He Freed an Innocent Man From Prison. It Ruined His Life.

Flashes flashed and shutters snapped as an exuberant crowd focused its attention on Martin Tankleff.

It was Dec. 27, 2007, a few days after a New York appeals court had overturned Mr. Tankleff’s conviction in the vicious killings of his parents at their waterfront mansion. Now, surrounded by lawyers, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends at a Long Island courthouse, he was a free man after nearly 20 years in prison.

Standing just behind him in the celebratory throng was a beefy man in a dark suit and red tie: Jay Salpeter, a former New York City police detective turned private investigator who had done as much as, perhaps more than, anyone to make the happy occasion possible.

“I’m letting you know you’ll never get rid of me for life since you’ve given me my life back,” Mr. Tankleff wrote to Mr. Salpeter the day the conviction was set aside.

Fourteen years later, Mr. Salpeter, leaner and grayer, was in a Long Island courthouse again, his face behind a blue surgical mask because of the Covid-19 pandemic. He was handcuffed and charged with felonies in connection with a three-year barrage of ominous calls and emails seeking money from a former client: Martin Tankleff.

The Tankleff case had briefly put Mr. Salpeter, a son of Bayside, Queens, on the low rungs of celebrity. He was a guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Dr. Phil” and “Nancy Grace.” He and Mr. Tankleff formed an investigative firm, Fortress Innocence Group, and introduced it at a splashy Manhattan news conference. Later came financial distress, mental health problems, heavy drinking and claims of impropriety lodged by angry clients.

Now, accused of threatening to harm Mr. Tankleff and ruin his reputation, Mr. Salpeter was facing the prospect of years in prison.

Mr. Salpeter, 71, had once said that, except for when his children were born, the day Mr. Tankleff left prison was the best day of his life. But by the time of his arraignment in May 2021, he regretted ever having opened Mr. Tankleff’s urgent letter seeking his help all those years ago.

“I never had these problems before Marty,” he said in one of several interviews over the past two years.

How It Began

On a September morning in 1988, Marty Tankleff, then 17, woke to find his mother, Arlene, fatally stabbed in her bed, and his father, Seymour, bleeding in the den, stabbed and beaten so badly he would die in a month. The boy called 911.

Marty, his relatives and others told investigators to focus on Jerry Steuerman, a shop owner who called himself the Bagel King of Long Island and who owed Seymour Tankleff $500,000.

Detectives homed in on Marty instead, partly because of what they said was his inadequate display of emotion. They obtained a quick confession with a lie: that Seymour Tankleff had briefly come to at the hospital and named Marty as the attacker.

The trial was sensational. When it was over, despite recanting, Marty was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to 25 years to life.

A decade later, in December 2000, a fellow prisoner from Long Island recommended that Mr. Tankleff, on a ceaseless drive to prove his innocence, contact Jay Salpeter.

By then, Mr. Salpeter had been a private investigator for a few years, starting with matrimonial and minor criminal cases after two decades with the New York Police Department as a beat cop, street decoy, hostage negotiator and homicide detective.

He was skeptical of Marty Tankleff. In fact, he thought he was guilty.

But after explaining that he could help Mr. Tankleff only if he was truly innocent — and then arranging a lie-detector test — Mr. Salpeter took the case. Unlike Mr. Tankleff’s lawyers, he didn’t work pro bono. He wasn’t that liquid.

His fee: a flat $5,000.

The investigation would last more than six years.

A Thread to Tug At

Mr. Salpeter’s first step was to review the thick case file. He was stunned by what he found. The killings had never been thoroughly investigated. The prosecution rested almost solely on the recanted confession. The supposed motive — a teenager’s anger over a car his father had given him — was shaky; the physical evidence was scant; and the police had never treated Mr. Steuerman, the Bagel King, seriously as a suspect.

Mr. Salpeter found a thread to tug at in the statement of a woman who had told detectives that a local hoodlum had admitted his role in the murders to her, saying he had been at the Tankleffs’ house with someone named Steuerman on the night of the attacks.

No one had followed up on the lead. Mr. Salpeter tracked down the hoodlum’s criminal associates. One confessed to being the getaway driver and also implicated a third man in the crime. The statements underpinned a motion to reopen the case.

