The parking lot behind the Dolphin Fitness Club in Amityville, New York was dark and mostly empty on the night of January 17, 2001. It was the kind of winter cold that makes the suburbs feel abandoned, the kind of night when normal people stay indoors. Alexander Algeri, 32, had no reason to linger. He had just ducked out to his car to retrieve a CD, a mundane errand that took perhaps two minutes. He never got a chance to go back inside.

Two men sat waiting in a rented van. They had driven up from Florida with a photograph, a gym address, and a description of their target: Paul Reidel, the club's owner and the estranged husband of Lee Ann Reidel. Alex Algeri happened to be Paul's lifelong best friend. He happened to look remarkably like him. He drove the same type of vehicle, a Ford Explorer. In the dark, from a distance, the resemblance was enough.

Ralph "Rocco" Salierno fired three shots. Two struck Algeri in the head; one hit his neck. The man who had stood as best man at the Reidel wedding nineteen months earlier died in that parking lot, killed by a plot his best friend's wife had set in motion. Paul Reidel, the actual target, was somewhere inside the gym, alive.

To understand how this happened, you have to go back to the beginning, to a bar on Long Island's South Shore where a bartender with ambitions met a man with a gym.

Lee Ann Armanini was born on December 29, 1967, and raised on Long Island. By the time she was working as a bartender and cocktail waitress at a strip club on the South Shore, she was the kind of woman who knew how to read a room and work it. Paul Reidel, who owned the Dolphin Fitness Club in Amityville, was a regular presence in that world: muscular, connected, flush with the kind of cash that a successful gym generates. He was also, though perhaps not obviously at first, a serious crack cocaine addict.

Lee Ann became pregnant with Paul's child. The two married in July 1999, with Alex Algeri standing at Paul's side as his best man. Lee Ann already had a son from a previous relationship. Whatever romantic feelings may have motivated the union, the marriage deteriorated quickly. Paul's addiction made stability impossible. Arguments over money became a constant feature of the household. Lee Ann, watching the relationship collapse, appears to have begun calculating her exit strategy.

In July 2000, she took the couple's infant son and left New York. She headed to Florida to live with her mother, Pat Armanini, and her mother's partner, Elizabeth Russo. She reportedly took more than $120,000 of Paul's money with her.

From New York, Paul Reidel launched custody and divorce proceedings. He wanted his son back. He wanted the money back. He had lawyers working the angles, and he was not going to let the matter go quietly. The legal pressure mounting on Lee Ann from across state lines gave her situation a ticking-clock quality: either she found a solution or the courts would impose one on her.

The solution she allegedly found was Ralph Salierno.

Salierno, known as Rocco, was a bouncer at a Florida strip club, a bodybuilder with a muscular frame and connections to organized crime. Lee Ann began a romantic relationship with him sometime after arriving in Florida. Prosecutors would later argue that what began as a love affair quickly became a criminal partnership, and that the stakes kept rising.

According to testimony at trial, the initial plan was not murder. Lee Ann, her mother Pat, and Elizabeth Russo allegedly talked first about having someone frighten Paul, rough him up, maybe scare him badly enough to back off the custody fight. It was the kind of thinking that sounds, in retrospect, like a person who has never thought seriously about consequences. The plan escalated. By the time it reached its conclusion, it had become a murder-for-hire conspiracy with an estimated $750,000 in cash and property, including ownership of the Dolphin Fitness Club itself, as the potential payoff.

Lee Ann gave Salierno a photograph of Paul Reidel and detailed information about his gym. Salierno recruited Scott Paget as his driver and accomplice. On January 17, 2001, the two men rented a van and drove north to Long Island.

They parked behind the Dolphin Fitness Club and waited.

Alex Algeri walked out to his car.

The investigation that followed was initially cold. Suffolk County detectives knew that Paul Reidel had been targeted; the physical resemblance between him and the victim was not lost on anyone. But physical resemblance is not evidence, and the trail from Amityville to Florida required time to develop. For more than a year, Algeri's family had no answers.

The break came from an unlikely direction. In early 2002, Scott Paget was arrested in Miami on a stolen vehicle charge. Facing serious time, he began to talk. He told investigators that Ralph Salierno had been the triggerman in a murder-for-hire killing on Long Island. The information opened a door that had been sealed for fourteen months.

