A 55-year-old husband from Pennsylvania was arrested with $100,000 in cash while taking a cigarette break outside a Las Vegas casino, the day after his second wife was found dead in their home on New Year's Day.
In a bizarre turn of events, Arthur Gati Jr.'s arrest Tuesday came four years after his ex-wife was accused of targeting him in a murder-for-hire scheme for life insurance money.
Franieris Nicoldo “Nicole” Zambrano, 26, a Venezuelan national, married Gati less than a year ago. WPXI reported.
According to WTAE, Zambrano, not her husband, was reported missing on Dec. 29 by worried co-workers at the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort when her housekeeper failed to show up for work. She last spoke to her family on Christmas Eve, and her neighbors have not been seen since.
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Arthur Gati Jr., 55, is pictured with his wife of less than a year, Nicole Zambrano, 26. Zambrano was found shot to death in his Pennsylvania home on New Year's Day, and Gatti became the prime suspect in Zambrano's murder. (Art Gati on Facebook)
The call led to a welfare check by the Uniontown Police Department at Zambrano's Bierer Avenue home, WPXI reported. When there was no response, police went inside and found a 26-year-old man shot “in vital areas of the body” around 1:31 p.m.
Police told the outlet that she had been dead for at least two days.
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Arthur Gati was arrested Tuesday morning outside a Las Vegas casino with a cigarette in his mouth and $100,000 in cash, a day after a warrant was issued for his arrest. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has arrested a fugitive from Pennsylvania who police found after a cell phone call. (Los Angeles Metropolitan Police Department)
Uniontown Police Lt. Thomas Korencik told WTAE that Gati was the primary suspect in Zambrano's death because he did not give satisfactory answers about Zambrano's whereabouts before she was found dead. became a person.
Before her body was found, Gati reportedly told her neighbor, Bob Luick, that she and Zambrano had visited the Grand Canyon.
Other neighbors told police the couple was vacationing in Florida, police said.
“We just didn't get along,” Korencik said. “They were in contact with him, and the stories he was telling his family and chatting with some police officers just didn't add up.”
A warrant was issued for Gati on Monday after authorities found Zambrano dead but were unable to contact him. After a day on the run from police, he was arrested at a Mardi Gras casino with $100,000 in cash. Police determined his location by pinging his cell phone, according to WTAE.
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Police could not provide sufficient information about Franieris Nicolle “Nicole” Zambrano's whereabouts after she was reported missing, leading to suspicions that Arthur Gati may have been involved in her murder. I doubted it. (Art Gati on Facebook)
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department released a photo of Gati handcuffed to his knees and a cigarette dangling from his mouth early Tuesday morning.
“He was heading out of the country with a large amount of cash, and we believe he was trying to avoid or avoid responsibility for what happened here,” Fayette County District Attorney Mike Ober said. “I'm working on it,” he said. he told WTAE.
Before Zambrano was killed, Ruick told WTAE that he remembered Gati making creepy and creepy comments.
“He said maybe a month ago that he thought this. [Zambrano] “This was just his way of saying it. He sat there and said, 'If I found out she was fooling around, I would kill her,'” Ruick recalled.
Neighbors said they last saw Gatty a few days before Christmas Eve.
“He disappeared and we didn't know where he went or what he was doing,” Ruick said.
Other neighbors told the newspaper that Zambrano was popular in the community for her difficult personality and echoed Luick's shock over Gati's alleged role in her death.
Police in Nevada are currently working to extradite him to Pennsylvania to face charges of murder and aggravated assault.
Gati's ex-wife, Roxanne Gati, 55, was criminally charged in 2019 after she allegedly tried three times to hire a man to kill her then-husband.
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Arthur Gati's ex-wife, Roxanne Gati, was arrested in 2019 on suspicion of conspiring with a friend to murder Arthur Gati and splitting his $50,000 life insurance proceeds. (Fayette County Jail)
According to one occasion, CBS News PittsburghGati's first wife is said to have asked the would-be hitman, “What kind of gun would work?”
The woman and the man, identified in court documents as Norman Pennington, reportedly agreed to split the $50,000 life insurance proceeds after orchestrating Gati's death.
However, Pennington told police he thought the woman was joking and “didn't intend to kill Gatty,'' and decided to come forward because “I thought it was going too far,'' the Pittsburgh newspaper reported. Ta.
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Roxanne Guti pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit murder, which was reduced to a misdemeanor charge of recklessly endangering another person in February 2021, according to Law & Crime.
She was sentenced to 20 months' probation and ordered not to contact Gati unless necessary through her attorney to finalize the divorce process, the paper reported. Additionally, state prison records Tuesday did not list her as an inmate or parolee.
