Pod Insights Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén Dalia Dippolito: A Black Widow, a Murder Plot, and a Web of Lies About this episode A seemingly heartbroken newlywed becomes the face of a shocking murder-for-hire plot—caught on tape before the crime can even happen. But as the trial unfolds, the real mystery isn’t what she planned, it’s how far reality can bend when everyone knows the cameras are watching.
Sources for this episode include:Murder for Hire, "Crocodile Tears" (S1, E11 - 2019) Cnapped, "Dalia Dippolito (S8, E10 - 2012)"Murder Plots, Bumbling Cops, and Con Men: When Reality TV Goes Wrong" (VICE)"Florida Woman Dalia Dippolito Uses Reality TV Defense in Murder for Hire Trial" (ABC News)"Wife Accused in Plot to Kill Husband Speaks While on House Arrest" (ABC News, Interview)
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:06 Harvey Guillén? She is perhaps the most notorious of all spiders: The Black Widow. A crimson hourglass, a warning to any that might threaten her. A male, a fraction of her size and lacking her powerful venom, approaches. Driven by instinct, unaware of the peril, he announces his presence by plucking the strands of her web. A courtship dance. If successful, he will ensure his genetic line continues, but it will come at a great cost. Once mating is complete, she moves with surgical precision. Her fangs, built for flies and beetles, sink into him instead.
0:49 Harvey Guillén? His body will provide her with valuable nutrients. And as cruel as the act may seem to our human sensibilities, there are parallels in the lives of men. Love, attraction, lust. They fog our vision. They make choices that would have otherwise seemed ludicrous seem sound. Just like our tiny male spider, who thinks not of his own fate, but of his impulses. Ask yourself: Has your own animal desire led you down a path you wish you never took? I'm Harvey Guillén, and this is Killer Stories.
1:51 Harvey Guillén? We're going back to 2009, the year Jersey Shore first hit MTV. America is tanning, flexing, and fist pumping its way through the recession. And somewhere down south, a man named Mike Dippolito is trying to start over. He looks like he could have been cast as an alternate on Jersey Shore, but Mike isn't from Jersey. He's from the other land of questionable decisions. Florida. Sunshine, oranges, and headlines that always begin with the words, "Florida, man." Mike is one of them. He'd gone to prison for selling fake stocks online. He says he was using drugs back then, made bad choices, wanted to do better. Mike spent two years behind bars and is now on probation
2:34 Harvey Guillén? until he pays back the $192,000 he owes his victims. He's been working to make that happen. First, making pennies as a cook, then decent money selling email marketing. And now, Mike's actually saving cash to pay off his debt for the first time in a long time. His life is looking up. And then, he meets Dalia. She's beautiful, charismatic, mysterious, in that way people are when you meet them online. But their story isn't "You've Got Mail." It's "Pretty Woman," if Richard Gere was married. One day, when his wife's not around, Mike scrolls a website for escorts.
3:17 Harvey Guillén? He finds Dalia's profile and is intrigued. So, they meet up in person. And then, they, um, well, they, they meet up in per- you know what they did, okay? And apparently, they have an instant emotional connection. Within a week, he's not her client anymore. He's her boyfriend. A few months later, he's left his wife. And soon, they're talking about marriage. Even Mike knows it sounds reckless, but he loves Dalia. And like that little male spider, he's following his heart. And pretty soon, he follows his heart straight into a jewelry store and then, to the altar. And that's where this story begins.
4:01 Harvey Guillén? With a wedding ring, a promise, and a phrase that always sounds sweet, until it isn't. Till death do us part.
4:12 Harvey Guillén? One day, early in their marriage, Dalia brings up the subject of traveling. She wants to do it more, see the world. And I get it, girl, who doesn't? But they have a problem. Anytime Mike wants to leave Miami County, he needs to tell his probation officer. If he wants to leave the state, he needs permission. But Dalia isn't complaining. She's problem solving. Mike has saved about $100,000. He needs $192,000 to get off probation. So Dalia offers to give Mike the rest of the money to pay off the debts. Now, handing over 90 grand would be a huge sacrifice for Dalia, but it would also be a gift for her as well.
