U.S. indicts top MS-13 leadership, trials to be held on Long Island
A Suffolk County Sheriff's Department photo of MS-13 tattoo on a gang member in 2007. Credit: Suffolk County Sheriff's Dept.
More than a dozen key members of the "command and control" leadership council of the MS-13 street gang based in El Salvador were indicted Thursday in cases brought by federal prosecutors on Long Island and in Washington, D.C.
The trials will be held at the federal courthouse in Central Islip, officials said.
"MS-13 is responsible for a wave of death and violence that has terrorized communities, leaving neighborhoods on Long Island and throughout the Eastern District of New York awash in bloodshed," acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District Seth DuCharme said in a statement. "Today’s groundbreaking indictment seeks to demolish MS-13 by targeting its command and control structure and holding MS-13’s board of directors accountable for their terroristic actions."
The 14 council members, known in Spanish as la Ranfla Nacional, were charged with numerous counts of terrorism for their two decades of leadership in an indictment simultaneously announced in Washington by acting U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and in Brooklyn by DuCharme.
The four counts of the indictment include conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, conspiracy to finance terrorism, and conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism.
If convicted, the leaders would face up to life in prison.
Eleven of the Ranfla leaders are in prison in El Salvador and three are being searched for by the FBI and Salvadorean law enforcement, according to officials.
Member of the gang unit leaves Nassau Police headquarters after a MS-13 round up on in Mineola in June 2017. Credit: Newsday
According to the indictment, MS-13 leaders, "In order to achieve its goals in El Salvador, the United States and elsewhere … directed acts of violence and murder in El Salvador, the United States and elsewhere."
The indictment does not list specific killings or other crimes gang members are accused of committing on Long Island or in the United States.
But the indictment says that gang leadership ordered an increase in violence in El Salvador and the United States in 2016, blaming the U.S. for pressuring the Salvadorean government into breaking a truce it had with the gang that allowed gang leaders to be incarcerated in less rigorous prison conditions.
At that time, MS-13 gang violence escalated dramatically on Long Island and nationally. Among the crimes that prosecutors have said the gang is responsible for locally include the 2016 killings of two teenage girls who were students at Brentwood High School and the 2017 killings of four young men in a Central Islip park.
Though imprisoned, the Ranfla Nacional continued to run the overall gang "in El Salvador and the United States through the use of contraband cellular telephones, the smuggling of written messages … out of prisons, intermediaries and the organizational structure of subordinate leaders [outside prison]," according to the indictment.
To fund the MS-13’s renewed battle with the government and police in El Salvador at the time, the leadership collected $600,000 from MS-13 members in the United States to purchase weapons, including M-16s and M-60 machine guns, grenades, IEDs, and rocket launders, officials said.
"Certain murders in the United States … including the murder of MS-13 members suspected of cooperating with law enforcement or otherwise violating the rules of MS-13, required the approval of the Ranfla Nacional…." the indictment said.
In addition to funding the weapons used in the ongoing war in El Salvador between the gangs and the government, "Cliques in the United States were also required to send money from dues and the proceeds of drug trafficking, extortion and other criminal activity to the MS-13 in El Salvador," the indictment said.
The indictment does not say when the MS-13 leadership would be extradited to the United States. Most are already serving lengthy prison sentences in El Salvador.
The gangs’ leadership name of la Ranfla is a Spanish term for small circle or wheel, but was adopted by the founders of MS-13 in Los Angeles, where it was also used as to mean lowriders. Lowriders were the status customized car in that city’s youth automobile culture.
The usual lowrider car had smaller wheels in the back so the front was raised higher off the ground.
The Salvadorean-based gang, which has brought so much violence to Hispanic neighborhoods in the United States, was originally founded in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s initially to protect Salvadoreans in the California prison system from the attacks of other inmates, officials said.
Gang members who were eventually deported back to El Salvador used the tactics they had learned in California to become a major threat in their native country, and then imported the gang’s operation back into the U.S., officials and academics who have studied the gang’s history have said.
While the gang has spread to many areas in the United States, major concentrations of gang members have been in the Central American communities on Long Island, New York City, the Washington, D.C. suburbs, as well as in Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee.
Normally major Justice Department cases would be heralded at news conferences. But because there is so much other major news going on — the impeachment, the inauguration, the coronavirus pandemic, officials decided to announce the case by news release, according to sources.
Bob Kessler covers federal law, including law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, DEA, IRS and ATF, as well as the federal courts.
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