Celebrity P.I. Gets 3 Years For Sunset Park Prostitute Set-Up: DA

SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN — A famous private investigator who filmed a set-up with sex workers in a Sunset Park hotel to blackmail one of his client's victims will go to prison for at least a year, prosecutors announced.

Vincent Paro, a private investigator who once had his own TV show, was convicted last month for unlawful surveillance, promoting prostitution and dissemination of an unlawful surveillance image for the 2016 scheme.

Paro had secretly recorded a family member of a child sex abuse victim as a way to pressure the victim to stop cooperating with the prosecution of her abuser, who had hired Paro when he was arrested, prosecutors said.

“This defendant, a licensed private investigator, was hired by a sexual abuser who sought to silence the victim of a heinous crime, causing her and her family additional pain," Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said. "A jury found him guilty of secretly recording an intimate encounter and with today’s sentencing he has been held accountable. Sickening and shameful behavior such as this will not be tolerated in Brooklyn and will be vigorously prosecuted.”

The 68-year-old as sentenced to one to three years in prison after a jury found him guilty in May.

Prosecutors said the scheme started in July 2016 when the client, Samuel Israel, hired Paro. Israel had been arrested and was later indicted for sexually abusing a woman when she was 12 years old.

He paid Paro $17,000 to help him with the scheme to record embarrassing videos of the family member to shame her and her family from cooperating with the case.

That December, Paro and someone he had enlisted to help him lured the family member to a Sunset Park hotel room, hired a sex worker and filmed the family member having sex. The pair even set up a second encounter with the family member, the same sex worker, and a second sex worker a few days later because the recording hadn't worked the first time, prosecutors said.

A few weeks later a stranger wearing a scarf came up to the family member at the hotel, showed him a cell phone video and a photograph of the encounter and told him to "Be smart. Stop making trouble."

Investigators with a search warrant later found videos fo the hotel encounter on Paro's office computer.

Israel pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree criminal sexual act and one count of fourth-degree tampering with a witness last year. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, seven years’ post-release supervision and must register as a sex offender upon release from prison.