Mr. Salpeter brought a Long Island lawyer with whom he had worked before, Bruce Barket, onto the Tankleff team and continued to dig. He set up a tip line that yielded additional witnesses in an investigation that consumed thousands of hours.

Mr. Salpeter was catching up too. He appeared on TV; collaborated on a book about the case; and joined the defense team that won the release of the West Memphis Three, three Arkansas men convicted as teenagers of killing three boys in what prosecutors called a cult ritual. The author Dominick Dunne hired him for help in a lawsuit. He aided the defense of Anthony Marshall, convicted of stealing from his mother, the socialite Brooke Astor.

In 2008, Mr. Salpeter and Mr. Tankleff teamed up to start the Fortress firm. The goal: Get work from corporate law firms on their pro bono cases. They celebrated at Peter Luger steakhouse the night before announcing the venture, whose logo showed a silhouette of two birds flying free. Rubin Carter, the former prizefighter and exoneree known as Hurricane, was at the news conference. A beautiful day, he called it.

But the firm never got off the ground, and by 2011, Mr. Tankleff and Mr. Salpeter had fallen out.

Mr. Salpeter blamed Mr. Tankleff’s wife, Laurie, whom he had met and married after leaving prison. The split came after a confrontation at the Long Island offices of Mr. Barket’s firm, where the Tankleffs worked and where Mr. Salpeter kept an office.

After appearing suddenly at the door one day, the couple entered. They talked for a time, and then Ms. Tankleff unloaded on Mr. Salpeter, accusing him of maintaining his ties to Mr. Tankleff only for money.

Mr. Salpeter was livid. There was no money to speak of. The litigation against Suffolk County and New York State had not been resolved. The exchange became heated, and Mr. Salpeter screamed at Ms. Tankleff. Mr. Tankleff, in Mr. Salpeter’s telling, sat by silently. (Mr. Tankleff filed for divorce from Laurie Tankleff last year; efforts to contact her through her lawyer were unsuccessful.)

Mr. Tankleff, who declined to be interviewed, offered others a different explanation for what had caused the estrangement. He felt as though Mr. Salpeter was trying to control him. He resented, among other things, being asked to help promote Mr. Salpeter’s book and he thought Mr. Salpeter had invited him to his daughter’s wedding to show him off. Yes, Mr. Salpeter had given him his life back. Why wouldn’t he let him live it?

The relationship between the two men had gained one of them freedom and both of them a measure of fame. Suddenly, they were not even on speaking terms.

A Downward Spiral

The financial problems that had begun while he worked on that case mounted, court records show. His home in Glen Cove went into foreclosure. Tens of thousands of dollars in federal and state tax liens piled up.

As Mr. Salpeter’s fortunes declined, Mr. Tankleff prospered. After graduating from college and getting married, he earned a law degree. In 2014, he settled his suit against the state for $3.4 million. His lawyers took the typical third.

Mr. Salpeter, who had been paid several thousand dollars to consult on the civil suits, turned to Mr. Barket: Would he arrange a meeting with Mr. Tankleff to discuss whether there might be anything in the payout for him?

Mr. Tankleff did not want to meet, Mr. Barket said. And, he added, legal ethics prevented someone who was not a lawyer from participating in the settlement.

Mr. Salpeter sank into depression. Sometimes, he went to his office and slept. He spent a year, maybe two, mostly at home. His drinking increased. Several clients complained to state officials that he had not provided them with written contracts or detailed reports of the work he had done. He settled the matters with nominal fines.

The residual fame from the Tankleff case still attracted clients. One, Marina Lebron, met Mr. Salpeter in August 2014.

Ms. Lebron, whose husband was in prison for murder, was put off by how Mr. Salpeter bragged about his importance. Nonetheless, she paid him a $6,000 retainer to help get her husband out. Then, after hearing nothing for months, she confronted him. He apologized, sent her $2,000 and vowed to repay the rest. When he did not, she got a judgment against him. When he failed to pay that, she filed a complaint with the state.

The grievance was one of at least nine filed against Mr. Salpeter, state records show. One said he should be investigated “because he is taking advantage of inmates.” Another said he had replied to inquiries with “excuses and mild threats.”

