appears to use a purple handheld vacuum to vacuum the inside of the elevator."
There is no indication in the file that the Taser, the vacuum, the murder weapon, or the victim's cell phone were ever recovered — just that one paper disc, now assigned the evidence voucher number 1001335579.
But on the evening of the murder, a man alleged to be Haspil was recorded on surveillance cameras on the Hudson River waterfront of Jersey City, New Jersey, throwing a bag into the river, the law enforcement source said. NYPD divers were unsuccessful in recovering a bag.
Personal assistants are like family
"Personal assistant embezzlement is pretty common," a Manhattan financial risk advisor told Insider, calling the relationship "often very familial."
Personal assistants often have access to their bosses' checkbooks and credit cards. They manage passwords and pins, and get first access to snail mail and email. They may quite literally know all about their employer's dirty laundry.
Yet too often, they are not thoroughly vetted.
"People hire based on referrals and word of mouth," said the advisor, who asked to remain unnamed due to client confidentiality issues.
A lack of vetting before hiring, and of regular auditing over the course of employment, lets small thefts go unnoticed, leading to ever-larger thefts, he said.
"So many people don't look," the advisor said. "They just trust."
Only the biggest thefts tend to make the news.
The personal assistant of ex-NBA player Richard Jefferson was sentenced in Arizona last year to 70 months prison for stealing $4.7 million. A Dallas-based personal assistant was sentenced four years ago to 12 years after stealing more than $2 million from a wealthy Texas couple.
Violence is rare.
In one high-profile exception, comedian David Spade was Tased awake in the middle of the night by his admittedly cocaine-addled personal assistant, David "Skippy" Malloy.
"I was just screaming, like, 'What are you doing?" Spade told Howard Stern of the 2001 attack at his Beverly Hills home.
Fatal larcenies are extremely rare.
Most prominent was the murder of Linda Stein, a millionaire Manhattan residential real-estate agent who was once the manager for punk pioneers the Ramones. Stein's real-estate clients included Elton John, Madonna, Calvin Klein and Angelina Jolie.
In 2007, Stein, 62, was bludgeoned to death by her personal assistant in her Upper East Side penthouse. The assistant, Natavia Lowery, 28, had begun stealing from her boss almost immediately, taking $30,000 in the three months she'd had the job.
"My mom! She's dead, I think — I don't know!" daughter Mandy Stein cried to a 911 operator after finding her mother's body on the floor. The slain Realtor's head was covered by a blue fleece jacket the daughter had lent her the previous Sunday, during a chilly walk in Central Park.
"Send somebody! Please, please, please," the daughter begged in the call, which was played for the jury that convicted Lowery of murder and grand larceny in 2010.
"This is such a heartbreaking story, and definitely brings up memories," Stein, a documentary filmmaker in Los Angeles, told Insider of Saleh's murder.
"You fully let them into your lives," she said. "My mom had a lot of affection for Natavia. She was a trusting person."
Stein, like Saleh, would have been eager to resolve the embezzlement amicably, the daughter said. And both victims, she noted, had entrusted their assistants with very personal tasks.
Lowery helped blow dry and style her mother's hair. Haspil house-sat for Saleh during the tech CEO's month-long business trips to Nigeria, caring full time for his boss's beloved Pomeranian-husky mix, Laila.
During these months of house-sitting, Haspil appeared to enjoy assuming the life of his millionaire boss, lying to pals that the apartment was actually his own, Insider previously reported.
"Not only was Tyrese quite comfortable in the apartment, but so was this guest of his," Saleh's cousin testified in a preliminary hearing three years ago, referring to Saleh's previous Manhattan apartment and to Haspil's then girlfriend.
Two trips to Home Depot
The day after Saleh's murder was July 14, 2020, a Tuesday. Haspil began the day at the Home Depot on West 23rd Street in Manhattan, prosecutors allege.
By 9:30 a.m., prosecutors say, he was at the checkout counter purchasing two gallon-sized jugs of disinfectant and other cleaning supplies.
Haspil used his victim's credit card, prosecutors allege, for these purchases and for the hired car that took him from Home Depot back to the crime scene.
A photograph of surveillance video in the case file shows the man prosecutors identify as Haspil returning to the condominium later that morning. He is wearing a heavy, fleece-lined, grey hooded sweatshirt, a Nike baseball hat, a large black COVID mask, and a backpack.
Inside the backpack was a saw he'd purchased earlier, also from Home Depot, the law enforcement source said.
Haspil had found the saw online, using his iPhone to search the Home Depot website "for various models of electric saws and saw blades," according to a search warrant application in the case file.
He allegedly settled on a Makita brand, "Sawzall" cordless hand saw. It's a tool strong enough to cut through metal, according to the website, which shows it slicing through what looks like thick aluminum piping.
Soon afterward, Haspil realized he'd made a mistake when he packed his backpack that morning, the law enforcement source alleged.
"As he was chopping up the body, the battery ran out," the source said of the killer's cordless saw. "He'd forgot the charger at home. So he went back to the Home Depot for another charger."
Haspil was still on his run to the hardware store at 3:30 p.m., when Saleh's buzzer rang.
It was Saleh's cousin, a young engineer from Brooklyn, worried after not being able to reach him for more than a day.
(Since the cousin could not be reached for comment, and prosecutors are referring to her only as "Person 1," Insider is identifying her only by her nickname, "Ayema.")
Getting no answer, Ayema rode the elevator to the seventh floor and let herself in with her copy of her cousin's key fob.
When the elevator doors opened, Ayema was met by Saleh's dog, Laila, and a scene that could only be described as horrific.