4:54 Harvey Guillén? She and her new husband could live and travel more freely, and that's music to Mike's ears. He's like, okay, as long as you're sure, let's do it. Dalia doesn't have the money yet, but she insists it's coming. She's no longer working as an escort. She's selling real estate now. So to get the cash, I guess she needs a sale to go through or something? Anyway, Mike agrees to transfer all of his savings to her account so she can make one clean payment through his lawyer. Maybe you see where this is going. Mike definitely doesn't. What ends up happening is Dalia takes all of Mike's money and never sends it to his lawyer. As more time passes,
5:38 Harvey Guillén? Mike gets mad and starts confronting Dalia. So she lies and tells him that she sent the money. That turns into her accusing Mike's lawyer of stealing it. Then the story changes to she sent the money, but something went wrong in the transfer process, like a glitch or something. She tells Mike not to worry, though. The money isn't lost. She worked things out, and it'll be back in her account soon. Now, that explanation is obviously suspect. We all know Dalia's spinning a web to buy time, but Mike believes her. If you're finding that hard to swallow, let's take a second and look at things from his perspective. Yes, they've only known each other for a few months, but they've shared so much in that time. They spend long nights lying in bed, talking about their lives,
6:23 Harvey Guillén? the challenges they face, the mistakes they've made, the future they want. With Dalia, he feels seen, forgiven.
6:33 Harvey Guillén? In Mike's eyes, there are no secrets between them. Dalia's his wife now. They're legally bound to one another, and they're still in the honeymoon phase. As far as Mike knows, Dalia has only one feeling towards him: love. And love is patient. Love is kind. Love maybe doesn't call up an ex-lover to have you murdered, in my opinion. What do I know? Love.
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9:36 Harvey Guillén? It's summer in Florida. The sun is shining, the breeze is breezing, and Dahlia Di Polito is scheming. She continues to lie about mixing up the bank wire for almost $200,000. And now, she's meeting up with one of her exes, a guy named Mohammed. And I know what you're thinking. She's cheating on Mike with Mohammed. But no, no, no, no, no, that's not true. She's meeting Mohammed for a different reason. He's gonna help Dahlia murder Mike using a hitman he knows. Mohammed tells her, "This is all the hitman does. He doesn't want nothing to do with you after." She says, "That," like she's approving a haircut. When it comes to money, Dalia asks how much it will cost
10:20 Harvey Guillén? to kill her husband. And Mohammed says, "Eh, just give me 20, but cash." Like, you know. To which Dalia responds, "Right, right. No, of course, I'm not gonna write you a check." Dalia tells Mohammed to smile on her way out the door, and in one short conversation, the deal is in motion.
10:40 Harvey Guillén? And if you're sitting there wondering how we know every word of that exchange, it's because we have it. Because 24 hours earlier, Mohammed walked into a police station and told them what Dalia wanted. He agreed to wear wire. The rest, the offer, the bargaining, the casual cruelty, was recorded in plain sound, like a receipt.
11:05 Harvey Guillén? Now, after this one interaction, officials have enough to arrest Dalia for solicitation of murder. But the more evidence they gather, the easier it will be to put her away for a long time. And so, they decide to spin a web of their own. They have an officer go undercover as a fake hitman. The conversations Dalia has with the fake hitman are also recorded. They don't reveal anything new, but they're just as damning as the convo with Mohammed. At multiple points, the hitman/undercover cop gives Dalia a chance to back out, to show a little hesitation, but she never does. And when the cop asks her, "For the last time, are you sure you want to do this?
11:49 Harvey Guillén? There's no going back once it's done." She says these words to him. "There's no changing. I'm positive, like 5,000% sure." And you know, I love to see that kind of commitment, just not under these circumstances. Now, let's talk about the actual plan Dalia sets with her hitman. Here's what Dalia thinks is going to happen. It's pretty simple. She'll leave home early in the morning to go to the gym. The hitman will arrive 30 minutes after Dalia leaves. He'll enter the house, shoot Mike twice in the head, and hopefully make things look like a robbery gone wrong. These are the terms Dalia agrees to. I mean, poor Mike. He has zero clue that any of this is happening. He's living in a world where his biggest problem is
12:34 Harvey Guillén? that his wife doesn't know how to send a bank wire. He thinks he's going to be a free man any day now. And one of the worst parts is the police don't loop Mike in on the fact that his wife is plotting his death until they are literally on his doorstep. The morning he's supposed to die. Why the theater? Because they're taking this whole undercover scenario to the extreme. They want her to act, to break, to show herself. Here's how the day really plays out. Dalia wakes up, she tells Mike she's going to the gym, she leaves. Cut to Mike is face to face with a sea of cops.
