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…