Nicholas Defina
PHOTO FINISH: Model Lori LaManna led police to suspect Nicholas Defina (inset). (
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She’s the model detective.
A Staten Island stunner showed cops how it’s done after a man allegedly hacked into her portfolio, downloaded her professional photos and uploaded them to a smutty porn site.
The 5-foot-4 knockout, Lori LaManna, says she was forced to trade in her bikini for a badge, of sorts, to bust Nicholas Defina, 23, because investigators refused to do their job.
“The detectives said I was basically out of luck,” LaManna, 22, told The Post. “They thought it was another stupid girl sending out naked pictures of myself and now I would have to pay the price. That wasn’t the case.”
LaManna said she first learned through a female acquaintance that six of her provocative photos were downloaded on the XXX Indonesian site.
“I broke down hysterical crying. My whole week went to s–t. I canceled all of my appointments in the city,” she said, noting she missed a photo shoot and a music-video audition.
“It was like being molested. My personal space was invaded. I was violated.”
LaManna’s nightmare began shortly after Defina — whom she had met a few times through a friend — allegedly contacted her several times on Facebook under an assumed name and asked her for nude photos.
LaManna, who has had small roles on the NBC show “Smash” and the CBS hit “The Good Wife,” quickly shut him down.
“My response was, ‘No, only me and my photographer have access to my full photo shoot. This is not porn. Don’t be disrespectful,’ ” she said.
So Defina allegedly posed as LaManna on Sept. 27 and sent an e-mail to her professional photographer to gain access to her online portfolio of 400 pics, law-enforcement sources said.
In the e-mail, Defina allegedly wrote, “Hey, this Lori. I got a virus on my computer. I need the password to access my photos,” according to LaManna.
“I don’t why [the photographer] wasn’t suspicious, but he wasn’t and gave up the password,” she said.
Defina then allegedly downloaded all of the smoking-hot snapshots from LaManna’s private account on the photographer’s Web site and uploaded six of them onto the porn site.
After getting no action from the police, LaManna spent the next 24 hours building a case against the alleged cyber perv, she says.
She Googled the screen name attached to the Yahoo e-mail, “AlexIsPureLove,” and that led her to Defina’s Myspace page, she says.
LaManna printed out the evidence she had gathered and presented it to detectives at the 122nd Precinct station house in New Dorp.
“I said, ‘Here — now you have a person. I’m giving you the person. I know who it is,’ ” LaManna said.
“And they were just blown away. They were shocked. They started investigating,” she said.
The NYPD’s Computer Crimes Squad traced the e-mail back to the laptop at Defina’s residence in Travis, law-enforcement sources said.
On Nov. 9, detectives interviewed Defina, and he allgedly admitted to the caper. Investigators searched his computer, with Defina’s consent, and found the racy images, sources added.
“Detectives did their job. Maybe not as quickly as the complainant preferred, but they did their job nonetheless,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
Defina was arrested Tuesday and charged with unauthorized use of a computer, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment, records show.
Additional reporting by Doug Auer