May 26, 2011 Millionaire gym owner convicted in murder of security guard www.privateofficer.com
A federal jury at U.S. District Court in Central Islip found Christian Gerold Tarantino guilty of the two murders but did not reach a verdict on a third murder. Prosecutors said they will retry that case.
“Today’s verdict means, quite literally, that Tarantino will not get away with murder,” said FBI Assistant Director in Charge Fedarcyk. “He did not stop at participating in one murder; he committed a second killing to silence a witness who could implicate him in the first one.”
The 42-year-old and several coconspirators, including Louis Dorval, robbed a Mid-Island Check Cashing armored van in Syosset on June 23, 1994, authorities said. Dorval shot and killed one of the van guards, Julius Baumgardt, 47, of Lindenhurst, before the robbers fled with nearly $100,000 cash.
Tarantino, a part-owner of Synergy Fitness Clubs—with locations in Farmingdale, Levittown, Franklin Square, Massapequa and Long Beach—killed Dorval the following month after learning that he had told someone about the armored van robbery and murder.
Dorval, 30, who was indicted on unrelated federal racketeering charges in New Jersey shortly after the robbery and two days before he was murdered, had said he would flee the country rather than face prison time, prosecutors said.
Tarantino and others who assisted in Dorval’s murder then put his body in a trunk and dumped the trunk into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island. The U.S. Coast Guard found the trunk floating in the ocean four days later.
Tarantino faces two mandatory minimum sentences of life imprisonment.
He is scheduled to be retried Aug. 1 for the 2003 murder of Vincent Gargiulo, his 34-year-old business partner.
Source:Long Island Press
Tags: Christian Gerold Tarantino, julius baumgardt, Millionaire gym owner convicted in murder of security guard
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