13:16 Harvey Guillén? And one of them is explaining to him that his wife has hired a hitman to kill him. The cop's like, I know this is a lot to process, but we only have so much time. We need to stage an elaborate crime scene and we need to get you out of the house fast because we're going to fake your death. This really happened. Once they're finished, they call Dalia at the gym and tell her to come home. This is where things get, ugh, truly cinematic. Because when Dalia pulls up, the cameras are already rolling. Yes, we have footage of it. She walks straight towards Sergeant Ramsey, the officer in charge.
13:55 Speaker 04 Mr. Polito? I'm Sergeant Ramsey, I'm the one that called you.
13:59 Harvey Guillén? She's waiting to hear that her plan worked. He tells her there's been a disturbance at her house. And then he tells her.
14:07 Speaker 04 Okay, I'm sorry to tell you, man, he's been killed. He's been killed, man.
14:15 Speaker 04 Try to calm down.
14:18 Speaker 04 I can't, man. We have to do our job.
14:21 Harvey Guillén? Bravo. I mean, again, the girl commits. But I do have some performance notes I'd like to discuss after this break.
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16:05 Harvey Guillén? Can we play the video again?
16:08 Speaker 04 He's been killed, man.
16:12 Speaker 04 Try to calm down.
16:13 Harvey Guillén? Okay, stop, stop. Yeah. Yep. No, that's enough. Yeah, I'm getting distraught. You know, I'm getting scrunchy face. What I'm not seeing is listening. You know, it's zero to 60. And to really sell this scene, I need more of a processing of the initial shock. You know, a little disbelief, a little confusion, you know? Asking questions, building up what we have here, which is a complete emotional breakdown. And it'd be nice, it'd be really nice if you could just squeak out an actual tear, you know? An actual, I know actors have their preferred methods. Personally, I like to use, you know, emotional memory recall. That's what I like. Hold on.
17:00 Harvey Guillén? See, see, see? There you go. Okay, thank you. Thank you, everyone. Stop.
17:10 Harvey Guillén? Oh my god, makeup.
17:15 Harvey Guillén? It's entertaining in a sad, sad way. Like a high school production of Cats. Dalia's the only person not in on the joke at this point. And the punchline is, she's going to jail. But not before the police have their big reveal moment. Dalia walks into the police station believing she's won. In her head, the final step in her grand plan is simple. She'll answer a few questions, shed a few tears, and walk out draped in sympathy. The grieving widow, the woman the world will pity. In another room behind a pane of glass, Mike is alive and watching.
17:58 Harvey Guillén? It's the kind of moment that splits a person in two. A few hours ago, he thought his wife woke up with a new gym habit. Now, he's watching her lie, smooth and practiced, about the morning she planned to have him killed. It becomes clear that Dalia only cares about Dalia. At some point, officials bring in the fake hitman in handcuffs, and they ask Dalia if she recognizes him. She's met this person multiple times, and everyone knows that. But without a second thought, she's like, "I have no idea who that is." Okay, girly.
18:35 Speaker 07 I don't know what's going on, please.
18:37 Harvey Guillén? Mike sees it all. The web, the mask, the performance. And the woman he thought he knew vanishes completely. Eventually, though, detectives end the charade, and here's how it goes.
18:54 Harvey Guillén? Take a look.
18:56 Speaker 07 Oh my god.
18:59 Speaker 07 Come here, please. Come here. Mike, come here. Come here, please. Come here. Why not? I didn't do anything to you. Mike, come here, please. Come here.
19:14 Harvey Guillén? Happy to report, Mike does not come here. He leaves the room and waits for his day in court, which comes in April 2011. Officials really pulled all the stops to build a case against this woman. They have so much evidence: audio and video recordings, firsthand confessions, eyewitness statements from key players. So, the trial should be a slam dunk. Right? Wrong. Dalia arrives with a defense that is so bonkers that you kind of have to applaud. She claims she knew. She was being played. She knew she was being filmed. She was in on it the whole time. And her argument is, Mike and Mohammed were too.
