MS-13 execution allegedly thwarted

Court records: Police averted killing with two minutes to spare

A former member of the MS-13 street gang narrowly avoided being executed by other gang members earlier this month, his life likely saved by police who intercepted gang phone calls, according to court records filed in Harris County.

Bryan Funes, 17, and Jorge Alexander Cortez, 23, were arrested last week in Austin. Both El Salvadoran immigrants, the two were wanted in Harris County on criminal conspiracy charges after police say they planned days earlier to drive a fellow gang member from Austin to Houston so they could kill him. The would-be victim was wanted dead by the gang because of drug debts and other things, though it was unclear in court records whether he was still active in the gang.

Another man, Melquisedec Steven Lemus-Monje, 19, also was arrested and charged with conspiracy, as well as a weapons violation that came just before gunfire was about to erupt, court records show.

Houston police officers, with help from the FBI, intercepted phone calls between the men and MS-13 leaders who “green lit” the killing from El Salvador and Vir-

ginia, court records show.

On Feb. 11, the target, Lemus-Monje, Funes and another MS-13 member were pulled over by a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper in the 7800 block of Harwin Drive because their car’s registration had expired, court records show. Lemus-Monje was then arrested for carrying a 9 mm pistol loaded with five hollow-point rounds — which he referred to in phone intercepts as a “nine” with “candies” — and which investigators believe were about to be used in the thwarted execution, according to court records.

Cortez was pulled over in a separate car and released, court records show.

A short time after, Funes made a phone call in which he said they had been stopped by police “approximately 2 minutes before they would have killed” the intended victim, court records show.

Better tactics?

Coordination between some MS-13 cliques has become “increasingly common” due to advances in and cheapness of technology, said Steven Dudley, a senior fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the co-director of InSight Crime.

“It’s obviously disturbing,” he said. “Because it can give them the kind of reach that they may not have had in the past.”

Conversely, he said, the Texas cliques’ willingness to kill their own — and their ignorance that their phones might be tapped — could also be viewed as a sign of weakness.

“They don’t know because they’re not sophisticated,” Dudley said. “They’re not thinking through all the pieces when they’re putting these schemes together. There is a haphazard nature to them.”

Late last year, after five alleged MS-13 members were charged with the capital murder of a Missouri City teen who was cooperating with HPD, local law enforcement officials similarly downplayed the gang’s threat.

In Texas, MS-13’s membership dropped to about 500 in 2017 — or less than 1 percent of the total gang members estimated to be living here by DPS. The FBI meanwhile estimates MS-13 accounts for roughly 10,000 of the total 1.4 million gang members in the country.

Experts cite those numbers as evidence that MS-13 is not an existential threat and that many fundamentally misunderstand the gang.

A Trump target

Born in Los Angeles in the 1980s, MS-13 didn’t become particularly violent until it flourished in the California prison system, Michael Paarlberg, an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and an associate fellow at the Washington, D.C.based Institute for Policy Studies, told the Chronicle in December.

Today, it’s mostly based in El Salvador, with leaders giving directives to chapters known as cliques that are spread across Central America and the U.S. But despite its designation as a “transnational” gang, MS-13 has not been able to replicate the unity or proximity offered by the California prison system, Paarlberg said.

Instead, some cliques simply “franchise” the MS-13 name and its reputation to intimidate and extort vulnerable, often immigrant communities in the United States, he said.

But even if some cliques have, as seen in the alleged Houston murder plot, bolstered their coordination, Dudley said MS-13 does not really pose a threat to average citizens. Rival gang members and informants will always be among MS-13’s main concerns, he said.

“While we have this notion of this gang sort of lashing out without any regard or going after innocents, in most cases (victims) are part of this intimate or closely-knit circle,” Dudley said. “And they use that intimacy in order to lure their victims.”

Despite that, the gang has been a focal point of President Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policies. MS-13 has also been cited as justification for legislation like Texas’ Senate Bill 4, which requires local police forces to cooperate with federal immigration officers. Records show that MS-13 members accounting for about less than 1 percent of all arrests made by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, according to a CNN report.

HPD Chief Art Acevedo has said those perceptions have made it more difficult to police vulnerable communities.

“We have to fight the perception that HPD is interested in the immigration status of people who might be victims or witnesses,” he said. “That’s a problem, because now (witnesses) might not come forward because (they) know that a distant relative might be entangled with MS-13 or some other violent street gang.”

“In most cases (victims) are part of this intimate or closely-knit circle.” Steven Dudley, co-director of InSight Crime