Mr. Salpeter acknowledged that he had not always accomplished what the aggrieved clients had hoped, but he said they had unrealistic expectations. Do a miracle once, and everyone assumes that’s what they’ll get.

Whatever he earned was not enough. In July 2017, he began to borrow money from a friend of a friend from Bayside.

Over the next two years, Mr. Salpeter borrowed $120,000 in transactions documented on A.T.M. receipts, memo-pad pages and other paper scraps, according to a lawsuit the lender filed but later abandoned. With interest tacked on, the debt had reached $200,000 by late 2019.

Mr. Tankleff settled his suit against Suffolk County in April 2018 for $10 million. Mr. Salpeter again asked Mr. Barket if he might arrange a meeting with Mr. Tankleff in hopes of getting a share, he was again told no.

By then, when the workdays, such as they were, ended, Mr. Salpeter would hit the bar at Ruth’s Chris steakhouse at the Roosevelt Field mall and have four or five vodka and tonics.

Drunk and depressed, he would bombard Mr. Tankleff with emails and phone messages demanding money. As time passed, the badgering turned darker.

“So Marty, do you think your freedom is worth 150-200k?” Mr. Salpeter wrote in a February 2020 email shared by someone close to Mr. Tankleff. “It’s better than being at Clinton,” he added, referring to the upstate prison where the two had first met.

In another email several months later, he asked whether Mr. Tankleff could “recommend a good lawyer for a homicide arrest.”

Mr. Salpeter would contact Mr. Tankleff several times a day, dropping references to how strong he was or how he had just seen the movie “Dead Man Walking.” Sometimes he commented on changes in his former client’s appearance in ways that made Mr. Tankleff feel he was being stalked by a man who he knew was licensed to carry a gun.

Mr. Tankleff tried at least once to defuse the situation, telling Mr. Salpeter via email that he was not ignoring his messages, but blocking them on the advice of lawyers and others. When the time was right, he wrote, he would arrange a meeting.

No meeting ever occurred.

A Halfhearted Defense

Mr. Barket warned Mr. Salpeter repeatedly to stop. He did not. That left Mr. Tankleff with three choices: Let the calls and emails continue, pay Mr. Salpeter or go to the authorities. He chose the last one.

When Mr. Salpeter was indicted, Mr. Tankleff responded with a brief statement calling it a sad day. Mr. Salpeter denied doing anything sinister and insisted he would never hurt his former client but he admitted to the calls and emails.

His lawyers suggested a psychiatric defense: Depression, aggravated by heavy drinking, and post-traumatic stress caused by his police career and his experience with Mr. Tankleff were to blame.

A few months after he was indicted, a hearing on Ms. Lebron’s complaint was held in a drab government room in Lower Manhattan. Because of the pandemic, the participants — an administrative judge, a state lawyer, Ms. Lebron and Mr. Salpeter — appeared via video monitor. A reporter and two state employees were the only ones physically present in the room.

Mr. Salpeter’s defense was halfhearted. He did not deny the gist of the allegations, although he produced a document he said he had secured for Ms. LeBron’s benefit. He was a victim of unrealistic expectations, he maintained.

Several weeks later, the administrative judge, citing dishonesty and incompetence, suspended his license. Mr. Salpeter had already contacted state officials to relinquish it.

The criminal case ended quietly. Mr. Salpeter pleaded guilty last June to aggravated harassment, a misdemeanor. He was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to stay away from Mr. Tankleff, now a lawyer at Mr. Barket’s firm. When the brief hearing ended, Mr. Salpeter thanked the judge politely and headed out into the sweltering heat.

Nine months later, at the Glen Cove condominium he shares with his third wife, Amy, Mr. Salpeter appeared sober, reflective and mostly retired — though he still sends hectoring emails to Mr. Barket. He said he was mainly filling his time with exercise, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and sessions with a psychotherapist. He and his wife live off his police pension, Social Security and what she brings in.

He can no longer carry a gun and is, for all practical purposes, done investigating.

“That was my passion,” he said wistfully. “I was good.”

As he spoke, he paused and pulled out a list of his most notable clients and cases. At the top was a familiar name: Martin Tankleff.

Was it a source of pride or regret?

“I would do it again,” Mr. Salpeter said.