NO CHOIR BOY
St. Pat’s gas-can man went ape in N.J. cathedral
A pious ex-parish music director went from dutiful Catholic to holy terror.
Marc Lamparello, 37, of Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., was charged Thursday with attempted arson, trespass and reckless endangerment less than 24 hours after he was grabbed outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral for toting two gas cans and a pair of butane lighters inside the tourist-filled Fifth Ave. landmark.
The devout but deranged defendant was later transported to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric exam, interrupting his plans to board a Thursday night flight to Rome, sources told the Daily News. But his strange fall from grace actually started two days earlier on the other side of the Hudson river.
On Monday night, an obstinate Lamparello was arrested on a charge of defiant trespass inside the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark, N.J., where he attended evening Mass and then refused to exit the house of worship unless police put him in handcuffs.
“I’m not leaving!” Lamparello screamed as he threw himself on the cathedral floor. “God wants me here! I know all the sins the priests have committed!”
Police do not believe Lamparello was bent on a lonewolf terror attack when he walked into the Midtown Manhattan cathedral on Wednesday evening with the flammable liquids and the means to set the building afire, said NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counterterrorism John Miller.
“It does not appear that way,” he said, although investigators had yet to uncover a motive for the man’s unsettling actions.
The suspect is a CUNY student seeking his Ph.D. in philosophy. He has worked as an adjunct lecturer in the Lehman College philosophy department, and held teaching positions at Brooklyn College and Seton Hall University, a Catholic college in South Orange, N.J.
Lamparello, who lived with his elderly parents in Hasbrouck Heights, was staying alone at a Jersey hotel before his Wednesday night arrest outside St. Patrick’s, cops said.
“They are good people,” said family friend Salvatore Altamore, 86, a retired Army vet. “A good religious family. I really can’t believe this.”
In a chat with The News, Lamparello’s stunned father described his son as a “brilliant” college professor who sounded fine in a phone call just hours before his arrest.
“Extremely out of character,” said the distraught dad Leonard, 79, about his son’s behavior. “He’s a brilliant professor. His writings — other professors can’t even understand his writings. Something happened, we don’t know.”
The son is a 2004 graduate of Boston College, also a Catholic institution, and New Jersey friends said Lamparello came from a churchgoing family. He served for a time as the musical director and pianist at St. Joseph’s in East Rutherford, N.J.
“He was a normal guy,” said a St. Joseph’s pastor. “The parents are very active here. It’s shocking, yeah..”
Lamparello claimed he was cutting through the cathedral with the gas because his car had run out on Madison Ave. behind of the church. When cops located the vehicle, his story turned out to be bogus.
He was arrested walking south on Fifth Ave. toward 50th St. while carrying the cans holding four gallons of gas, along with a plastic bag with two bottles of lighter fluid and the two lighters.