Dalia Mohammed met Mike Dippolito in 2008 and married in 2009, five days after Mike’s divorce from his wife was finalized – something he did for Dalia. Mike was an ex-convict on probation for stock fraud, and he met Dalia when she was working as an escort. According to friends, the couple seemed very happy together and Mike was head over heels for Dalia. Unfortunately, the love was one-sided.
Mike’s probation was in risk of being jeopardized as he continued having run-ins with the police. On the morning of March 12, 2009, Mike’s probation officer showed up, unannounced, and told Mike they had multiple anonymous tips saying that Mike had been selling steroids and ecstasy. They showed him their search warrant and searched the property, but found nothing. The next weekend, the couple went to a luxury hotel in Palm Beach, per Dalia’s request. On Sunday morning, police were waiting for them in the parking lot and told them they received an anonymous tip that he was selling drugs from his car. They searched the vehicle, but found nothing.
A couple of weeks later, police were waiting by Mike’s car as he and Dalia left a fancy restaurant. This time, they found a small bag of cocaine in his cigarette pack. Mike swore up and down that it wasn’t his and begged the police to believe him. The police, believing Mike’s sincerity, let him go. On the ride home, Mike asked Dalia if she was the one who had been setting him up. Dalia got furious and began driving recklessly. Mike, fearing that she may crash the car, apologized for suggesting it, then became elated when Dalia told him she was pregnant. She wasn’t.
The next day, Dalia contacted one of her ex-boyfriends, Mike Stanley. She and Mike had been exchanging explicit messages throughout her marriage to Dippolito, with Dalia even texting him, “The sooner he gets jammed up the sooner we can be in paradise island baby.”
Only a week after sending that text, Dalia reached out again. In the past, Dalia had recruited M. Stanley to impersonate a doctor to cover up that she had stolen $100,000 from M. Dippolito. This time, she asked Stanley to impersonate a lawyer. She texted him, “I need u to spoof the cll and tell him that he needs to meet ur paralegal at 2:30 at th courthouse.” He did so, and convinced Dippolito that in order to get off of probation, he needed to transfer his house into his wife’s name. After completing his task, Dalia cut off contact with Stanley.
Continuing her plan to somehow get rid of her husband, Dalia then contacted another ex-boyfriend, Mohammed Shihadeh, and asked him to find her a hitman to kill her husband. Shihadeh, not as easily swayed as Stanley, told the police what Dalia had requested; this was the beginning of the end for Dalia.
On August 1, 2009, Dalia met up with the “hitman” Shihadeh had found for her inside a red vehicle. In reality, the hitman was Widy Jean, an undercover cop with a hidden camera in the vehicle. Throughout the conversation with Jean, Dalia looked directly into the hidden camera 15 times; If Dalia considered the small hole to be suspect, she knowingly ignored the risk.
After talking with Dalia for about five minutes, he tells her, “I could get it done by Wednesday if you want me to,” which she agrees to. He tells her that he’ll have to do his “homework” before killing Mike, but it’ll be done on Wednesday morning. The plan was that Dalia would go to the gym in the early morning, then Jean would break into the house as if he were a burglar. “I’m gonna think he’s at work, boom, he’s not at work, then, you know… He gets two in the head.” Dalia responds to this with an apathetic, “Mm-hmm.”
When Jean tells Dalia that there will be no changing her mind once she leaves, she tells him, “There is no changing. No, there is no, like… I’m… I’m determined already. I’m positive, like 5000% sure, like…”
Wednesday morning, Dalia goes to the gym at 6 am. Once she was gone, police knocked on the Dippolito’s door and informed Mike of his wife’s plans, then drove him to the police station. The police then made the exterior of the home look like a crime scene and called Dalia back to the home. When she arrived, they told her that there was a reported disturbance at her home and that two shots had been fired, then asked her if her husband was Mike Dippolito. She nods her head yes and immediately bursts into dramatic crying when they tell her her husband is dead, even embracing the cop for comfort. She repeatedly tells the cops that she wants to see him and that this can’t have happened.
