It looks like the honeymoon ended very quickly for Michael Dippolito.
The 38-year-old Florida man met his pretty, dark-haired wife Dalia, 26, at a local Starbucks about a year ago. After a whirlwind affair, the couple married in late January, three days after his divorce from an earlier marriage was finalized, according to the Palm Beach Post newspaper.
“We hit it off,” Michael Dippolito told Matt Lauer Monday on the TODAY show. “Me and my wife actually got along so well we were together 24/7.”
So Dippolito was stunned to learn that his new bride hired a hit man to take his life, according to police.
“It hasn’t sunk in. I don’t really get what really happened,” Dippolito told Lauer.
Money motive?
Michael said he and Dalia had a fairly set routine — they went to the gym together, visited his family Friday nights and ate Sunday dinner with her family.
He told Lauer he couldn’t imagine why his wife would want him dead, but officials believe the motive may have been financial. Michael recently transferred the deed to a $243,000 townhouse where the couple lived to his real-estate agent wife, according to the Miami Herald.
Michael, who said he works from home doing e-mail marketing, spent seven months in state prison in 2003 and 2004 after being convicted of grand theft and organized fraud. His lawyers told the TODAY show those convictions are unrelated to the alleged murder-for-hire plot.
According to police, after a male friend of hers tipped them off, Dalia Dippolito hired an undercover police officer posing as a hit man to kill her husband for the bargain price of $3,000, plus $1,200 for the purchase of a gun.