On the Fourth of July in 2019, as the night sky over New York City exploded in a symphony of celebratory fireworks, a far more sinister event was unfolding in a nondescript motel room. Near LaGuardia Airport, inside the Airway Inn, police responding to a call discovered the lifeless body of a man. At first glance, it appeared to be another tragic statistic in the city’s raging fentanyl crisis.

The medical examiner confirmed a fatal overdose, a cocktail of fentanyl, cocaine, and meth. Security cameras showed a woman leaving his room just hours earlier, but with no name on the hotel registry, the trail was cold. It was a quiet death amid the city’s loud celebration, but it was not an isolated incident. It was the beginning of a trail of bodies that would lead investigators to a deadly duo: a predatory prostitute and her pimp.

Just one week later, on July 11, another call came in, this time from the Crown Motel just a few miles away in Woodside, Queens. Police found another man, 28-year-old John Alexander Silvero, dead in his room. The cause was identical: a massive fentanyl overdose. His family said he was supposed to be meeting his girlfriend, but CCTV footage told a different story.

It showed Silvero entering the motel not with his girlfriend, but with the same mysterious woman seen at the Airway Inn. Still, in a city grappling with over 1,500 annual fentanyl deaths, the two cases were logged as separate, tragic overdoses. The deadly pattern remained hidden in plain sight.

The scheme may have continued unnoticed had the predators not chosen a victim whose disappearance would sound an alarm across the city. Andrea Zamperoni, 33, was not a man who would simply vanish. An Italian-born culinary star, he had worked his way up to become the head chef of the prestigious Cipriani Dolci at Grand Central Terminal.

Described by colleagues as responsible, kind, and incredibly hardworking, he was the first to arrive and the last to leave. So, on August 17, when he failed to show up for his shift without a word, his manager knew something was gravely wrong and immediately alerted the NYPD.

Investigators quickly pieced together Zamperoni’s last known movements. His roommate saw him on the morning of August 17. CCTV footage captured him leaving his building and, later that night, entering the Kamway Lodge in Queens. He was not alone. With him was the same woman from the other two death scenes.

Two days later, police arrived at the Kamway Lodge. When they knocked on the door of Room 15, a woman opened it, saw their badges, and tried to slam it shut. The officers forced their way in and were immediately hit by a putrid, overpowering odor, which the woman had tried to mask with scented candles.

“It wasn’t me,” she blurted out, “it was my pimp.” Before the detectives could even locate the source of the smell, their eyes were drawn to a large trash can with a bedsheet clumsily thrown over it. When they pulled back the fabric, they saw a human foot.

The woman was identified as Angela Barin, 41. The body in the bin was the missing chef, Andrea Zamperoni. The room was a tableau of horrors: a suitcase, an electric saw, drug paraphernalia, and Zamperoni’s American Express card. An autopsy would later reveal his system was flooded with alcohol, cocaine, and GHB, a notorious “party drug” used to render victims unconscious.

Barin was arrested on the spot. In custody, she spun a tale of a client encounter gone wrong. She claimed Zamperoni was her customer, that they did drugs together, and she awoke to find him dead. She alleged her boyfriend and pimp forbade her from calling 911 and suggested they dismember the body instead. But the evidence told a story of a cold, calculated, and predatory modus operandi.

The investigation soon led to her accomplice, Leslie Lescano, a Filipino national living in the U.S. illegally. By accessing Barin’s social media accounts, detectives uncovered their entire operation. Lescano was not just Barin’s pimp and boyfriend; he was her partner in crime.

Their social media messages, retrieved by forensic experts, laid the plot bare. On August 16, Barin had messaged Lescano about a “job.” He booked the room at the Kamway Lodge while Barin lured Zamperoni there. According to Lescano’s later confession, his role was to hide in the bathroom while Barin “entertained” the client.

CCTV footage and their own messages confirmed the chilling sequence of events. After Barin drugged Zamperoni, she took his credit card and gave it to Lescano. He was then captured on camera at a nearby pharmacy and deli, buying gift cards, toiletries, cheese, and cigarettes at Barin’s request. The plot was never about sex; it was about robbery, and it had turned fatal.

For the next few days, as Zamperoni’s body decomposed in the room, Barin was seen on camera coming and going, at one point dragging the large trash can into the room and later attempting to borrow a hand truck.

At their trial in April 2022, the two turned on each other, each painting the other as the mastermind. But the prosecution presented an airtight case built on CCTV footage and their own damning words. They were both found guilty.

Angela Barin, the hands-on predator, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Leslie Lescano, the accomplice, received a sentence of two and a half years, after which he would be deported back to the Philippines.

While Zamperoni’s family and friends mourned the loss of a brilliant chef in Italy, Barin, less than a month into her sentence, filed an appeal. It wasn’t to protest her innocence, but to request a transfer to a low-security federal prison in Minnesota.

The reason: it had a program that allowed inmates to train service dogs, an activity she claimed would help her build “confidence and patience”—a chillingly detached request from a woman who had shown no mercy to the men whose lives she so carelessly destroyed.