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Chicago real estate developer Daniel Dvorkin was sentenced to eight years in prison by a federal judge on Monday for his attempt to hire a professional hit man to murder a debt collector.
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Dvorin, 76, has already spent a year in prison since he was convicted of the charges back in August of 2013 for solicitation of murder and five counts of using a telephone and car to commit murder-for-hire. He wanted to have a Texas based debt collector killed after the man had won an $8 million judgment against Dvorkin in a civil court in 2012. The debt came from Dvorkin’s firm’s having defaulted on loans on its two corporate jets.
Dvorkin, according to the charges, looked for a hit man back in April of 2012, one month before he was obligated to make the payment on the debt. But in a story that sounds like it came out of an episode of Law and Order, the prospective assassin, a gun shop owner, got cold feet and decided to cooperate with the authorities, informing on Dvorkin.
An arrest was made in July 2012 before Dvorkin made a final deal with the hit man because because federal authorities feared that he would try and hire someone else after Dvorkin did not agree to the asked for price.
Dvorkin’s lawyers made a plea for leniency for their client in sentencing, pointing to his charitable works. But prosecutors described him in their sentencing memo as a “a calm, cool, collected businessman who negotiated the price of a hit man as though he were closing a real estate deal, who showed only real concern for his bank account over the life of [the victim].”
Prosecutors had sought an 11 year sentence.
Timothy Parlatore, Dvorkin’s lawyer, maintains that his client was framed saying, “He’s disappointed and was hoping for a lesser sentence, and certainly his options for an appeal are still existent. He does intend to appeal because ultimately this is an invented case.”
