Pittsburgh woman pleads guilty to lying about wanted husband's whereabouts

A former Allegheny County 911 dispatcher pleaded on Monday guilty to lying about her husband’s whereabouts as federal agents searched for him in connection with a murder-for-hire plot.

Janine Lanese, 47, of Pittsburgh’s Overbrook neighborhood, will be sentenced on the misdemeanor count by U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon on Sept. 22.

According to the prosecution, federal agents attempted, in December 2017, to arrest Lanese’s husband, Brad Lanese, on murder-for-hire charges. She claimed he wasn’t home.

They later found him hiding in a second-floor bathtub.

Brad Lanese is serving eight years in prison after investigators unveiled a plot for him to hire a hitman to kill a woman with whom he’d previously been working in a large marijuana grow operation in Northern California.

According to the criminal complaint in the case, Lanese had owned and operated the grow operation with his cousin and his cousin’s wife, identified only by her initials in the complaint, as “L.D.”

Although Brad Lanese had been making large amounts of money in the business, the complaint said, he had difficulties with L.D. and was asked to leave.

Investigators said L.D. paid Lanese $29,000, and he returned to Pittsburgh.

However, they wrote in the complaint, he quickly ran out out of money.

“Lanese became disgruntled that he had exhausted his profits from the operation and that (his cousin) and L.D. were still making large amounts of money without him,” the complaint said.

At first, Lanese planned to rob the operation. He contacted a confidential source and plotted to do so, and then that source introduced Lanese to “Deeds,” who was an undercover agent.

Lanese and the confidential source traveled to California in October 2017, and it was then he decided he didn’t want to just rob L.D., but kill her instead, investigators said.

He proposed paying $30,000 for Deeds to kill her with a fatal overdose of heroin/fentanyl in the distant marijuana fields and pushing her car over a cliff, the complaint said.

Lanese was arrested on Dec. 7, 2017, and pleaded guilty just under a year later.

Janine Lanese’s defense attorney Chris Rand Eyster said his client “had nothing to do with his operation.” She was fired from her dispatcher position after being charged.