The gunman on trial for murdering a Forest Hills dentist was “a paid executioner, an assassin, a hit man” who shot him inches from his young daughter – a plot hatched by his estranged wife, a Queens prosecutor charged yesterday.
Assistant District Attorney Brad Leventhal told the jury that the wife, Mazoltov Borukhova paid her distant relative $20,000 to gun down Daniel Malakov, with whom she was locked in a bitter custody battle for their then-4-year-old daughter, Michelle.
“Who would hire an executioner to kill this victim in front of his daughter?” Leventhal asked during opening arguments. “Who would have such strong feelings toward [him] that they would hire an assassin?”
“Her!” he yelled, pointing at Borukhova. “In order to accomplish in one moment through payment of an assassin what she couldn’t accomplish with payment of her attorneys.”
Malakov’s “fate was sealed,” Leventhal said, when he was granted custody of Michelle, but it was his kindness – and Borukhova’s scheming – that bought him to his death in October 2007.
“He agreed to let the little girl spend the day with his mother, because that’s the kind of guy he was,” Leventhal said.
But it was Borukhova, 35, who refused to pick up the child. That forced Malakov, 34, to deliver the child to the park where he was slain by triggerman Mikhail Mallayev, the prosecutor said.
Borukhova’s lawyer, Stephen Scaring, conceded that some of the evidence may be grim, but said cops rushed to judgment, “making conclusions and inferences which when you examine them make no sense.”
Leventhal told the jury that he has a witness who heard the first of Mallayev’s three shots and turned to see him pump two rounds into Malakov’s chest.
“She made a conscious decision, she will tell you, to look at his face,” he said. After witness Cheryl Springsteen saw Malakov fall dead, she waited for police and told them “I saw it,” the prosecutor recounted.
He also cited fingerprints on a homemade silencer found at the scene, and 91 phone calls between the co-defendants, Mallayev, 51, and Borukhova, leading up to the murders.
Additional reporting by Jennifer Fermino and Reuven Fenton