FBI: Killing discussed on tape

A tape recording that federal prosecutors allege is a Dix Hills businessman boasting about dumping the body of an associate off Fire Island was played in court Wednesday during the triple murder defendant's pretrial hearing.

FBI agent Robert Schelhorn testified that on the tape the businessman, Christian Tarantino, discussed the killing of an associate, Louis Dorval, whose body was found in 1994 inside a large tool chest floating off Fire Island.

On a portion of the tape, the agent said in court Wednesday, it is Tarantino who is asked about the Dorval murder by a business partner, Vincent Gargiulo, who wonders on the tape whether the body was dumped into the water from land or taken out to sea by boat.

Tarantino allegedly replies: "By boat . . . It was day time . . . I was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean."

It was Schelhorn's second day of testimony in federal court in Central Islip.

Assistant U.S. Attorney James Miskiewicz and Schelhorn have worked for eight years to charge Tarantino with the three slayings that the government said grew out of a bumbled 1994 Muttontown armored car robbery in which guard Julius Baumgardt was killed. Tarantino later had Dorval and Gargiulo killed because he feared they would become informants to the FBI, Miskiewicz has said.

One of Tarantino's attorneys, Michael Rosen, noted Wednesday that the government can't show the tape hasn't been tampered with because there is no clear "chain of custody" from Gargiulo to the homicide detective.