GANG PRESENCE CAUGHT AUTHORITIES OFF GUARD
Brutal slaying last fall in town of Ulster raised awareness about MS-13, 18th Street
KINGSTON, N.Y. » The February arrests of four Kingston men with gang ties in connection with an October 2017 homicide in the town of Ulster caught county law enforcement off guard because there had been no spike in local crime.
“We don’t see it, either,” said William Weishaupt, chief investigator for the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office, when asked how 18th Street and MS-13, two of the nation’s most notorious gangs, could have set up shop in Ulster County without notice. “That was part of the problem. We weren’t seeing it in the investigations we were doing. We weren’t seeing it in our covert investigations ... in our street crime and narcotics-trafficking [investigations]. We’re not seeing telltale signs . ... It’s simply under the radar.”
That’s about to change, Weishaupt said during a recent interview at his office in the Ulster County Courthouse on Wall Street in Kingston. “We’re coordinating very closely with the FBI and we are gathering up our intel, and we are going to be pooling our resources. And when we get what we need to move forward, we’re going to start going after these embedded cells.”
Exactly how long that will take “depends on how quickly we’re going to be able to identify the different components and look for the head, and we’ll go after the head first if we can,” Weishaupt said. “If we can’t, we’ll work our way up. It could take anywhere from six months to three years, but once we start, we’re going to go after them full-bore to see if
“Once we start, we’re going to go after them full-bore to see if we can uproot them before they get settled.” — William Weishaupt, chief investigator for the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office
we can uproot them before they get settled.”
Kingston Police Detective Sgt. Brian Robertson said his department also was caught off guard by the recent gang influx.
“As far as 18th Street, we weren’t as in-depth with it as we were with Sex Money [Murder] and gangs that we know,” he said recently at the department’s Garraghan Drive headquarters. “I’ll be the first to admit, part of it is a language barrier. It’s a Latinbased gang, and it does tend to keep to itself . ... We haven’t seen a lot of overt activity going on.”
Weishaupt said gang members are living among us in virtually every community in Ulster County, but “they stay out of trouble locally.”
Until some recent high-profile arrests changed all that.
Early this year, three Kingston men were charged with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of an unidentified man whose body was found in October 2017 in the area of Sojourner Truth Ulster Landing Park in the town of Ulster, according to officials and court documents filed after the men were arrested.
A fourth Kingston man was facing unspecified related charges, Weishaupt said at the time.
According to accusatory documents filed in Rosendale Town Court, where the suspects initially appeared, Sergio G. Herrera Hidalgo, 20, Israel Mendiola-Flores, 23, and Cristian R. Perez Perez, 20, were arrested Feb. 21, and each was charged with one felony count of second-degree murder.
The court documents said the victim was killed about 3 a.m. Oct. 25, 2017, at the Ulster County-operated park at 4318 Ulster Landing Road in the town of Ulster. The documents state the defendants “intended to cause and did cause the death of another person by stabbing him with a sharp instrument.”
In February, Weishaupt said the victim was about the same age as the defendants. He would not say where the man lived.
The victim’s name has not been made public.
The killing and arrests first were reported in February by the Kingston Times, a weekly newspaper. Authorities have not said why they did not release information about the killing or the arrests when they happened,
The arrests began to change the focus and scope of local law-enforcement attention, both Weishaupt and Robertson said.
“We were very focused on a particular crime at that point, and it was subsequent to the arrest, with the FBI doing a bundle of debriefs down in the Eastern District and the Southern District [of New York], that they pretty much advised us that we have a problem that’s under the radar,” Weishaupt said.
The Eastern and Southern districts cover part of New York City and all of Long Island.
Yet despite the apparent influx of gang members, Weishaupt said, “I have yet to see drug trafficking associated with either of these two street gangs here . ... Not in terms of what their normal mode of operation is. We’re just not seeing it. In Ulster County, they’re living quiet lives and either conducting criminal activities well below the radar or elsewhere.”
Then, in May, another development occurred.
A Kingston man with alleged gang ties, who already was under indictment in connection with the town of Ulster killing, was charged with helping commit a February homicide in Queens. Yanki Misael Cruz-Mateo, 19, the previously unidentified fourth suspect in the local case, was arrested by New York City police and charged with murder and criminal possession of a weapon in connection with the February slaying of an Elizabeth, N.J. man, the New York Daily News reported on its website.
According to the Daily News, Oscar Antonio BlancoHernandez, 20, was found mortally wounded in front of 85-14 160th St. in Queens about 6:40 p.m. Feb. 2. He had been shot in the head and groin and was pronounced dead at the Queens Hospital Center.
