Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Page 3
Ninth Circuit:
Murder-for-Hire Conviction Stands for Ex-New York Lawyer
Opinion Rejects Assertion That Northern District of California Was Improper Venue Where Only Links to State Were Wire-Transfers Made to San Francisco Account After Offense Was ‘Complete’
By Kimber Cooley, associate editor
|
|
|
ALLEN GESSEN defendant |
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday upheld the murder-for-hire conviction of a now-disbarred New York attorney accused of offering an undercover officer $50,000 to kill the mother of his children, rejecting the defendant’s claim that his constitutional rights were violated by conducting the trial in the Northern District of California where the only connection to the state was the account into which a portion of the payment was made.
Yesterday’s opinion, written by Circuit Judge Mark J. Bennett, acknowledges that Article III of the U.S. Constitution requires that criminal trials shall “be held in the State where said Crimes shall have been committed” and the Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants “an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”
However, he analogized the murder-for-hire offense to kidnapping and said:
“Just as a kidnapping consists of ‘distinct parts’ in ‘different localities’ when a perpetrator moves their victim across state lines,….the victim of a murder-for-hire is not safe until the plan is foiled or the culprits arrested. So until that point, each act of travel or use of interstate commerce facilities in furtherance of the plot continues the criminal offense. Put another way, the offense ‘does not terminate merely because all of the elements are met.’ ”
Introduction to Agent
The question arose after federal prosecutors charged Allen Gessen with a murder-for-hire plot based on allegations that he was introduced to David Rizzo, an FBI agent who was posing as an undercover member of an organized-crime syndicate, after he asked an acquaintance to connect him with someone who could help him bribe an immigration officer to have his ex-girlfriend, Priscilla Chigariro, deported.
Rizzo recorded the June 2022 meeting in Boca Raton at which Gessen said he would be open to other, “cheaper” ways “to get rid of her.” When the officer told him that a “more permanent” option would cost him less than the bribery route, Gessen said he was “prepared to proceed” with that path.
A few weeks later, back in New York, Gessen handed a gold coin worth $2,000 to the agent and agreed to pay an additional $23,000 as a “down payment” via wire transfer to a San Francisco business account. He again confirmed that he was “on board” with a “final solution” that looked like a “random act,” and transferred the funds a few days later.
Violation of §1958
On July 28, 2022, the day on which the killing was supposed to occur, he was arrested for violating 18 U.S.C. §1958, which provides:
“Whoever travels in or causes another…to travel in interstate or foreign commerce, or uses or causes another…to use the mail or any facility of interstate or foreign commerce, with intent that a murder be committed…as consideration for the receipt of, or as consideration for a promise or agreement to pay, anything of pecuniary value, or who conspires to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned….”
At the ensuing trial, Gessen testified that he had a “very different understanding of what was being discussed” with the undercover agent. After a jury found him guilty in May 2023, he moved for a judgment of acquittal and a new trial, challenging the sufficiency of evidence, that the venue was improper, and that he was wrongly adjudged guilty in “the absence of” an actual hitman.
On January 16, 2024, District Court Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the Northern District of California rejected his requests, saying that “[n]othing in the statute suggests the person to whom the defendant promises to pay money…must be the person who the defendant believes will personally commit the murder” and that “[s]ufficient evidence demonstrated some acts in furtherance of [the] scheme occurred in the Northern District.”
She sentenced him to 10 years in prison in April 2024.
Completion of Crime
Bennett noted that, for statutes that do not contain an express venue provision, courts are directed to look to the location of the offense’s essential conduct elements and that venue may be proper in more than one judicial district for so-called “continuing crimes.”
Turning to the elements of the section, he remarked:
“Travel in interstate or foreign commerce ‘requires transport[]…over a period of time and distance,’…and so the offense can span those judicial districts through which the defendant (or another person) crosses. The same is true for the use of the mail or any facility of interstate or foreign commerce….Because a murder for-hire plot ‘span[s] space and time,’ it ‘may be considered [a] continuing offense[].’ ”
He distinguished Eighth and Eleventh Circuit decisions finding that the crime is complete once the interstate-commerce facility is used with the required intent, commenting:
“The murder for-hire plot in each involved only a single act of travel and use of an interstate-commerce instrument….
Offense Spans Geography
“Review of the indictment here, by contrast,….[c]onfirms that the offense spanned both time and geography—lasting more than seven weeks, crossing multiple judicial districts, and involving both travel in and use of facilities of interstate and foreign commerce. Thus, the murder-for-hire can be tried ‘in all of the places that any part of it took place.’ ”
The jurist said:
“Gessen urges that the evidence of wire transmissions to the San Francisco bank account could not be considered in determining venue because his offense was already complete before he wired those payments. In his view, ‘the offense was committed and completed prior to the money transfers on June 29 and July 8, 2022,’ when Gessen ‘first contacted Rizzo via Signal message or met with him on June 2, 2022 in Florida or later in New York.’ ”
Unpersuaded, Bennett wrote:
“[A] rational trier of fact could not conclude that the offense was complete when Gessen first contacted Rizzo because that occurred before he asked Rizzo to arrange the murder and the two agreed to a price….Again, in order to convict, the jury had to find that ‘some act in furtherance of the crime charged occurred in the Northern District of California.’ And the jury did so find.”
As to his argument that he did not violate §1958 because there was no true agreement to kill, he declared that “an actual agreement is not required” by §1958. He added:
“Gessen relies on the fact that neither he nor Rizzo ever used the words ‘murder,’ ‘kill,’ or ‘murder-for-hire.’ But our inquiry is not so narrow.”
The case is U.S. v. Gessen, 24-2979.
Copyright 2026, Metropolitan News Company