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By Andrew Marra
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Updated: 11:32 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009
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BOYNTON BEACH — How does a woman meet the man she's going to marry and then be accused of trying to have killed?
In Dalia Dippolito's case, as a professional escort, says her jaded husband.
In a sworn interview with Boynton Beach Police detectives, Michael Dippolito said he met his future wife — now charged with trying to kill him via a hitman — when he paid for her escort services one day at his office.
"She's actually an escort," he said in the August interview, which was released this week. "That's how I met her. She came to my office one day. I called her and solicited her to the office and she came."
"After that one time," he said, "we started dating."
The new revelation about 26-year-old Dalia Dippolito's past comes three months after her arrest on a charge of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. At the time of her arrest, Michael told reporters they had met at a Starbucks.
The real first encounter, Michael Dippolito swore to cops, was in October 2008. Four months later, they two were married and living together in a Boynton Beach town home he had bought.
"Pretty much we were on a fast-track relationship, getting along great," he said.
Then, he told investigators, bizarre changes took hold of his life.
Dippolito now accuses his plastic-surgery-loving wife of making off with $100,000 of his savings intended as restitution payments for victims of a fraud scheme he had been convicted of years earlier. She also managed to convince him to give her sole ownership of his house.
In the meantime, police records show, she was planting drugs on his car in a failed attempt to get him arrested. And then, detectives say, she tried to have him killed.
First she searched for hitmen on the streets in Riviera Beach, police say. When that didn't work, authorities allege she tried to poison his Starbucks tea with anti-freeze.
Finally, she turned to a friend who turned her in to the cops, police allege. They say they set her up with a cop posing as a hitman, who she paid, then set up a fake murder scene to convince her Michael was dead.
"It's like a bad movie," Dippolito told detectives when he learned of his wife's plot.
His divorce attorney, Jason Brodie, said new evidence made public this week about her various alleged killing attempts only strengthens his divorce case.
"Unfortunately for Michael, he has to relive this," Brodie said.
Dalia Dippolito was audacious until the end.
From the county jail, where she was held before being released on house arrest, Dalia Dippolito dialed up the man cops say she wanted dead.
"Hey, it's me," she said.
"Yeah," said her stunned husband. "What's up?"
"Nothing, Mike. Can you please come here?"
She wanted him to hire her a lawyer, she said. And in a ten-minute conversation that followed, she tried to convince him that the plot detectives had accused her of — buttressed with several secret video recordings, recorded phone calls and an elaborate staged murder scene — was all a lie.
It didn't work.
She never stopped working an angle, though. In a separate jailhouse call to her mother, she begged her to call her husband on her behalf.
Then she demanded he be removed from the house she had convinced him to sign over to her.
"I heard Mike is at the house," she told her mother. "I want him out of my house. That's my house. The title's in my name."
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