Tudisco, the lead detective at the time, described the scene in one of the file's search warrant affidavits.
"I observed a human torso with multiple stab wounds lying supine that was dismembered and decapitated," the detective wrote.
"I observed a battery-powered electric saw near the torso and what appeared to be blood on the blade," he wrote.
"The limbs and head were recovered from demolition bags next to the torso. I also observed bleach, towels, and other cleaning materials.
"The dismembered body was identified as Fahim Saleh."
By the time the killer allegedly returned to the building with the new charger, a crowd had already begun to gather in the flashing glow of lights from the police cars that rushed to the scene.
"When he came back, he was actually in the crowd," the law enforcement source alleged, citing video surveillance evidence.
The gold balloons
It would take the NYPD three days to arrest Haspil, using a flurry of search warrants and the many clues that prosecutors say he himself left behind.
Police quickly realized that the victim's credit card was still being used, including at a nearby Party City on July 15, a Wednesday, and the day after the body was found.
The card had been used to order a trio of gold helium balloons, two shaped like "2s" and one shaped like a heart.
The 13th Precinct sent a detective to the Party City, where, according to another search warrant affidavit in the file, an employee said the balloons had just been delivered to 172 Crosby Street, an address on a touristy, cobble-stoned street about a 15-minute walk north of the crime scene.
The man who ordered the balloons had asked that the delivery driver call a cellphone number, the affidavit says.
The DA's office soon confirmed that "Tyrese Haspil was the subscriber to that number," the affidavit continues.
Locational data for the number put it in the area of 172 Crosby Street throughout the day, according to investigators.
Haspil had moved to the address — a 2,400-square-feet, $18,000-a-month Airbnb — on Wednesday morning with his girlfriend, to celebrate her 22nd birthday, according to law enforcement sources cited in multiple news reports at the time.
Haspil used Saleh's card to shop at the neighborhood's expensive shops, the news reports said, including at a Christian Louboutin store.
The three gold balloons that led police to Haspil's doorstep would still be visible in the Airbnb's fifth-floor window on Friday, July 17, when Haspil was arrested in the building's lobby, and his iPhone immediately seized.
"Any incendiary devices"
Haspil's plan, before it was interrupted, may have been to allegedly finish dismembering the body, then somehow remove the bagged pieces and burn them, investigators theorized early on, according to paperwork in the file.
In pursuit of this theory, on the day after Haspil's arrest, a Saturday, the NYPD obtained a warrant to search his Brooklyn apartment and his basement storage locker.
According to the copy in the case file, the warrant allowed investigators to seize "any and all items that can be used to dispose of a human body and or dispose of forensic evidence, including but not limited to incendiary devices, or any object or substance capable of igniting or fueling a fire."
Inside Haspil's apartment, police found and vouchered a navy suit jacket and pants, and a white dress suit, file documents show.
From Haspil's storage unit, police seized a black Nike backpack.
The backpack contained five bottles of Ronsonol lighter fluid, WD-40, two boxes of Diamond brand, 32-count wooden matches, and a bottle of mosquito-repellent Tiki-torch fuel, according to an evidence list in the case file.
Four Duraflame logs were separately recovered from the storage unit, according to the evidence list.
So were a single knife and two leather sheaths.
These last three items were turned over to the medical examiners' office for possible DNA testing. Neither the knife nor the sheaths were ultimately tested, records in the file show, likely indicating a lack of evidence.
"Extreme emotional disturbance"
What's next for Tyrese Haspil?
He remains held without bail at New York's Rikers Island jail, where he's been housed for the three years since Saleh's killing.
The top charge against him remains first degree murder, alleging that he killed his former boss to keep him from discovering the totality of the $400,000 embezzlement, and to prevent his turning him in to the police. Even after Saleh's death, Haspil worried about this theft being exposed, and had continued trying to wipe evidence of the embezzlement from the victim's computer, prosecutors allege.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg has stood firm on this theory of murder, declining to offer a plea to a lesser charge. The judge, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice April Newbauer, has told both sides that she will sentence Haspil to 33 years to life in prison if he pleads guilty to the top charge. With no chance of a lower sentence, Haspil appears on track to go to trial.
Roberts, Haspil's public defender, has said on the record that his client is considering what's called an "EED" defense, in which he would attempt to prove to a jury that he killed his ex-boss during a state of extreme emotional disturbance.
Jurors would be asked by the defense to find that at the moment he stabbed his former boss to death, Haspil was experiencing a profound loss of self-control, and that there was a reasonable explanation or excuse for that loss of self-control.
If the jury agrees, they would find Haspil guilty of a reduced charge of first degree manslaughter. The difference in sentencing would be significant.
First degree murder comes with a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 to life, meaning the earliest he could see a parole board would be in 20 years.
If a found guilty of "man-1," as it's colloquially called, Haspil, who has no criminal record, would face a sentence of anywhere from 5 to 25 years.
Prosecutors will likely rebut the emotional disturbance defense by reminding jurors of the missing $400,000 and arguing that as he allegedly Tased, stabbed, and dismembered his former boss, Haspil had nothing but self-preservation in mind.
It would be a war of dueling expert psychiatrists, each side describing diametrically different conclusions from their jailhouse interviews of the defendant, interviews that are currently ongoing.
But here's where the Seventh Precinct detective squad's voucher number 1001335579 would play its starring role.
That one tiny paper disc proves that this was a murder planned weeks in advance, the prosecution will likely argue — ever since the Taser that contained it, and from which it burst in a moment of calculated betrayal and greed, had arrived at Haspil's door.
Haspil's murder trial has not been scheduled; his next court date is September 28.