CHICAGO
U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin sentenced a father who offered to hire a hit man to execute two potential witnesses in his son’s murder trial to 17 years and six months in prison, officials announced.
“The defendant’s conduct strikes at the heart of the criminal justice system,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter S. Salib argued in the government’s sentencing memorandum. “Without witnesses, criminal cases can never be judged on the merits of the evidence.”
Euripides Caguana, 61, paid an undercover person $500 to buy a gun, and offered to pay up to $7,500 to have the two potential witnesses killed, according to authorities.
Officials said he is heard on a recording telling the individual, “I want both of them, both of them.”
In October 2013, a cooperating person notified law enforcement that Euripides Caguana, of Chicago, had called him seeking to have two men killed to prevent them from testifying against Travis Caguana.
Over the course of a few days, officials said the cooperating individual and an undercover police officer—posing as a hit man—engaged in a series of secretly recorded meetings and conversations with Euripides Caguana.
A jury in May convicted Caguana on four counts of murder for hire. He was sentenced on Friday.
Federal prosecutors played secret audio recordings of Caguana as his trial got underway, according to a report on CBS Chicago.
“We’re gonna do it. We’re gonna do it,” Caguana told Jimmy Valentine on the recording, the report stated.
“I’ve got a dude on standby,” replied Valentine, on the other end of the line.
But the “dude” Valentine was talking about was an undercover police officer. And Caguana was arrested after he met the would-be hit man.
Valentine, who did plumbing work for Caguana and was briefly his neighbor in Ashburn on the Southwest Side, testified last week that he called police after Caguana shared the plan to kill the two teens, according to the CBS report.
Caguana’s son, Travis Caguana, is charged with murder in the Circuit Court of Cook County in connection with a fatal drive-by shooting of a man on June 8, 2011.
The FBI and the Chicago Police Department investigated this case.