In the murky world of criminal misadventure, what happened at the Likquid Lounge in Chester, New York, on a night in April 2016 may have some bearing on Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody three years later.

In many ways what happened there has become a conspiracy theory within a conspiracy theory. For while speculation about the actions of Epstein and his circle has long spread across the US, the Likquid Lounge is at the center of a fresh mystery of exactly how Epstein died.

It was there, according to prosecutors, that 49-year-old retired cop turned cocaine dealer Nicholas Tartaglione lured four men, at least one – Martin Luna – with ties to the Mexican mafia. Tartaglione suspected Luna had stolen $250,000 from him and planned to confront him. Luna, 41, brought along two nephews and a family friend.

Tartaglione allegedly forced one of Luna’s nephews to observe as he beat and strangled Luna to death with a zip tie. Tartaglione and two others then took Luna’s body, along with Miguel Luna, Urbano Santiago and Hector Gutierrez, to his dog and equine animal sanctuary in Otisville, New York.

The three surviving men were forced to kneel and were shot in the head, execution-style, and all four buried in a mass grave. Nine months later, after investigators connected Tartaglione to Luna, the bodies were unearthed. A neighbor said Tartaglione’s property “smelled like death”.

Tartaglione was arrested and charged with kidnapping and murder. But it wasn’t until 2023 that the bodybuilder, who had a patchy career as a police officer, was convicted and sentenced to four consecutive life sentences for the killings. He’d pleaded not guilty, claiming that he’d been framed.

But in that time, while held at the now-abandoned metropolitan corrections center in Manhattan, Tartaglione was placed in the same cell as Epstein, the notorious sex trafficker whose scandal as roiled American politics. It was later reported they “gotten along pretty well” as cellmates.

But after Epstein was found with injuries to his neck in July 2019 – an incident that Tartaglione alerted guards to – he initially said Tartaglione attacked him. He later retracted the claim, and prison officials concluded that Epstein had tried to kill himself.

Crucially, Tartaglione reported finding a note from Epstein hidden in a graphic novel he was reading but had not discovered it until four days later, after Epstein had been removed from their cell and briefly placed on suicide watch. Tartaglione passed it to his lawyers. Two weeks later, in what was ruled a suicide, Epstein was found dead in his cell.

That note was finally released last week, after the New York Times petitioned the federal court in White Plains, New York, where Tartaglione was tried.

“They investigated me for month – FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note begins, adding that the result was charges going back 15 years.

“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note continued.

“Watcha want me to do – Bust out cryin!!” the note reads.

“NO FUN,” it concludes, with those words underlined. “NOT WORTH IT!!”

But it has only turned up now because it became part of a dispute between Tartaglione’s lawyers in the murder case and court-appointed lawyers assigned to fight the death penalty phase of the case should he be convicted, but prosecutors ultimately dropped their intent to seek that penalty before Tartaglione’s case came to trial.

He was facing the death penalty at the time and his conduct in jail is a relevant factor in front of a jury whether or not they should they vote for death, says Tartaglione’s trial lawyer Bruce Barket.

“There were some unsubstantiated allegations that he had assaulted Epstein when Epstein tried to kill himself the first time. We had the note, and we knew that wasn’t true, but we thought we could use it for those purposes,” he adds.

But initially, “nobody was quite sure what it was, who wrote it, or who it belonged to, until several months later”. Plus, Barket says, “Nick had a variety of other issues to deal with, chief among them would be defending himself against a quadruple homicide allegation. Once we got passed there was no allegation that he’d harmed Epstein, it become irrelevant to us.”

But the existence of the note has hardly quieted theories that Epstein was killed in jail. Mark Epstein, Epstein’s younger brother, who has long maintained Epstein was murdered in his cell, has claimed the note is a forgery.

“It wouldn’t be hard to get some pro forger to forge a note,” he told Business Insider. “That’s the easiest f***ing thing in the world to do.” He said the phrase “bust out cryin” line is a reference to the Little Rascals TV show the brothers had watched as children.

The line appears in Epstein’s emails, he acknowledged, “so they stole it from me to make it sound like it was him”.

“Everyone is entitled to their opinion,” says Barket, who adds that the using the note to bolster an Epstein murder scenario is “laughable” since it would require someone to have access to Epstein’s emails in 2019, six years before they were released by congressional order.

“There is no conspiracy,” he says. “The idea that [Epstein] was murdered is absurd. He killed himself. He’d tried at least one other time and he succeeded.”

The idea that Epstein was murdered, he continues, “is a great mission impossible. The idea that someone got to the 10th floor of a federal detention center and somehow snuck in, murder somebody, snuck out, and no one ever saw that person is kinda ridiculous.”

Theories that it could have been someone on Epstein’s tier of cells is equally far-fetched, he says. “They’re all a bunch of knuckleheads, no offense to my client, and they’re all locked into their own cells at night.”

But in the carnival funhouse of the Epstein scandal, nothing is ever accepted as it appears. The intersecting Tartaglione story is no exception and it has been taken up by blogger Jessica Reed Kraus. Tartaglione left her a voice mail last week claiming that Epstein actually wanted to be placed back in the cell with him.

“Epstein offered me money to not return to general population and stay in the box with him because he felt safe with me,” he reportedly said on the voice mail.

He also pointed out, “If I wanted to hurt Jeffrey Epstein, I could have hurt Jeffrey Epstein. I didn’t hurt Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.”

Tartaglione is seeking to appeal his conviction on the grounds that it was obtained on shaky evidence – no murder weapon, drug money or trafficking paraphernalia was ever found, and his DNA was not found on the zip tie prosecutors said he had used to strangle Luna.

His appeals lawyer Inga Parsons provided a statement to Kraus. In it, she pointed to fact that Tartaglione was prosecuted by Maurene Comey, who also led the prosecutions against Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Sean “Diddy” Combs.

“Nick is retired law enforcement. He rescues animals. He is not a killer, nor is he a member of the Mexican cartel as the main cooperator, and the men who were killed by the cartel were cartel members. Nick Tartaglione is innocent and is unjustly serving life sentences for crimes he did not commit,” Parsons said.

According to Barket, his former client’s brief encounter with Epstein was neither helpful nor unhelpful to his case.

“It’s an unfortunate sequence of events. I don’t think it hurt Nick at all but it didn’t help him. But it led to a long hearing involving me and my firm about our conduct around the note. All things being equal, I would have taken a pass on all this.”