DA will ask for 50-to-life sentence for embezzling assistant who slaughtered his tech CEO boss

Moments before his death, Gokada ride-share CEO Fahim Saleh makes small talk with the embezzling ex-personal assistant who is about to kill him.

Manhattan prosecutors will ask on Tuesday for a 50-years-to-life sentence for Tyrese Haspil, the personal assistant convicted of charges stemming from the murder, decapitation, and dismemberment of Fahim Saleh, the tech CEO who was his former boss, according to the killer’s defense lawyer.

The sentence would mean Haspil — who was 21 when he ambushed and slaughtered the founder of Gokada, a Nigerian app-based delivery service, inside his Manhattan condo — would be 71 before he could request release from a New York parole board that could keep him in prison until he dies.

Prosecutors will not be asking for life without parole, which is the highest sentence that New York Supreme Court Justice April Newbauer can hand down on Tuesday. District Attorney Alvin Bragg promised when he took office that he would never seek life without parole.

But Haspil’s public defender, Sam Roberts, told B-17 before the sentencing that the 50-to-life term sought by prosecutors “amounts to de facto life without parole.”

“In the context of a young person, and given the prison mortality stats, you’re probably going to die in prison,” with a 50-year sentence said Roberts, of New York City’s Legal Aid Society.

Pretrial, prosecutors offered to recommend Haspil be sentenced to 35 years-to-life, Roberts said. The judge sweetened the proffered plea deal, saying she’d sentence Haspil to just 33-to-life if the case didn’t go to trial, the lawyer added.

In that context, the 50-to-life sentence now recommended by prosecutors amounts to a surcharge against Haspil, punishing him over the decision to go to trial, Roberts said.

Haspil had hoped to convince a Manhattan jury this summer that he suffered from an extreme emotional disturbance and is guilty only of manslaughter. Jurors rejected defense arguments that Haspil believed he had no choice but to kill his boss because he was desperate to hide a $400,000 embezzlement and obsessed with lavishing gifts on his girlfriend.

“This is a trial tax and that’s offensive to due process,” Haspil’s lawyer complained of prosecutors’ decision to significantly up the ante, post trial, from 35 years-to-life.

The sentence prosecutors plan to recommend Tuesday would break down to 25-to-life for the murder, plus five years each on two counts of grand larceny, plus 15 years for burglary, Roberts said.

A spokeswoman for the DA’s office declined to comment on this story.