A bold inside-job $280,000 heist at Aqueduct Raceway went south for a Queens crook on Thursday when a Brooklyn federal judge sentenced him to nine years behind bars.
Lamel Miller, 40, teamed up with two others to steal the racetrack’s earnings on March 7, 2020 — the day of the Gotham Stakes, one of the qualifying horse races leading up to the Kentucky Derby.
The heist was a textbook inside-man job — but evidence in the case shows it didn’t go down as smoothly as the heist led by George Clooney in “Ocean’s Eleven,” or the elaborate bank robbery in Spike Lee’s New York heist movie, “Inside Man.”
It also didn’t go as badly as in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1950s racetrack heist movie, “The Killing,” which involved shooting a horse — but it proved messy enough.
In the 2020 Aqueduct heist, Miller’s longtime pal, Lafayette Morrison, was a track security guard.
Morrison fed Miller and accomplice Khaleel Williams details on how the cash from the Gotham Stakes would be transported around Aqueduct. Morrison also gave the men a key that let them access restricted areas at the track, and helped coordinate the heist over the phone.
Hours after the race, Morrison accompanied two raceway employees who wheeled the money in a cart along a catwalk.
When Miller and Williams popped out of a stairwell with guns, Morrison played the victim.
The two gunmen forced Morrison and the two track employees into a closet, took the cash and their cell phones, and made them count to 1,000.
Miller and Williams each got $100,000 from the score, while Morrison’s cut was $84,000. The robbers spent the cash on cars and jewelry, federal prosecutors said.
Miller pleaded guilty to a robbery charge — but he demanded a trial on charges he brandished a weapon in the crime. A conviction on the weapons brandishing charge stood to automatically tack seven years to his robbery sentence. Miller insisted the gun in his hand was a fake.
So Miller shared a trial with Morrison in October.
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