BROOKLYN — The spurned ex-assistant district attorney who illegally wiretapped the phone of an NYPD detective she’d been romancing physically cut out copies of judges' signatures from legal documents and then taped them onto bogus ones for 18 months before she was caught, federal prosecutors said Monday.
Tara Lenich, 41, who had been a high-ranking member of the Brooklyn DA’s elite unit that investigates drug and gun rings, also forged a judge’s signature to be able to tap the cellphone of the detective's new lover, who was a colleague of hers in the DA’s office, according to the charges.
Lenich misappropriated DA equipment to intercept, monitor and record the talks between the two phones, according to prosecutors.
The phony documents were sent to AT&T and Verizon ordering the wiretap, which was illegally re-authorized every month until Thanksgiving 2016 when Assistant Deputy Chief Detective Investigator Brian Donohue noticed that the surveillance had been going on since May 2015, prosecutors and law enforcement sources said.
Most most wiretaps don’t last more than a year, law enforcement sources said.
“Tara Lenich violated her duty to the public when she engaged in a long-running scheme to forge judicial documents in order to illegally wiretap telephones,” Acting United States Attorney Bridget Rohde said in a statement.
Lenich, who joined the Brooklyn DA's office in 2005, is charged with illegally intercepting oral and electronic communications.
She is expected to arraigned in Brooklyn Federal Court Monday afternoon.
Her lawyer, Gary Farrell, could not be immediately be reached for comment.
