TENDING HIS GLOCK:
Pastor John Rocco Carlo,
retired after years with the NYPD (inset), always carries one of his three guns at Christian Pentecostal Church. (NY Post: Chad Rachman (main photo))
A pistol-packing retired police captain who worked the city’s mean streets during its darkest decades still lays down the law — God’s law.
Tough-talking John Rocco Carlo, now a pastor on Staten Island, saw it all in his 28 years as a transit cop — from the blackout of 1977 to the Crown Heights riots — and says he’s a better minister for it.
“The one thing you don’t have to convince a cop of is that there’s a devil. You meet him every day,” said Carlo, 69, who has been senior pastor at Christian Pentecostal Church in Staten Island’s Concord section since even before he retired from what was then the city’s Transit Police Department in 1993.
“The Bible talks about being gentle as a dove but wise as a serpent. You need both,’’ he said.
“I’ve met so many pastors who are burned out because they’re not ready for the reality of what they see and hear.”
Carlo still packs heat — even while giving sermons.
He said he never knows who might pose a threat to his flock of 1,000 parishioners.
“Once, I happened to be in the lobby after a service, and a guy walked in. He said, ‘What would you do if someone came in here and started shooting people?’ I said, ‘I’d kill him.’ The guy took off. I guess I gave him the right answer,” the ex-cop recalled.
Carlo worked as a cop in the city’s crime-riddled ’70s and ’80s.
Once, in the early ’70s, he and his partner were nearly killed when a routine ticketing of two fare-beaters in a Lower East Side subway station turned violent.
“One guy picked up a piece of wood and was going to hit me with it. I drove him right into a phone booth and had my gun right up his nose. I said, ‘I’m going to kill you! Drop it!’ ” Carlo said.
Then, as he was helping his partner cuff the other perp, an angry mob formed.
“This crowd of 100 people was yelling, ‘We’re going to kill the cops!’ My partner was bleeding. I took his gun, I had my gun, and I was scared,” Carlo recalled.
“I cocked both guns and said to this crowd, ‘If we die here, 12 of you are going to die with us.’ ”
Thanks to a quick-thinking porter who called 911, Carlo and his partner made it out alive.
Today, the thick-skinned reverend brings one of his three handguns to church services — and everywhere else, too.
“I make visitations where angels fear to tread — housing projects and the like,” he said.
“It’s good to have ‘Mr. Colt,’ ‘Mr. Glock’ or ‘Mr. Smith & Wesson’ at a time like that.”
Parishioner Flora Lucchese, 78, said she likes having an ex-cop at the lectern in the Concord church.
“When he’s around, you feel safe,” she said. “You feel like nothing bad is going to happen to you.”