A Blackmail Case With Prostitutes, a Video
and Sex Abuse Charges
By ALAN FEUER SEPT.
19, 2017
Like many private investigators, Vincent Parco has, for nearly
30 years, made his living in the darker corners of New York.
In 1991, he admitted on the witness stand to having sold a pistol and a silencer to a
woman who used them in a love-triangle murder that came to be known in the
city’s tabloid media as the “Fatal Attraction” case. Decades later, he found
himself embroiled in the salacious prosecution of Anna Gristina, the so-called
Soccer Mom Madam, whose little black book inspired terror among the rich and
famous, both before, and after, she pleaded guilty to running a brothel
on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
On Tuesday, however, Mr. Parco, 67, made the leap from a simple
sleuth and connoisseur of crime to a criminal defendant. In a proceeding that
rivaled (and perhaps outdid) his prior exploits in the underworld, he was
charged with attempting to derail a sexual abuse case in a Hasidic community in
Brooklyn by secretly recording a witness having sex with prostitutes he had
hired then threatening to expose the man unless he stopped cooperating with
prosecutors.
The story began in March 2016 when Samuel Israel, who lives in
the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, was indicted on charges of sexually
abusing a 12-year-old girl. According to the Brooklyn district attorney’s
office, Mr. Israel, 45, was offered a deal under which he could have pleaded guilty
and served five years in prison.
