Inmate Pleads Guilty to Plotting to Kidnap Former Nassau County Prosecutor

An inmate at an upstate New York maximum security prison pleaded guilty Friday to plotting to kidnap and assault a former Nassau County District Attorney prosecutor who prosecuted him, according to the NCDA.

Convicted murderer Chandran Nathan, 59, an inmate at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, pleaded guilty to second-degree criminal solicitation. He faces up to 3 1/2 to seven years in prison at his sentencing on April 12. In November 2016, he pleaded not guilty to the same charges at his indictment.

The NCDA said they received a tip that Nathan allegedly offered to pay a third-party up to $10,000 to abduct the former prosecutor off the street, place him in handcuffs and assault him.

“From his upstate prison cell, this defendant tried have a former prosecutor brutally beaten in a foolhardy effort to coerce fake evidence to exonerate him of a past crime,” Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas said in a press release.

Nathan requested to have the former prosecutor beaten about the body, but not around his face, and waterboarded, if necessary, the DA said. The inmate wanted the prosecutor to give videotaped statements explaining that many confessions he used in his career were coerced and tainted, and to mention a number of cases he prosecuted so it would not be known who did the kidnapping, the DA said.

Nathan, of Richmond Hill in Queens, was convicted in 1994 of killing a 20-year-old medical student in Manhasset, which caused the man’s fiancee, who Nathan was obsessed with, to kill herself by jumping out of her terrace on the sixteenth floor of her Queens apartment, the New York Times reports. The Times reported the murder was a “fit of jealousy” over the couple’s engagement.

The kidnapping case was investigated by members of the Nassau County Police Department’s DA Squad and NCDA detective investigators with assistance from the New York State Department of Corrections.

Image via NCDA