19:58 Harvey Guillén? In fact, she claims Mike orchestrated the whole elaborate plot. And now, for a reason she doesn't quite explain, he's throwing her under the bus, saying it was all real. Now, why would the three of them want to look like fools? Well, according to the defense, Mike orchestrated the plot, knowing cameras would be rolling, so they could get a television show and become reality stars like, yep, you guessed it, the now very popular cast of Jersey Shore. Mike is obviously like, "That's the most insane thing I've ever heard, no." But he spends three days on the witness stand getting grilled. And the defense literally asks him with a straight face
20:44 Harvey Guillén? whether he wants a career like Snooki's. As if that's the reason they're all in court. And I know, these are professional attorneys who are just doing their job, but can you imagine? Can you imagine making that argument with your full chest? Do you want to be like Snooki? Okay, first of all, why would Mike or Dalia agree to look so ridiculous? And to risk getting arrested all for fame? Forget that wasting police's time and resources with false allegations is a crime in and of itself. Where would their careers go after they told the cops it was all a joke?
21:22 Harvey Guillén? And second of all, there are easier ways to get your 15 minutes of fame. And the irony of the snooky defense is between Dalia, Mohammed and Mike, Mike's the only one without television experience. Mohammed once appeared on the TV show Burn Notice, and Dalia once made an appearance on the hidden-camera show The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, when she was a teenager, on an episode that included a fake hitman. And it would be wild for the defense to make their argument one time, but they end up doing it three times, three times. The first trial in 2011 gets thrown out because of a tainted jury. Apparently, one of the jurors read something in the news about how Dalia once tried to poison Mike.
22:06 Harvey Guillén? Yes, poison, like an actual black widow. But since that detail was never entered into evidence during the trial, everything got thrown out on a technicality.
22:18 Harvey Guillén? Did she actually try to poison Mike? I don't know, but it was reported by a local outlet that Dalia gave him a Starbucks iced green tea laced with antifreeze. Hi, can I get a venti green tea, cold, light on the ice, heavy on the murder? But when a second trial happens in December 2016, the defense manages to convince some of the jurors that there's maybe something to the reality TV angle. Half of them buy into it. So the whole thing ends in a split decision. The judge declares a mistrial. The result is surprising. I mean, I've got some beachfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell to some of those jurors. Am I right?
23:04 Harvey Guillén? No, the truth is, juries are notoriously unpredictable. You never know what's going to sway a person one way or the other. But here's what it actually means for Dalia. A third trial is set for June 2017, about six months later. Without a sentence, she doesn't go to jail. She gets to live in the comfort of her own home, under house arrest. She's just like in her pajamas, eating ice cream, watching Netflix. She has to follow rules, sure, but not the rules of prison. Dalia lives in a comfortable limbo for eight years. That's the amount of time between Mike's fake murder and the final trial. That's a lot of time.
23:46 Harvey Guillén? And at the end of the trial, Mike says, as the verdict was being read, he was nervous about which way it would go. I mean, I gotta be honest, I would be nervous too.
24:00 Harvey Guillén? But ultimately, the third jury finds Dalia guilty. A judge sentences her to 16 years in prison, and the world finally sees what it looks like when Dalia actually processes shock and grief. She saves the real tears for herself.
24:20 Harvey Guillén? As for Mike, weirdly enough, he says he feels bad for Dalia, that he wishes her well. Yes, I'm talking about the same woman who tried to have him killed and stole around $100,000 from him. Money he never got back, by the way. But hey, you can't help how you feel. And as easy as it is to blame Mike for not seeing the red flags, I don't know, wouldn't the world be a better place with more Mikes? More optimists, more hopeless romantics, and less of the people who prey on their good nature? Like Dalia? Luckily, his story has a happy ending. Mike's no longer on probation, he's paid off his debts, and last I read, he found love again.
25:04 Harvey Guillén? And unlike many of the stories we tell here, he's still alive to tell his. And on a serious note, I'd like to take a moment to apologize to the Black Widow community, the eight-legged type. I owe them an apology. Turns out, they rarely eat their partners at all. That was something we made up, us humans, spinning a story that suited us. I think it's because maybe it's easier to believe in monsters than to admit how easily we mistake hunger for love.
25:41 Harvey Guillén? Thanks for tuning in to Killer Stories, a Spotify podcast. New episodes release on Mondays. If you liked today's story and want to learn more, we dropped some of our favorite sources in the episode description. Until next time, I'm Harvey Guillén. Stay safe out there.
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