Lillo Brancato made a name for himself playing mob characters on the small and big screen. With his Italian New York upbringing, and an uncanny ability to imitate the tough dialect of local crime families, he was recruited to play opposite Robert De Niro and appeared in six episodes of the TV series the Sopranos as a wannabe mobster who was killed before he could achieve his dreams.
Now Brancato's own ambitions face extinction as he goes on trial for the murder of a police officer in 2005. Brancato is alleged to have been involved in a bungled robbery in search of prescription drugs, in which his alleged accomplice, Steven Armento, shot the officer at close range.
Armento was last month sentenced to life without parole for the murder of Daniel Enchautegui; the heaviest punishment short of the death sentence.
Growing up in an Italian-American family in the Yonkers district of New York, Brancato had an early fascination with movie depictions of the mob. He used to impersonate his hero, Robert De Niro, a skill that was discovered by a film scout who spotted Brancato, then 15, on a beach off Long Island while scouting for a new face to play De Niro's son in A Bronx Tale.
He went on to have parts in Renaissance Man with Danny DeVito and Crimson Tide starring Denzel Washington, and then in 2000 appeared in episodes of the Sopranos before his character was killed off in the second series.
At that point he fell into drugs - starting with cocaine, then the prescription drug Vicodin and eventually heroin. "I swear, a lot of the times I did drugs, it was straight up out of being bored," Brancato, now 32, told New York magazine from his prison cell last year. He also began hanging out with Armento, 48, the father of his former girlfriend. Armento is reputed to have been banished from the Genovese crime family because of his heroin addiction.
On the night of December 10 2005, Brancato and Armento had been drinking at a strip club in New York. The older man allegedly suggested they break in to the flat of an acquaintance in Yonkers to find Valium. The break-in was heard by neighbour Enchautegui, who was off-duty. He called for backup and confronted them. In the ensuing gunfight Enchautegui shot Armento six times and Brancato twice before he was killed.
Brancato's defence was that he was unarmed, has never used guns, and was unaware Armento was carrying a gun.
His fellow cast member on the Sopranos, Chris Tardio, told Associated Press: "One life was already ruined. The jury will have the power to prevent that of another."
