NY man offered farmer Wild Turkey bourbon to let him feed girlfriends ex to hogs: FBI

An upstate New York man tried to hire a hitman to murder his girlfriend’s ex — then offered a farmer $1,000 and a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon to feed the victim to his hogs, authorities said.Except the entire thing was a set-up — and both the hitman and the farmer were working for the feds, according to a criminal complaint.Jeal Sutherland, 57, pleaded guilty last week to the use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire after the hitman he hired turned out to be an informant for the Department of Justice and the farmer he bribed turned out to be an FBI agent.Sutherland wanted his girlfriend’s ex – with whom she had a child – murdered and his body disposed of as soon as the would-be victim was released from state prison at the end of January, according to a federal criminal complaint.Shortly after the man returned home, Sutherland sent him a menacing note stuffed into the mouth of a dead goose, federal officials said. “Sutherland admitted that in late January 2025, he had another man put the carcass of a Canada goose on the doorstep of the victim’s mother.When the dead bird was discovered, it had a threatening note stuffed in its beak,” prosecutors recounted.He then recruited a man who was already in prison for setting the intended target’s mother’s car on fire – an associate who he used as an enforcer to collect money from people, according to officials and reports. Little did he know that that man was working with the feds. The confidential informant, whose name was not released by officials, is a convicted murderer on lifetime parole who agreed to cooperate in exchange for leniency.

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Sutherland and the informant met over several months to discuss the plot – sometimes a...