Kidnappers tie up, torture surgeon with blow torch, records say

HALLANDALE BEACH – A continuously blaring horn drew police to a car parked at a Hallandale Beach strip club. In the front seat they found a bound and burned man with a remarkable story.

The plastic surgeon told police he had been abducted nine hours earlier in a Walmart parking lot, beaten, tortured with a blowtorch and threatened with death if he did not give his captors money, according to a federal criminal complaint.

After weeks of planning the Jan. 14 kidnapping and scoping out the doctor’s Broward County office, the two men responsible did not strike it rich. They walked away from the crime empty-handed and each now faces federal charges that could land them in prison for life, prosecutors announced Wednesday.

Justin Boccio, 33, of Deerfield Beach, a former instructor at a Fort Lauderdale flight training school, was arrested April 1. He is in federal custody in Miami, records show.

Boccio’s defense lawyer could not be reached for comment Wednesday despite email and voicemail messages.

Boccio’s alleged co-conspirator, Sergei Nkorina, 53, is from Tenerife, Spain. He has been detained in that country and is awaiting extradition to South Florida, prosecutors said. Nkorina has had addresses in Margate, Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville and Neptune Beach, pub

lic records show.

His wife had been a patient of the plastic surgeon and was Facebook friends with Boccio’s wife, investigators found.

It was about 6:45 p.m. on a Monday when the surgeon, who is not identified by name in court documents, was confronted by a man with a gun and shoved into a van at a Broward County Walmart. Court documents do not specify which Walmart it was.

The abductor blindfolded the doctor, tied up his hands and feet and, during an hourlong ride to who knows where, repeatedly shocked the surgeon with a stun gun, prosecutors said.

Once at their destination, which investigators later discovered was a storage facility in Margate, the doctor was tied to a rolling chair. When his blindfold was removed he could not get a clear view of his two captors because of the headlamps and baseball caps they wore.

What he could see were “several sharp devices and guns,” according to the federal complaint.

The kidnappers beat the doctor, singed the tops of his hands with a blowtorch and some other “hot metal object” and threatened to kill him, prosecutors said.

According to the complaint, the doctor “was willing to give them whatever they wanted, but they just kept hitting him and burning his hands.”

The doctor gave up his home address in MiamiDade County, gate entry information and the alarm code to his house. He also told the men where they could find $50,000.

At about 2 a.m., the two men went to the doctor’s home and tried to get in, but someone was there, turned on the lights and scared them away.

The doctor’s last memory was being forced to drink alcohol and getting back into the van. He passed out and came to in his car at Cheetah Gentleman’s Club on Hallandale Beach Boulevard, court documents show.

When police found him it was 3:45 a.m. on Jan. 15.

Video surveillance from the Walmart parking lot, the storage facility, the doctor’s home and office and the strip club helped investigators piece together the case.

Security camera footage from inside the doctor’s office on the day of the kidnapping showed one of the culprits entered the office about two hours before the abduction, filled out paperwork and made a cellphone call. It would turn out to be Boccio, court records show.

Footage from the parking lot of the doctor’s office showed a gray van spent extended periods of time there in the days before the kidnapping. The footage also captured the van’s Florida tag number, which led to a Budget rental car company, to Boccio, who had rented the vehicle, and to his cellphone number.

From there, a warrant for Boccio’s cellphone records led investigators to another phone number. According to the complaint, it belonged to coconspirator Nkorina.

A tentative trial date has been scheduled for Oct. 1 in Miami before U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga. A deadline for plea deals has been set for Sept. 20.