A handcuffed Mara Salvatrucha gang member waits for the start of a court trial at the Isidro Menendez Judicial Center in San Salvador, El Salvador, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019. El Salvador on Tuesday began a mass trial of over 400 alleged gang members, including purported leaders of the feared transnational crime group Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)
Two shot-callers in one of the largest street gangs in the United States, MS-13, were sentenced to life in federal prison for murder, racketeering, and extortion.
Luis Flores-Reyes, 42, of Arlington, Va., and Jairo Jacome, 40, of Langley Park, Md., were sentenced in the case, federal authorities said in a statement on Wednesday.
They were accused of participating in at least six murders, including two minors. In one case, the gang stabbed to death two homeless people who they thought were gang rivals but had no gang affiliation, officials said.
“Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. are all much safer with those two individuals off the streets,” said Special Agent in Charge James Harris, who heads Homeland Security Investigations Baltimore, in a news release.
MS-13 is an international gang made up of immigrants from El Salvador and other Central American countries, officials said.
Jacome was the highest-ranking member of a clique in the Capital Beltway that extorted businesses by charging them “rent” to operate in MS-13 territory. Flores-Reyes was a leader in a clique claiming turf in Maryland, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Texas and El Salvador, authorities said.
Jacome directed and participated in the 2016 murder of a 14-year-old MS-13 gang member suspected of informing on the gang to the cops, authorities said. His remains were discovered more than 18 months after he was killed in the woods outside of Germantown, about 30 miles north of Washington.
In a case in 2017, a gang member accused of murder and hiding from police in Virginia killed a high school student over marijuana, authorities said.
“Gang members kidnapped the student from his front lawn and cut his hand off before killing him,” officials said. “After the murder, Flores-Reyes helped to hide and protect the killers from law enforcement.”
In addition to the violence, the gang traffics drugs sending proceeds to gang leadership through structured transactions and other methods to avoid law enforcement scrutiny.
They use any means necessary to force respect from those who showed disrespect, authorities said.
“One of the principal rules of MS-13 is that its members must attack and kill rivals,” authorities said.
The case comes after the announcement last month of the indictment of three high-ranking members of MS-13 in New York in a narco-terrorism and racketeering conspiracy spanning the U.S., El Salvador and Mexico over two decades.
U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said authorities in the U.S. and Central America are dismantling the gang from top to bottom.
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