Surveillance video: Lucchese capo's son caught on tape in hit attempt, before he's shot dead by cops
The bumbling son of a Lucchese wiseguy was armed with a death wish when he tried to whack a mob-linked Brooklyn man - and the bungled hit was caught on tape, police sources said.
"I can no longer live as a failure," Carl Lastorino wrote in one of two suicide notes he left for family members before he headed to Peter Argentina's East New York tire shop on Monday.
Fortunately for Argentina, Lastorino's final act fell short of success.
Dramatic security camera footage of the attempted assassination released Tuesday makes it clear the gunman was no hit man.
Although Lastorino, 45, fired at close range without warning, Argentina, 49, was shot only in the hand and shoulder.
Eleven minutes later, Lastorino was killed in a confrontation that investigators believe was a suicide-by-cop.
"He told his mother before he left he had a job to do and he wasn't going to be coming back," said Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne, the NYPD's top spokesman.
Argentina is affiliated with the Lucchese crew, police sources said, and he knew Lastorino's father, Frank Lastorino Sr.
The elder Lastorino is a Lucchese capo and consigliere, the sources said. The feds locked him up for murder conspiracy in 1993, and another son also runs with the Luchese crew.
But Carl Lastorino was not a mobster, and detectives do not believe the tire shop bloodshed was a botched gangland execution.
"This all emerges from the deep depression of Carl [Lastorino], not a hit ordered by the father or anyone else," sources said.
Lastorino was packing a pair of .38-caliber pistols when he left his family's Flatlands home on Monday for the tire shop on Linden Blvd.
The video shows him walking right up to Argentina.
He asked Argentina if he was "Pete," then opened fire when he responded, "Yeah," Browne said.
Argentina tried to shield his body with his right arm, and the first shot hit his hand. He darted into the next room and ran between two rows of tires as Lastorino chased him with the pistol blazing.
Fleeing the tire shop on foot, Lastorino had just hailed a livery cab a few blocks away when two cops responding to the shooting spotted him.
They did a U-turn, pulled up behind the cab and approached on foot with guns drawn, Browne said.
Lastorino hopped out of the backseat, holding a pistol.
The cops yelled for him to drop it, Browne said, but he aimed it at them and yelled, "You're not going to take me alive! You are going to have to shoot me!"
Each officer fired a single round from about 20 feet away, and both struck his chest.
Lastorino was the fourth person shot to death by cops this year. Last year, NYPD cops shot and killed eight people - the fewest since 1971.
Browne commended the tactics used by the cops Monday. "It was a textbook tactical approach to dealing with an armed suspect," he said.
0 comments:
Post a Comment