Brooklyn Prosecutor Jailed For Illegally Wiretapping Lovers

BROOKLYN, NY — A former high-ranking Brooklyn prosecutor will spend a year behind bars after she illegally tapped the cellphone of two people she was having affairs with.

Tara Lenich, 42, was sentenced to a year and a day in prison Friday for illegally listening to the phone calls and reading text messages from two cellphones for more than a year, federal prosecutors said.

"Former Assistant District Attorney Lenich violated her duty to the public as a prosecutor when she engaged in her long-running illegal scheme," U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District Richard Donoghue said in a statement.

"The victims of her scheme include the individuals whose privacy rights she violated by listening to and reading their private communications, the state court judges whose signatures she forged in order to perpetrate her scheme, the Kings County District Attorney’s Office whose reputation of integrity she damaged, and the public whose trust she betrayed."

Starting in June 2015, Lenich started to illegally monitor the cellphones of a fellow prosecutor and an NYPD detective she was having affairs with, the New York Times reported.

Lenich, who served as the deputy chief of special investigations for the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, created bogus judicial orders with forged signatures of judges to get permission to wiretap the phones, federal prosecutors said.

She also created fake search warrants so she could intercept text messages sent to and from both cellphones. When other prosecutors in the DA's office asked about the surveillance, Lenich told them she was conducting a "highly sensitive" criminal investigation into the two men, authorities said.

Lenich continued her monitoring of the phones until she was arrested for the scheme in November 2016. She pleaded guilty to two counts of intercepting oral and electronic communications last year, federal prosecutors said.

Judge William Kuntz sentenced her to a year and day in prison for both counts, to run concurrently.

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