The owner of a South Bronx auto body shop was sentenced Thursday to 19 years in prison for a drive-by shooting that left a rival dead.
Christian “Coco” Lugo, 38, ran several schemes out of Certified Auto beginning in 2019, prosecutors said. He dispatched drivers of unlicensed tow trucks who raced to crashes to haul wrecked vehicles to the Mott Haven shop. Body shopworkers would then inflate damage to defraud insurance companies.
The scheme earned Lugo 10s of thousands of dollars per vehicle — and he aggressively protected his territory in the neighborhood. When a dispute arose with a rival body shop over who should have hauled a car involved in a crash on Feb. 7, 2022, prosecutors said, Lugo “allowed and encouraged” the drive-by.
“Are you going to take care of it or am I?” Lugo told the gunman, according to prosecutors.
Gloria Ortiz, the owner of the rival shop, was killed. Two other people were wounded.
In emotional testimony at Lugo’s sentencing in Manhattan federal court, Ortiz’s son Jacob Brito said that the killing left him and his younger siblings orphaned. Ortiz had taken over the shop after her husband was killed in a separate dispute related to the towing industry, prosecutors said.
“My mother was everything to me,” Brito said.
He said the devastation of his mother’s death led him to enlist in the military. He said his mother had been seeking to stop relying on unlicensed tow trucks and legitimize her business.
After the murder, prosecutors said, Lugo fled to Florida, while employees of the rival shop took over his business.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Herman said that workers from the rival body shop returned fire at Lugo’s employees, but that he bore responsibility for the murder.
“He propagated a culture of violence in the industry. This is an outcome of that culture,” he said.
Prosecutors said the man who fired the fatal shots would also face charges.
Prosecutors wrote in documents that Lugo’s body shop amounted to a “criminal enterprise” where tow truck drivers carried guns to threaten competing tow truck drivers. He used a fleet of modified pickup trucks with hidden towing rigs to outpace conventional trucks from licensed companies.
“His rivalry with other tow truck companies set in motion a deadly chain of events, which caused a broad daylight shooting,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a release.
Lugo pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy and firearm possession.
Lugo said that Ortiz was the godmother to one of his own children, and that he was committed to being a better person and a better father.
“When Gloria was taken from this world, it broke me,” he said.
Judge Dale Ho said the shooting was “the most terrible act I have seen in my relatively short time on the bench.”