Authorities have said the defendants videotaped the October 2017 killing in Ulster before burying the victim’s remains in the Turkey Point State Forest, which borders the towns of Ulster and Saugerties. The video, obtained by the FBI, shows Mendiola-Flores slashing the victim across his neck and Cruz-Mateo severing his ear, prosecutors have said.
Weishaupt said videotaping is a method used by both gangs to keep members in line.
“It’s the way that these gangs communicate their messages to one another in terms of to stay in line ... in videoing everything, which doesn’t make sense to me, but that was their thing,” he said. “They would video an assault or a murder or whatever, and then they would send it to the other gang members [as a message] to stay in line.”
Had the gang not been penetrated by FBI informants, he said, “nobody would have ever known about it. The contents would have stayed within the gang.”
Weishaupt declined to discuss how the FBI penetrated the gang, but he said that, “in hindsight” the 18th Street Gang’s actions were “sloppy and shortsighted, certainly brazen.”
Contrary to the common public perception of gangs using graffiti to mark territory, both Weishaupt and Robertson said 18th Street and MS13 are unlikely to sanction much in the way of public displays.
“They’re pretty organized,” Robertson said. “There’s a hierarchy over how you do it, and when you do it. Not that they don’t do it. There’s a military sense to everything.”
There is one notable exception, Weishaupt said, and it can be found on an old road sign at the Turkey Point State Forest, not far where the body was discovered in October. There, just off a parking lot and at the start of a dirt road, is an octagonal wooden sign with bullet holes in it that Weishaupt believes were made by gang members.
Until police and the FBI can put a significant damper on gang activity, Robertson said, the Kingston Police Department will keep up its policing of drug- and gang-related activities of all sorts, as it always has. Among other things, he said, police will keep an eye on the Trailways bus station on Washington Avenue, which he called “the pipeline.”
“Trailways has always been a run, and it’s no secret that a lot of drug dealers will get off Metro-North [Railroad, in Poughkeepsie] and cab it up here ... to avoid getting on Trailways, because we watch
the bus . ... We’re watching pretty much everything all of the time,” Robertson said. “We never sleep.”
According to the FBI website, “MS-13 and 18th Street gang members have gained a foothold in numerous U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, Charlotte, Newark and the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. They commit a variety of crimes — mainly trafficking drugs and extorting individuals and business owners — and they maintain strong ties to Central America.”
Asked why these gangs have turned their sights to Ulster County from parts of Queens and Long Island, Weishaupt said it’s because “federal authorities in the Eastern and Southern districts are doing a good job ... and they’re putting pressure on them.”
“It’s like anything else — if they’re putting pressure on them, they’re looking for a relief valve,” he said. “They’re pushing outward.”
Noting that many of the gang’s members are Hispanic, Weishaupt pointed to Kingston declaring itself a sanctuary city as one possible cause of the influx.
“It doesn’t hurt that we have advertisements running around; you know Kingston is a sanctuary city, we welcome everybody. That’s playing right into their hands,” Weishaupt said. “I mean, mentally. In terms of practicality, as I indicated, a sanctuary city in terms of law enforcement, it means nothing. But when you hear that and you’re looking for a relief valve, it’s a nice place to go.”
In an email, Kingston Mayor Steve Noble, a leading proponent of Kingston’s sanctuary city resolution, rejected Weishaupt’s argument.
“I think it is critical for
all individuals who are concerned about the memorializing resolution that the Common Council adopted in 2017 to read it,” Noble wrote.
“I think that it is clear that the intention of this resolution was to communicate to community members, many of whom live in fear on a daily basis, that the city of Kingston is committed to serving every member of our community and to fulfilling the primary mission of our emergency services departments to maintain public safety,” the mayor said.
He continued, “Building trust within our community is a critical element of effective law enforcement, and the adoption of this memorializing resolution was one important component of that work. We have not changed our police operations and are responding in the same manner as we did prior to the adoption of this memorializing resolution. Nothing has changed. We will continue to preserve public safety. There are federal enforcement agencies who are authorized, trained and responsible for enforcing federal immigration laws.”
As far as Robertson is concerned, “if I know that there’s drug dealing or crime or organized crime — gang activity, which is the same thing — I’m going to investigate, it and it has nothing to do with a nationality, race or anything else. It makes no difference to me . ... I have blinders on when it comes to that. I’m glad to say I do.”
Robertson said the city’s sanctuary status “doesn’t change my job at all in terms of who I go for or who I have to go for. I have no intention of singling out anybody in any way, whether it has to do with sanctuary city or not. We’re not a sanctuary city for violent gangs. I know that.”