Jesus Rosario, a 51-year-old man, died on July 4, 2019, after a meeting with Angelina Barini at a motel in Astoria, Queens. Investigators ultimately connected Rosario’s death to a series of fatal druggings involving Barini during the summer of 2019. Federal prosecutors said Barini met Rosario at the Astoria motel and supplied him with drugs containing fentanyl. He was later found dead inside the room. Reporting identified the location as the Airway Inn near LaGuardia Airport and indicated that Rosario’s body was discovered at approximately 11:00 a.m. Surveillance footage showed a woman resembling Barini leaving the motel at approximately 9:30 a.m., roughly 90 minutes before Rosario was found.
The New York City medical examiner determined that Rosario died from acute intoxication caused by the combined effects of alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine and fentanyl. What initially could have appeared to be an accidental drug overdose took on a much different significance as investigators began discovering other men who had died under strikingly similar circumstances after encounters with Barini. Federal prosecutors later described a pattern in which Barini provided narcotics to men in order to incapacitate them and then steal their money or belongings. Some of the drugs she supplied contained lethal quantities of fentanyl.
One week after Rosario’s death, another man died following an encounter with Barini at a motel in Woodside, Queens. A third fatal overdose connected to her occurred in College Point on August 5. The investigation intensified later that month after the death of Cipriani Dolci chef Andrea Zamperoni, whose body was discovered in an Elmhurst motel. By then, investigators were examining the deaths as part of a broader pattern rather than as unrelated overdoses. Barini was arrested on a federal criminal complaint on August 25, 2019, and subsequent indictments expanded the narcotics case against her.
In August 2021, Barini pleaded guilty in Brooklyn federal court to four federal narcotics offenses: two counts of distributing narcotics resulting in death, one count involving the distribution of fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine, and one count of conspiring to distribute GBL. There is an important distinction concerning Rosario’s case. The two guilty-plea counts specifically alleging that drug distribution resulted in death concerned the July 11 and August 5 victims. Rosario’s July 4 encounter was covered by the separate count involving fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine. Nevertheless, federal prosecutors’ later sentencing account expressly stated that Barini met the July 4 victim at an Astoria motel, gave him fentanyl-laced drugs and that he was found dead later that day.
On April 26, 2022, U.S. District Judge Brian M. Cogan sentenced Angelina Barini to 30 years in federal prison. Prosecutors said her conduct was motivated by a scheme to incapacitate victims and rob them, and characterized the multiple deaths as the consequence of her deliberately supplying dangerously potent narcotics. Although Leslie Lescano, Barini’s former boyfriend, was later arrested and prosecuted for his role in the drugging and robbery scheme surrounding Andrea Zamperoni, available federal records do not establish that Lescano was charged with participating in Rosario’s July 4 death. The publicly documented criminal case therefore identifies Barini as the person directly connected to supplying the drugs involved in Rosario’s fatal encounter.