The investigation widened. Elizabeth Russo, who had lived with Lee Ann's mother and had been present for conversations about the plan, eventually became a prosecution witness. Larry Diodato, another figure in the orbit of the conspiracy, also testified under immunity. The picture that emerged, piece by piece, was of a plot that had grown from grievance to greed to violence over the course of months.

Lee Ann Reidel was arrested in March 2003. Ralph Salierno was arrested as well. Both were charged in connection with Algeri's murder.

The trial began in February 2004 in Suffolk County Court and ran for six weeks. It was unusual in its structure: both defendants were tried simultaneously, but before separate juries, a logistical arrangement that required careful management throughout. Judge Louis Ohlig presided.

For the prosecution, the case rested heavily on the testimony of cooperating witnesses. Scott Paget took the stand and described the drive to Long Island, the wait in the parking lot, the sound of the shots. Larry Diodato filled in details about conversations he had been privy to. Elizabeth Russo testified about what had been said inside the Florida household where Lee Ann and her mother had lived.

Defense attorney Bruce Barket argued that Salierno had acted alone, that he had been motivated by jealousy rather than by any agreement with Lee Ann. It was a theory that asked the jury to see Salierno as a rogue actor and Lee Ann as a woman being blamed for a crime she had not sanctioned. The jury did not find it convincing.

Observers in the courtroom noted that Lee Ann Reidel smiled through much of the trial, a detail that courthouse observers and journalists found difficult to interpret and impossible to ignore. On March 26, 2004, when the jury returned its verdict, the smiling stopped. She was convicted on all counts: murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, and conspiracy in the second degree. She wept uncontrollably as the verdict was read.

The sentencing took place on April 28, 2004. Before Judge Ohlig imposed sentence, members of Alex Algeri's family addressed the court. His brother and sister called Lee Ann a cold-hearted woman who had shown no remorse for what she had set in motion. Their words described not just the loss of a brother, but the particular cruelty of a death that had been intended for someone else entirely, a man who had done nothing except walk out to his car on a winter night.

Judge Ohlig sentenced Lee Ann to concurrent indeterminate terms of 25 years to life on each murder conviction, with an additional 8 and one-third to 25 years for the conspiracy charge, all running concurrently. Rocco Salierno received life without the possibility of parole. Scott Paget, who had cooperated with prosecutors and pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 18 years to life.

Lee Ann was received at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women on May 17, 2004, listed in Department of Corrections records under her maiden name, Armanini Riedel, with inmate number 04G0447.

She appealed her conviction. In March 2007, the New York Appellate Division affirmed the judgment, writing that the evidence against her had been overwhelming and that any evidentiary errors during trial had been harmless. The New York Court of Appeals denied further review in July 2007. In September 2008, Lee Ann filed a federal habeas corpus petition in the Eastern District of New York. In August 2012, U.S. District Judge Sandra J. Feuerstein denied that petition in its entirety.

According to Department of Corrections records as of October 2019, Lee Ann Reidel's earliest parole eligibility date was March 16, 2028, with a scheduled initial parole hearing in November 2027.

The case has had a long afterlife in the true crime landscape. It was featured on Oxygen's "Snapped" in 2004 and later on "Snapped: Killer Couples," as well as on "Scorned: Love Kills," "Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry?," and episodes titled "Pretty Dangerous: Mistaken Murder" and "An Exercise in Murder." Two books have covered the case: "Lethal Embrace" by Robert Mladinich and Michael Benson, published by Kensington Books, and "Killing the Wrong Man: The True Story of Lee Ann Reidel" by Anita Murdock.

What lingers about the case, beyond the legal mechanics and the courtroom drama, is the particular randomness of Alex Algeri's death. He was not part of any dispute. He had no stake in the financial warfare between Lee Ann and Paul. He was a loyal friend who showed up for the people he loved, right up to the night he walked into a parking lot in Amityville and became the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong moment. His killers did not know his name when they shot him. They only knew he looked like someone else.

For Alex Algeri's family, that knowledge has had to coexist with every year that has passed since January 2001. His brother and sister spoke at sentencing about a cold-hearted woman with no remorse. Whether that description was fair or fury-driven or both, it captured something real about the distance between the world of grief and the world of courtroom smiles.

Somewhere in New York State, Lee Ann Reidel waits for her parole hearing. The gym in Amityville where Alex Algeri died is long gone from her reach. So is the money, the plan, and the man she loved enough, or hated enough, to put all of it in motion.