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.<\/p>\n
Christian \u201cCoco\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The scheme earned Lugo 10s of thousands of dollars per vehicle \u2014 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 \u201callowed and encouraged\u201d the drive-by.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you going to take care of it or am I?\u201d Lugo told the gunman, according to prosecutors.<\/p>\n
Gloria Ortiz, the owner of the rival shop, was killed. Two other people were wounded.<\/p>\n
In emotional testimony at Lugo\u2019s sentencing in Manhattan federal court, Ortiz\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mother was everything to me,\u201d Brito said.<\/p>\n
He said the devastation of his mother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
After the murder, prosecutors said, Lugo fled to Florida, while employees of the rival shop took over his business.<\/p>\n
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Herman said that workers from the rival body shop returned fire at Lugo\u2019s employees, but that he bore responsibility for the murder.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe propagated a culture of violence in the industry. This is an outcome of that culture,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said the man who fired the fatal shots would also face charges.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors wrote in documents that Lugo\u2019s body shop amounted to a \u201ccriminal enterprise\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis rivalry with other tow truck companies set in motion a deadly chain of events, which caused a broad daylight shooting,\u201d Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a release.<\/p>\n
Lugo pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy and firearm possession.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Gloria was taken from this world, it broke me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Judge Dale Ho said the shooting was “the most terrible act I have seen in my relatively short time on the bench.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The owner of a South Bronx auto body shop was sentenced Thursday to 19 years in prison for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":124335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":{"0":"post-124334","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bronx","8":"tag-bronx","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-nyc","12":"tag-the-bronx","13":"tag-the-bronx-headlines","14":"tag-the-bronx-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/124335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}