A New Jersey woman who sought to have her romantic rival killed because she was dating her former boyfriend was sentenced to six years in a federal lockup today.
Marissa Mark, 29, of Jersey City, hired a hit man to commit murder and tried to pay for the job with stolen credit cards.
The target of Mark's alleged plot was not physically harmed.
Mark pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy to use interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire, three counts of aggravated identity theft and attempted access device fraud.
Prosecutors said that in 2006, while living in Allentown, Mark visited the hitmanforhire website seeking a hit man to kill "A.L.R." by shooting her in the head.
She contracted a person to complete the job for $37,000, prosecutors said, and used three stolen credit card accounts belonging to other people and made payments to the hit man using PayPal.
The credit card payments to the hit man were reversed, prosecutors said, but the hit man, now with a target but without a payday, tried to extort Mark's romantic rival.
Mark was arrested in March 2011 at her residence in Jersey City and later confessed to the crimes.
Authorities said her admissions could not be introduced against the hit man, Essam Eid, whose extradition from Ireland to California last year on extortion charges limited any additional charges against him.
Eid was charged by a federal grand jury in California in early 2007 with extortion conspiracy and threats to injure in interstate commerce but his arrest and subsequent conviction in Ireland in a similar murder-for-hire plot delayed his extradition to the United States.