Still in tears, Dalia is escorted back to the police department and questioned. They tell her this is just protocol, because she’s the wife, and inform her of her rights. When they ask her to sign a document agreeing to be videotaped, she tells them she doesn’t want to be videotaped. The cop says that it’s just part of the procedure and Dalia reluctantly signs the paper.
The cop asks her the usual questions, including, “Is there anyone that you think would want to kill your husband?” Dalia tells him that Mike is on probation, then recounts Mike’s entire criminal history, giving multiple possible motives for someone to kill him and naming a possible suspect. The cop explains what they think happened leading up to Mike’s death, saying that Mike answered the door for someone who forced him back upstairs. Before the cop can say anything else about it, Dalia immediately interjects and insists that her husband would not have opened the door. She tells the cop that they have cameras and that Mike never opens the door for anyone and that they have cameras all around the house. After going back and forth with the cop about Mike opening the door, Dalia tells the cops that the cameras at the front and back door don’t actually record.
After a little while more, the cop tells Dalia that he needs to go check the scene and leaves her by herself. Although Dalia showed little to no emotion throughout the questioning, she lays her head down on the table and pretends to cry once he’s gone.
The cop returns 16 minutes later and says to Dalia, “You know that silence is your right, right?” Dalia says yes. “Okay. The game’s over with. Okay? There’s no more games with you and I. Now we’re going to get down to serious business.” He opens the door and asks Dalia if she knows the guy he’s ordering to come inside; The undercover cop, still in character. Both Dalia and Jean deny knowing each other and Jean is ordered to leave.
The cop tells Dalia that Jean is an undercover cop, that they have recordings of their interactions, her husband is alive, and that she’s under arrest for solicitation of first degree murder. Dalia insists she’s innocent and asks to see her husband. When the cop denies her request and leaves the room, Dalia says, “I don’t know what’s going on, please.”
After being handcuffed, Dalia is allowed to see Mike. When she sees him in the hall outside the room, she calls out, “Come here please. Come here. Mike, come here. Come here, please, come here!” Mike says he doesn’t want to come in and tells her that he can’t fix this.
Dalia is then given 15 minutes alone in her cell to let her come to reality, then brought back to the interrogation room with two different cops. The only thing Dalia “admits” to through the entire interrogation is that she wants to call her husband and she wants to go home.
When she’s allowed to use the phone, she calls Mike. She tells him that what the cops are saying isn’t true. Mike asks her how it’s not true when he saw and heard her say it. She tells him, “Look, I heard what you heard. It’s not true! I heard what you heard and I saw what you saw. Everything they showed you, they showed me. I am giving you my word that it is not true!”
Later in the call, Mike asks her how she can say it’s not true, and she says, “How can you believe that?”
“I heard your voice!” Mike responds.
“How can you believe it?”
When Mike tells Dalia that he’s not allowed to come to the police station even if he wanted to, she says, “That’s not true. Who said that? They tell you that on purpose. That’s not true.”
Near the end of the call, Mike says, “You know what I’ll do for you? Seriously? You sign my house back over to me, I’ll help your mom. Immensely. Give me my house back.”
“That’s what you’re thinking about. I’m sitting here rotting and you’re thinking about… getting a house.
After spending twenty months in jail, Dalia had a trial in April 2011. Her defense was that Mike Dippolito was a fan of reality TV and the whole thing was a hoax for him to get on TV. A month later, Dalia was pronounced guilty and sentenced to 20 years in the Department of Corrections. Sadly, though, her sentence was quickly thrown out because of a technicality and Dalia was able to live under house arrest for six years.
Her second trial began in 2016, where she claimed that she, M. Dippolito, and Shihadeh set the whole thing up to get famous, and that she only kept up the act because Shihadeh threatened her with a gun and said he would hurt her family. In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Dalia told the reporter that she’s “understanding, sweet, and compassionate.” Mike, on the other hand, described her as, “Manipulative, conniving, malicious.” Her lawyer said she was, “Baited, enticed, and entrapped,” and claimed she was simply the victim of a fame-hungry police department. “They found out she’s an attractive woman. In their minds, it’s like ching, ching, ching.”
On July 21, 2017, Dalia was sentenced to 16 years in prison without chance of parole.
SOURCES
https://allthatsinteresting.com/dalia-dippolito